Carson-Newman College: Creation Scientist Denied Tenure - in their own words

This is the third in a series of blog posts in which this writer is using available historical evidence from one particular college to support the conclusions of the authors of the book Already Compromised by Ken Ham and Greg Hall.  Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, TN was one of the 200 colleges and universities whose key administrators were given the opportunity to participate in a survey of their own personal beliefs regarding Scripture and their claims for the worldview from which classes in their own college were being taught.  These two earlier blog posts used actual spoken, written, and published words of faculty members to demonstrate that this Baptist college in East Tennessee is a typical example of those supposedly Christian colleges whose classroom worldview has already been seriously compromised and whose faculty members no longer uphold the authority of Scripture.

Starting with this third post, evidence on issues involving the teaching of evolution versus creation at Carson-Newman College will be introduced.  We will begin this part of the historical story in 1996, when the Education department of the college hired a new, highly qualified faculty member to teach students who planned to become high school science teachers.  This new faculty member held four degrees:  a bachelor's degree in biology, a master's degree in science education, another master's degree in envoronmental biology, and a doctorate in science education.  Before coming to Carson-Newman, he had taught high school science classes, college biology and chemistry classes, and teacher education classes in colleges in three other states.  It certainly appeared that this new faculty member would be a valuable asset to the college in its quest to produce highly qualified science teachers.

It did not take long for the members of the Biology faculty at Carson-Newman College to discover that their new faculty colleague in the Education department was a dedicated Christian who believed that the Christian students at the college should be taught to respond to the challenges of Darwinism by engaging the secular culture with an authentic Biblical worldview and with the history of creation as found in the book of Genesis.  Likewise, it did not take long for this new faculty member to discover that students in the Biology and Religion departments of the college were being taught that Darwinism is to be accepted, and that there was no place, no tolerance at the college for a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis.  He quickly learned that naturalism was the worldview from which classes in these two departments were being taught, and that students were told that evolution was 'God's way' of accomplishing the creation.  He learned that students were told that they were arrogant and divisive if they dared to disagree with the party line of Theistic Evolution among the academic departments at Carson-Newman College.

 This new faculty member gained a reputation on the Carson-Newman campus and throughout the East Tennessee area as a creation scientist with a keen interest in the liberation of Bible-believing college students from the delusion that their faith in the truth of Scripture has been refuted by modern scientific understandings.  He became a charter member of the East Tennessee Creation Science Association and a lifetime member of the Creation Research Society.  He became well-known on the campus as a proponent of the so-called two-model approach to the teaching of biological science in the school classroom.  This made him a threat to the members of the Carson-Newman biology department who did not want their students to recognize that the biblical account of creation might be valid scientifically as well as religiously, and can be supported by scientific evidence apart from scriptural authority, without any religious doctrines or concepts.  These biology faculty members did not want their evolution model to be required to compete with a viable creation model in the science classroom, either at the college level or the high school level.

It is of interest to note that in August 2000 this creation scientist on the Carson-Newman education department faculty gave a presentation on the topic "Evolution in Tennessee:  Let's Teach it as a Controversy" at the Fourth Tennessee Regional Math and Science Summit held at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  This presentation proposing that the controversy between evolutionary theory and special creation should be allowed to be taught in high school classrooms was acceptable in this particular setting, that is, at a state university in Knoxville supported by Tennessee taxpayers.  This same presentation would clearly not have been acceptable in another particular setting, that is, at the Baptist college in Jefferson City supported by the tithes and offerings of Tennessee Baptists.

At Carson-Newman College, non-tenured faculty members are usually scheduled for a tenure hearing during the sixth year of their service, so that they can be granted tenure when they begin their seventh year on the faculty.  In the case of this well-known creationist professor in the education department, the administrators of the college decided to schedule a tenure hearing in 2001, while he was still in his fifth year on the faculty.  Charges of insubordination were brought, and it was obvious to the tenure candidate that the decision to deny tenure had already been made prior to the hearing.  The tenure committee became frustrated that this man who had so forcefully defended what Scripture said about the creation chose to refrain from responding to the charges the college was bringing against him.  The teaching career of this individual at Carson-Newman came to an unfortunate end after five years on the faculty when tenure was denied in 2001.

No doubt, readers are wondering about the identity of this creation scientist who was denied tenure by the administrators of Carson-Newman College in 2001.  His name is Dr. Glenn Charles Jackson.  Today, "Dr. J" is a church and college lecturer on the creation/evolution controversy, and he is affiliated with Creation Truth Foundation as Coordinator of Campus Ministry.  See  www.creationtruth.com.  See also  www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urmkkymurr0.

Much of the information contained in this blog post has been extracted from a larger document prepared in November 2010 by the present writer.  This larger document contains quotations from Dr. Jackson that were included in that document with his knowledge and approval.

There is a bit more to the Carson-Newman College story related to the denial of tenure for Dr. Jackson that can be found in the archives of the college library, in the written and published words of members of the college biology faculty.  There is also much more that can be presented, using the official publications of the college, to show how this faculty is attempting to teach not only their own students, but also high school students, that Darwin's theory of evolution is absolutely true!  They are not content to see their influence confined to just the students on their own campus.  Stay tuned!