Spouse speaks Hello, this is the person Moira generally refers to as "The Spouse". I just wanted to comment on what Kate Coe said below:

...I don't think a prof should be forced to write a recommendation when he doesn't want to.

I agree; an academic world where faculty were forced to write letters for students would be an even more hellish place than it is now.

I notice that this is taking place at Texas Tech. Having gone through part of graduate school deep in the Bible belt, I think I can understand the sort of Sisyphean frustration that probably led Dini to post his 'affirmation' web page. No matter how painstakingly you try to lay out the theory and evidence, every semester you face a new crop of students who've been raised to think that evolution means dogs can evolve into cats, and ipso facto is at best ivory-tower foolishness and at worst a Satanic plot. So I can see how someone could eventually blow a gasket and post a web page like this.

But it's still needlessly asking for trouble. I don't know how many requests for letters of recommendation Dini gets - maybe so many that he needs the web page to reduce the herd to something manageable - but I'm surprised that he didn't see controversy coming with the "truthfully and forthrightly affirm" rhetoric. Aside from playing directly into creationists' hands ("see! see! evolution's just like a religion for them!!"), and being pointlessly confrontational, I can't see what he hoped to gain by having this little catechism on his web page.

All I ever had to say when I didn't want to give someone a recommendation was, "I'm sorry, but I don't think I'd be able to give you a good recommendation based on our interactions with each other." No one ever had to know what was going on in my cold, black, calculating heart.

Posted by David Fleck at February 02, 2003 07:35 PM