Texas Higher Education and Creation Research, Part 13

And just when I was worried about what I would blog about today...

The Austin American-Statesman, Dallas News, and Inside Higher Ed. are all reporting that the decision on whether to allow the Institute for Creation Research to grant Master's degrees in science education has been pushed back, and won't be this month. April appears more likely.

The Inside Higher Ed article has the most substance of the three. It quotes Raymund Paredes, with bureaucratic understatement, as saying of ICR:

“Their curriculum doesn’t line up very well with the curriculum available in conventional master of science programs here in Texas,” he said. “I wanted them to either revise the curriculum or explain why it departed from the norm.”

Also pleased to note that Paredes is asking not just about faculty degrees, but the research they claim to do:

Paredes said that the institute “claims that their faculty do actual research,” so he asked for “material that documented the research activities under way” and that show the research to be “based on solid scientific research.”

It seems Raymund Paredes may be trying to move the application towards creation studies rather than science education. In any case, I am pleased to see that the Coordinating Board seems to be taking concerns about this application seriously.