The Catty Dr. Coyne
Original ArticleChalk up another one for the hidden hand of Discovery Institute. Through a pernicious web of connections in Indiana, including the Eli Lilly Foundation, we apparently persuaded the trustees of Ball State University in Muncie to show the door to President Jo Ann Gora. At least that is the fear of Professor Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, noted blogologist and rather-less-noted biologist.
The retirement of Dr. Gora has just been announced. Maybe she was pressured by the Trustees, who were pressured in turn by “donors,” as Coyne suggests; but that seems unlikely. The 67-year-old administrator who decided recently that Ball State professors may not mention intelligent design (at least not favorably) has completed ten years at the university, accumulated a large salary (approaching a million dollars, all benefits included), and with winter coming, she may just want to join the other wealthy Hoosiers in Florida.
But Coyne, like Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice — stroking his famous cat — is suspicious. Didn’t Bruce Chapman, founder of Discovery Institute, serve as a fellow of Hudson Institute (then in Indiana) less than 25 years ago? And wasn’t the Eli Lilly Foundation a major funder of Hudson? Haven’t Discovery fellows appeared at Hudson events and vice versa? Didn’t Discovery foreign policy fellow John Wohlstetter serve on Hudson’s board at one time? Doesn’t Lilly, which gives grants to Ball State, have a program supporting various “religious” studies?
His exposé of Lilly Endowment’s programs supporting religion studies strikes Coyne, the Sword of Atheism, as particularly telling. (It is quite equal to the quality of evidence he marshals for Darwin’s Theory.)
The revelations, indeed, are so shocking — how ever do Dr. Coyne and his cats gather all this intelligence? — that we are afraid he next will discover that I was born in Chicago, my parents lived on the South Side and my dad graduated from the University of Chicago. There, I admitted it myself. Now dig away, Dr. C. But I warn you, we are everywhere.