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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (54853)	3/21/2008 1:00:58 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542169

Never met any like that. My undergrad department was full of eccentric atheists and agnostics- nice men (I don't think we had any women)- at any rate, I checked my transcript, and I didn't have any female teachers except in chemistry. Ours were the reverse. As the university ratcheted up the pressure on biology, chemistry, physics, and geology to make bigger efforts to hire women, physics was the most cooperative, biology and geology didn't resist, but chemistry stuck with the competing arguments of "women don't make good scientists or chemistry professors" or "we just can't find any competent female chemistry PhDs. The breakthrough in chemistry came only after the long time, quite powerful, chair of the department retired. Now the chair is a woman, and last time I checked at least half the tenured positions were held by women. As for scientists and religion, I haven't seen any data recently. It would be somewhat difficult to work with since there is such a rather heated debate as to what is a science and which disciplines qualify. But if you take the four I mention above as, perhaps, the core (no doubt I've forgotten some favorite) then it might be possible. One of the things that always surprised me, however, were both scientists, in the narrow sense, and engineers, who were fundamentalists. Their argument was basically a two spheres argument--different forms of logic apply to faith and science. It was a leap of faith to believe in a god (and, more interesting, a literalistic approach to scripture) but that was the nature of faith. Made for fascinating discussions at the faculty dining room. IN the very best sense. Small colleges can bring colleagues together because they are not isolated from other parts of the university in large departments. As for the low incidence of such as compared to the population at large, I'm not surprised. And if you see the red on my face, it's embarrassment. Just went through one of those moments in which the car makes odd sounds but it simply won't replicate them at the mechanics. My computer problem would not appear at the Apple store. Just hooked it back up here and it works as it did at the Apple store. Perhaps the trip fixed it. ;-) But I'll be computing uneasily for a few days.