The Guillermo Gonzalez Tenure Case at Iowa State
[This post has gotten long and sprawling as I investigated more. I’ll leave it that way, as a source of material for other people to analyze]
David Klinghoffer in the Weekly Standard tells us how Guillermo Gonzalez, a pro-ID astronomer at Iowa State, was denied tenure. Reporting is usually so bad that it’s impossible to tell whether somebody was denied tenure for good reason (his scholarship) or bad reasons (for example, his political views). But this story caught my eye because it says:
According to a Smithsonian/NASA astrophysics database, Gonzalez’s scientific articles from 2001 to 2007 rank the highest among astronomers in his department according to a standard measure of how frequently they have been cited by other scientists. He has published 68 peer-reviewed articles, which beat the ISU department’s standard for tenure by 350 percent. He has also co-authored a standard astronomy textbook, published by Cambridge University Press, which his faculty colleagues use in their own classes.
Yet in turning down Gonzalez’s appeal, ISU president Gregory Geoffroy claimed that the astronomer “did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect.”
So I took a look myself, in Google Scholar, which is becoming the standard way to see who is influential in my field of economics. Below is what I found: counts of how many cites the 5 top articles of various people in the Iowa State department got. As you can see, Gonzalez looks a lot more like a “Distinguished Professor” than like the “Associate Professor” to which he was denied promotion.
Professor Gonzalez looks underplaced. I wonder whether he will now move to a better university? Cite counts are crude, so I’d value any comments by people in the field who can read an astronomy vitae better than I could.
THE TENURE CANDIDATE: Guillermo Gonzalez 244, 209, 147, 91, 88. THREE OF FIVE " DISTINGUISHED PROFESSORS": Costas Soukoulis: 175, 95, 77, 69, 42. David Johnston: 816, 349, 288, 212, 141. Kai-Ming Ho 221, 190, 92, 90, 88 ALL SIX ASSOCIATE PROFESSORS: James Cochran 95, 79, 60, 58, 35 John Lajoie 8, 1.... looks like he is older. Maybe he stopped publishing after getting tenure. Craig Ogilvie 6, .... hardly any, though 65 or so publications back in 2004, his latest CV . Odd. Soeren Prell 3, 1.... hardly any. Marzia Rosetti: zero cites! Though several articles. Joerg Schmalian 155, 130, 86, 81, 56,
A public letter by the President of Iowa State University on denying Gonzalez’s appeal adds nothing to our knowledge. The letter just argues that the president has lots of experience with astronomy and tenure decisions, rather than saying anything about the particular case (the familiar cop-out of “personnel matters are confidential” is used).
I don’t condemn the Physics Department simply for voting Gonzalez down even if he is well cited. I think it’s fine for a department to turn someone down if they think his work is bad, even if the rest of the world likes it, or to turn down someone some of whose scholarly work is so bad that they find it embarassing. A physics department might turn down a superstar in string theory, for example, thinking that the theory, though mainstream, is wrong. It’s rare for that kind of thing to happen, though, so it would be interesting if Intelligent Design arouses that kind of exceptional opposition. It suggests to me irrational hostility to religion.
Last, I should say that one very important strike against Professor Gonzalez is that he has not, to my knowledge, publicized the letter he was no doubt given explaining the reasons why he was denied tenure. He is free to do that, and not doing it suggests that it contained some good reasons.
P.S.: After I wrote this, I found a link on what the Klinghoffer article said: that Gonzalez is well cited. It just has astronomers, and the list doesn’t overlap with mine above.
Still more:
Des Moines Register had a good article on June 1, 2007:
Iowa State University has sponsored $22,661 in outside grant money for Guillermo Gonzalez since July 2001, records show. In that same time period, Gonzalez’s peers in physics and astronomy secured an average of $1.3 million by the time they were granted tenure, which is basically a lifetime appointment at the university.
“Essentially, he had no research funding,” said Eli Rosenberg, chairman of the physics and astronomy department where Gonzalez is employed. “That’s one of the issues.”…
Gonzalez said neither teaching nor service were factors in his tenure denial.
“So what I can confirm is tenure denial has something to do with the research aspect,” he said.
He pointed to ISU’s physics and astronomy tenure policy, which said promotion to an associate professor requires potential to achieve a national or international reputation, a standard demonstrated by the publication of 15 papers in peer-reviewed journals….
Rosenberg pointed to the university promotion and tenure policy, which said a document called a position responsibility statement is a key element in the tenure review process.
That statement in the physics and astronomy department, which Rosenberg declined to share, is signed by each faculty member and addresses the importance of seeking or obtaining money to support research, he said.
That “declined to share” hurts Rosenberg’s credibility. And as I said before, Gonzalez’s silence on the details of criticism of his research should be held against him, too.
Still later: Now it seems that he had $172,000 in grants, not the smaller figure. The Nightlight
blog has details, and is helpful in trying to put a very anti-Gonzalez spin on them.
THe Chronicle seems to have had a good article on this. Via the Iowa State Daily:
An article by Richard Monastersky in The Chronicle of Higher Education on Monday has acknowledged there are still important questions to be asked about assistant professor of Iowa State University physics and astronomy professor Guillermo Gonzalez’s tenure qualifications. While it was widely reported that Gonzalez’s publications list includes a greater number of peer-reviewed journal articles than Iowa State’s physics and astronomy department tenure guidelines suggest, the articles of interest to the tenure committees were those 25 that were written during Gonzalez’s time at Iowa State. Monastersky’s article raises questions about this most recent scholarship. The Chronicle uses University of California-San Diego physics professor Jorge Hirsch’s h-index to evaluate Gonzalez’s scholarship. The h-index takes into consideration the number of articles written by Gonzalez and the number of times those articles have been cited by other scientists as a measure of scholarship. Guillermo Gonzalez, according to the Chronicle, has an h-index of 13, which Monastersky notes is the highest of the 10 astronomers in his department. He reports the next highest h-index in the department is that of university professor of physics and astronomy Lee Anne Willson, who scored a 9. When asked, however, Monastersky said that the h-index was calculated using all 68 of Gonzalez’s career articles, even though only the 25 articles written during Gonzalez’s time at Iowa State were taken into consideration by the tenure committees.
The Chronicle article says
To compare different professors, The Chronicle calculated for each one a measure of scholarship called an h-index, devised by Jorge E. Hirsch, a professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego. A scholar with an h-index of 5 has published five academic papers, each of which has been cited by least five other papers.
Mr. Gonzalez has a normalized h-index of 13, the second highest of the 10 astronomers in his department. The only person who ranks higher is Curtis J. Struck, a professor with an h-index of 17.
Under typical circumstances, Mr. Gonzalez’s publication record would be stellar and would warrant his earning tenure at most universities, according to Mr. Hirsch. But Mr. Gonzalez completed the best scholarship, as judged by his peers, while doing postdoctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin and at the University of Washington, where he received his Ph.D. His record has trailed off since then.
“It looks like it slowed down considerably,” says Mr. Hirsch, stressing that he has not studied Mr. Gonzalez’s work in detail and is not an expert on his tenure case. “It’s not clear that he started new things, or anything on his own, in the period he was an assistant professor at Iowa State.”
That pattern may have hurt his case. “Tenure review only deals with his work since he came to Iowa State,” says John McCarroll, a spokesman for the university.
When considering a tenure case, faculty committees try to anticipate what kind of work a professor will accomplish in the future. “The only reason the previous record is relevant is the extent to which it can predict future performance,” says Mr. Hirsch. “Generally, it’s a good indication, but in some cases it’s not.”
Mr. Gonzalez responds by saying that older papers naturally accumulate more citations because they have been out longer than recent papers. “It is true that my most cited papers were published in 1997 and 1998. Nevertheless, several of the papers I published since arriving at Iowa State do have respectable citation numbers in the 30s and 40s range,” he wrote in an e-mail message.
The Smithsonian/NASA database does, in fact, list two post-2001 papers with more than 30 citations. But Mr. Gonzalez was not the first author on either of those papers. What’s more, the newer papers that list him as first or sole author have picked up citations at a much slower rate than his earlier papers, suggesting that other astronomers now find his work less relevant than they once did.
The Hirsch Index is a good idea. I’ve in the past tried counting up all the articles with at least 20 cites, which isn’t a bad method either. Both methods miss the “big publication”, though, which might be more important than any number of little ones. I just checked my own Hirsch Index and it is 16. One can’t compare it to the physics ones here, though, since citation numbers differ across disciplines.