Saturday 31 March 2007, "Hits and Misses" on the editorial page.

Ivory tower hysterics

In April, an official campus Christian group at SMU is bringing in scientists from the Discovery Institute to make an extracurricular presentation arguing in favor of Intelligent Design the idea that life is so complex that it must have been the product not of random chance, but an intelligent designer. God, if you like. It's a theory rejected by the overwhelming majority of scientists. But if there's any place where an idea like this can be examined and debated, you'd think that a university especially one affiliated with a Christian denomination would be it. But a group of SMU professors got the vapors and demanded that the university bar the Discovery Institute from campus. SMU's administration correctly told the prissy profs that the group had every right to be on campus.