KU students, faculty offer counterpoint

Topeka ? One floor below the anti-evolution hearings, scientists — many of them from Kansas University — staff the pro-evolution battle station.

It is an information table sponsored by several science groups and covered with pro-evolution literature.

In addition, a handful of experts patrol Memorial Hall available to counter arguments being made by anti-evolution speakers who are testifying before the State Board of Education subcommittee upstairs.

Rachel Robson, a doctoral candidate at KU Medical Center, was working at the booth Friday and hoped to watch a little bit of the hearings later in the day.

She already had seen some of the action, and wasn’t impressed by the three conservative members of the State Board of Education who are conducting the hearings.

“We know what their motivations are. All three on the panel have expressed interest in a creationist platform,” Robson said.

Robson said she also was put off by the fawning attitudes of some of the board members to the witnesses testifying. “I was surprised by the level of sucking up,” she said.

Robson, of Baldwin, will be teaching next year at a small college in Nebraska, but hopes to return some day to Kansas. But, she said, many of her science colleagues are ready to leave the state.

She said many were concerned about raising a family in a state that would allow anti-evolution science standards in its public schools.

Others talking to reporters included Joseph Heppert, a KU chemistry professor and director of the Center for Science Education; Robert Hagen, an evolutionary biologist with the Kansas Biological Survey; and Matthew Buechner, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at KU.

Hagen said the hearings were a “publicity stunt and we’re here to mess that up.”