ICR hits a snag

By Richard B. Hoppe

Via Phil Plait

The Institute for Creation Research, which in 2007 moved from California to Texas, has been seeking accreditation in Texas to award a Master’s degree in science education. In 2008 the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board denied ICR’s request for accreditation, and ICR brought federal suit. The National Center for Science Education now reports that ICR’s request to temporarily award the degree while seeking permanent accreditation has been turned down by the court.

ICR’s graduate school is currently accredited by TRACS, the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, which IIRC was originally founded by a group including Henry Morris, also the founder of ICR, to provide a cloak of faux respectability for institutions like ICR. As NCSE notes, TRACS

… requires candidate institutions to affirm a list of Biblical Foundations, including “the divine work of non-evolutionary creation including persons in God’s image.”

See here for more (pdf), especially pp20ff on “Biblical Foundations”. TRACS is not recognized by Texas as an accrediting agency.

In the ruling denying ICR temporary permission to award the degree, the court wrote

“It appears that although the Court has twice required Plaintiff to re-plead and set forth a short and plain statement of the relief requested, Plaintiff is entirely unable to file a complaint which is not overly verbose, disjointed, incoherent, maundering, and full of irrelevant information” (p. 12).

Kind of like most of their stuff, hm? It puts me in mind of R. Kelly Hamilton’s style in the Freshwater hearing: Toss everything into the pot and hope that something is edible.