Ongoing Goodyear Problems

Over the summer, I mentioned that the Canadian Science Minister Gary Goodyear had stuck his ignorant nose into an academic conference because he was worried that there would be some speakers who were anti-Israeli at the conference. As I pointed out at the time, when you have a conference on something as contentious as Middle Eastern politics, most likely you are going to have a variety of viewpoints which include both anti-Israeli sentiments and anti-Palestinian. After my initial reporting of the incident, though, I did not hear anything more. Science recently had an update article on the matter. While the information was rather scant in the article, it is at least nice to see that the matter is still being pursued (and, as I guessed, Goodyear appears to be throwing his weight behind things for ideological reasons... shocking, I know, for someone who thinks belief in evolution is a religious question).

I also thought it was kind of funny that the author of the article originally thought York University was in the United Kingdom... I suppose it must be kind of confusing, given that the vast majority of our universities in southern Ontario ripped off at least a couple names from British schools.