Proof that there may be more academic diversity and freedom on Cornell's campus than David Horowitz and company care to believe:WorldNetDaily: Intelligent design goes Ivy League :: Cornell University plans to offer a course this summer on intelligent design, using textbooks by leading proponents of the controversial theory of origins.
The Ivy League school's course – "Evolution and Design: Is There Purpose in Nature?" – aims to "sort out the various issues at play, and to come to clarity on how those issues can be integrated into the perspective of the natural sciences as a whole."
This course comes just after Interim President Hunter Rawlings's speech regarding Intelligent Design and the teaching of evolution in schools. While many Christian conservatives bemoaned the fact that Rawlings declared that Intelligent Design is not a valid scientific theory, they must applaud the fact that Cornell is taking pro-active steps to foster civil, academic debate among its faculty and students. This, after all, was the main point of Rawlings's speech--to motivate institutions of higher education to inform cross-disciplinary debates of public importance. As Rawlings himself stated:
Cornell’s history, its intellectual scope, and its current commitments position us well to contribute to the national debate on religion and science.
