Expelled makes it sound as if Crocker was immediately removed (expelled, even) from the George Mason University classroom. On the contrary, she completed teaching the course in the normal fashion, even after student complaints and whatever “discipline” followed that meeting with the supervisor. Crocker’s position at George Mason University (GMU) was a non-tenure track contract position in which the employee teaches on a course-by-course basis for a set length of time, with no guarantee of a renewal.
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Despite claims of being fired, Crocker was allowed to continue teaching and complete her GMU contract after the Department became aware of her ID instruction through student complaints. She was instructed to not teach about intelligent design and creation science, which was not part of the curriculum of the courses she had been hired to teach. Academic freedom does not mean the freedom to teach about anything you want, regardless of the expected content of your courses. And, far from having her academic career “come to an abrupt end”, after leaving GMU, Crocker taught at NVCC, and additionally acquired in 2006 a postdoctoral position at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, MD, working on T-cell signal transduction – an actual scientific investigation – suggesting that her reputation as a scientist was unaffected by the controversy over intelligent design.
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Indeed, if she were blacklisted, we would not expect her to have had regular employment after leaving GMU. But after her contract at GMU ended and the controversy about her teaching methods surfaced, Dr. Crocker continued in another adjunct faculty position at Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC), where she continued to teach demonstrably false science, as well as creationism, and was even profiled in an article at The Washington Post to which she willingly contributed.
