Kansas, and largely its state board of education, has been waging something of a bureaucratic crusade in the name of intelligent design, and this week a professor became one the first physical victims in the state squabble over the theory.

Intelligent design, in its simplest terms, is a theory that questions the legitimacy of evolution and suggests the universe has been formulated, in all its complexity, by a higher power.  Last month the Kansas Board of Education voted 6-4 in favor of new educational standards in state schools that challenge the legitimacy of evolution; teachers will now be obligated to adhere to these criticisms in science classes.  The board’s chairman, Steve Abrams, gloated, “This is a great day for education.” While Pennsylvania’s Board of Education recently voted to approve similar changes, outraged Pennsylvania voters replaced all of the board members who endorsed the changes.

As a retort to the recent challenges to evolution in the name of intelligent design, University of Kansas religious studies professor Paul Mirecki proposed to offer a new course this coming spring, titled “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies.”

It seems that Mirecki is not, unfortunately, a tactful man.  He allegedly sent an email to a student organization on the university’s campus in which he disparaged religious conservatives as “fundies” and asserted that categorizing intelligent design as mythology in his upcoming course would serve as a “nice slap in their big fat face.”

Mirecki is doubtless undiplomatic, but his beating, apparently a result of his proposed course and the email, is a lamentable throwback to outright primitivism.  Battered by two men who he says referred to his proposed course during their attack, Mirecki has since driven himself to the hospital, withdrawn his proposal to teach his course, and apologized for the scornful email.  

The challenge for both Mirecki and his assailants is now to haul the debate about intelligent design out of the ring of tactless mudslinging and vigilante justice and back into the at least civil, and ideally academic, sphere.  

Mimi Hanaoka