David Johnson

University of Nevada, Reno | UNR · Educational Leadership

What do academics think about their “responsibilities” to the public? This chapter provides a view of “the public intellectual” by examining how academics construct their relationship to the public. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with physicists at universities in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), we illustrate a typological appro...

SECULARITY AND SCIENCE: What Scientists around the World Really Think about Religion by Elaine Howard Ecklund et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 352 pages. Hardcover; $31.95. ISBN: 9780191926755. *I was raised in the 1980s and 1990s under conservative evangelicalism, which means my father's bookshelf was full of creation/evolution text...

New Atheism—a provocative and derisive anti-religious form of secularity—has established a central place in public thought through public intellectuals and scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. Science figures prominently in New Atheism, due in large part to such New Atheist thought leaders. And w...

What are the implications of our results for scientific and religious communities? Drawing on the core empirical patterns discussed in the book, this chapter explains how the rhetoric of New Atheism espoused by celebrity scientists does not square with the reality of atheism experienced by atheist scientists in the U.S. and U.K. Religious communiti...

Many scientists have an intuitive understanding of the word science but find defining it a challenge. Definitions of science provide insight into how atheist scientists demarcate science from religion and whether they believe there are limits to what science can explain. Narratives of atheist scientists emphasize science as a methodology, as a chan...

In this chapter we ask how atheist scientists think about meaning and purpose. Some observers assume that morality requires religion, while others distrust atheists and believe they are morally depraved. We find that most atheist scientists believe that life has no inherent meaning, while others believe that questions of meaning cannot be answered....

Many assume that atheists and atheist scientists rarely interact with religious individuals. Yet, a large subset of atheist scientists—29 percent in the U.S. and 21 percent in the U.K.—have sustained patterns of interaction with religious individuals and organizations, making them the most unlike the New Atheists. This group includes scientists rai...

Sociologists have identified a variety of factors that lead religious individuals away from the beliefs, practices, and affiliations of their adolescence. A number of scholars suggest that exposure to science is an essential turning point in trajectories toward atheism, in part because in many Western contexts, scientists are less likely to be reli...

Not all atheists are New Atheists, but thanks in large part to the prominence and influence of New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, New Atheism has claimed the pulpit of secularity in Western society. New Atheists have given voice to marginalized nonreligious individuals and underscored the imp...

Modernist atheists, the largest subset of atheist scientists, are the most like the New Atheists. They do not identify as religious or spiritual, they do not interact with religious individuals or organizations, and they are more likely than other atheists to view the science-faith interface as a relationship of conflict. Nevertheless, while this g...

Spiritual atheists comprise the smallest subset of atheist scientists in the U.S. and U.K. Unlike modernists (who are not spiritual) and culturally religious atheists (who participate in religion), spiritual atheist scientists construct alternative value systems without affiliating with religious traditions. Many cast spirituality in emotional term...

Not all atheists are New Atheists, but thanks in large part to the prominence and influence of New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, New Atheism has claimed the pulpit of secularity in Western society. New Atheists have given voice to marginalized nonreligious individuals and underscored the imp...

Not all atheists are New Atheists, but thanks in large part to the prominence and influence of New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, New Atheism has claimed the pulpit of secularity in Western society. New Atheists have given voice to marginalized nonreligious individuals and underscored the imp...

Is the market civilizing or destructive? The increased salience of science commercialization is forcing scientists to address this question. Benefiting from the sociology of morality literature’s increased attention to specific kinds of morality and engaging with economic sociology’s moral markets literature, we generate competing hypotheses about...

Existing explanations of faculty-student interactions emphasize social-organizational characteristics of higher education to the exclusion of social-psychological dimensions of the interactions themselves. Yet, student perceptions are essential cognitive elements that influence frequency of, and growth from, informal interaction with faculty. Drawi...

The persistent problem of sexual assault on college campuses is receiving attention in both the public sphere and state legislatures. Although a considerable body of research examines various aspects of campus sexual assault, such as rates and reporting, scholars have not examined how state characteristics and interstate dynamics influence the poli...

Using a data set that captures the introduction and enactment of “campus carry” bills between 2004 and 2016, we examined how the state policy adoption and diffusion framework explains the policy process related to allowing concealed weapons on the campuses of U.S. colleges and universities. Panel data logistic regression analyses revealed that acti...

Conducting qualitative interviews in-person is usually presented as the gold standard, with other modes being seen as inferior. There have been arguments, however, that remote interviews, such as those conducted using the telephone or videoconference technologies, should be seen as equivalent to or even superior to in-person interviews. Evaluations...

There has been much scholarly work on the interface between science and religion in the United States and the United Kingdom, but little has been done to compare these to other countries and regions around the world. By studying what scientists think about religion in eight national and regional contexts—the United States, the United Kingdom, Franc...

There are many ways to define religion, such as a system of beliefs about God, higher powers, or other supernatural or superhuman entities, or an organized belief system taught and shared by a specific community. Scientist respondents in this study provided various understandings and definitions of religion as well as their understandings of spirit...

India’s unique brand of secularism is accommodating to religion and diverse forms of religious expression, including within the scientific workplace. Religion is deeply ingrained in cultural and social life in India, and thus it plays a significant role in family life, even for those who do not consider themselves religious. Although most scientist...

Religiosity overall is decreasing in the United Kingdom. Yet recent waves of new immigrants entering the country are bringing religious diversity to the country and to science. While Christianity has long been the majority religion in the United Kingdom, the increased presence of Islam, Hinduism, and other religions is changing the nature of the UK...

Italy is an overwhelmingly Catholic nation. Roman Catholicism is pervasive in Italy and an integral part of Italian culture. Because of this, most Italian scientists are of the same faith background, at least raised nominally Catholic. The majority of Italian scientists identify as Roman Catholic and also see themselves as at least slightly religio...

In order to take an in-depth look at the relationship between science and religion around the world, the authors of this book completed the most comprehensive international study of scientists’ attitudes toward religion ever undertaken, surveying more than twenty thousand scientists and conducting in-depth interviews with over six hundred of them....

Turkey is a predominantly Muslim nation. However in recent years the nature of religion in Turkey is changing drastically. While there has been a long history of secularism in the country, recent political changes are seemingly moving the country in a direction of religious freedom and expression. Yet, as scientists expressed in their interviews, i...

In the countries and regions featured in this book, there are more religious scientists than we might think. There are varieties of atheism that exist among scientists in these Western and Eastern contexts. In contrast to the “warfare thesis” that science and religion are inherently in conflict with one another, the conflict perspective on science...

The idea of science and religion in conflict does not pervade Taiwan and Hong Kong as it often does in the West. Instead, there is often free expression of religion within the workplace. Scientists in Taiwan and Hong Kong actually mirror the public in terms of religiosity, perhaps because there is little tension between science and religion in thes...

France is characterized by its assertive secularism and its strong separation of church and state. Its official policy of laїcité means that there is not as much potential for conflict between religion and science because they are kept so separate and public expressions of religion are suppressed. Because religion is overall absent from the public...

US scientists believe that the US religious public is generally antiscience. However the views of religious Americans are much more nuanced and religious Americans are often more open to science and scientific issues than scientists would believe. Nevertheless, scientists’ perceptions of the religious public in the United States shape their views o...

Drawing on sixty-one in-depth interviews conducted with commercial and noncommercial scientists at four universities in the United States, this paper examines why academic scientists embrace commercially oriented career paths in higher education. A central goal of this paper is to expand our descriptive and conceptual understanding of socialization...

Entrepreneurs of contested commodities often face stakeholders engaged in market excluding boundary work driven by ethical considerations. For example, the conversion of academic scientific knowledge into technologies that can be owned and sold (i.e., science commercialization) is a growing global trend and key stakeholders have different ethical r...

Using two conceptual frameworks—boundary work and field theory—I examined how academic scientists’ strategies for demarcating science from the market have implications for professional socialization. I focused on how field theory’s emphasis on group differentiation, power, and rules within fields can inform analysis of boundary work. The study was...

Measurement of public trust in sources of information about science primarily examines whether the public turns to the "science communication industry" for information about science. Research posits, however, that scientists are not the singular cultural authority on science. Here, we examine the extent to which people turn to religion and religiou...

Some research suggests a crisis of public confidence in universities and colleges in the United States. But approaches to theorizing confidence in higher education do not examine how confidence varies across social contexts, while empirical efforts to document confidence are characteristically limited by weak construct validity. Drawing on a nation...

This article examines the relationship between structural strain (the imbalance between actual and preferred conditions of work) and anomie in science (the absence of opportunities to achieve recognition). Using data from a nationally representative survey of physicists and biologists in the United Kingdom (N = 1,604), we test competing hypotheses...

Peer review, a socially structured process of evaluating scholarly and scientific performance, is a ubiquitous condition of role performance in the professoriate and central to the production of knowledge. Focusing on the evaluation of publication, this chapter directs attention to three features of peer review: its functional ideals and relationsh...

The commercialization of research is one of the most significant contemporary features of US higher education, yet we know surprisingly little about how scientists perceive and experience commercial rewards. A Fractured Profession is the first book to systematically examine the implications of commercialization for both universities and faculty mem...

Drawing on 48 in-depth interviews conducted with biologists and physicists at universities in the United Kingdom, this study examines scientists’ perceptions of the role celebrity scientists play in socially contentious public debates. We examine Richard Dawkins’ involvement in public debates related to the relationship between science and religion...

Sociological research on the US population?s views of science and religion has recently burgeoned, but focuses primarily on Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals. Our study advances understandings of how Americans of non-Christian faiths ? namely Judaism and Islam ? perceive the relationship between science and religion. We draw on in-depth in...

Scientists have long been associated with religion’s decline around the world. But little data permit analysis of the religiosity of scientists or their perceptions of the science-faith interface. Here we present the first ever survey data from biologists and physicists in eight regions around the world—France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Taiwan, Turk...

Objective Drawing on a symbolic politics perspective, we analyze state‐level “anti‐evolution” legislative attempts between 2000 and 2012 to alter science curricula in the United States. Method We use structural equation modeling to examine whether interest groups, public opinion, government political climate, and science and engineering workforces...

Drawing on 171 in-depth interviews with physicists at universities in the United States and the UK, this study examines the narratives of 48 physicists to explain the concept of ethical ambiguity: the border where legitimate and illegitimate conduct is blurred. Researchers generally assume that scientists agree on what constitutes both egregious an...

The religion-science relationship has been the focus of a growing body of research. Such analyses have often suffered from poorly specified concepts related to religion and to science. At the individual level, scholars often assume that an individual's religiosity will affect her orientation towards science. But an orientation towards science consi...

We examined the potential for institutional conflict of interest between the 26 private universities belonging to the Association of American Universities and the corporations to which they are tied through their boards of trustees. We were interested in the degree to which interlocks may have tightened over three points across an 11-year period (1...

We examined the potential for institutional conflict of interest between the 26 private universities belonging to the Association of American Universities and the corporations to which they are tied through their boards of trustees. We were interested in the degree to which interlocks may have tightened over three points across an 11-year period (1...

We describe a semester-long active learning project in which students practice the skills of synthesis and analysis by developing portfolios organized around a topic of their own choosing (relevant to their substantive course). We build on prior contributions in four ways. First, we offer a project that is indicative of basic skills in the sociolog...

Using data from interviews with 133 physicists and biologists working at elite research universities in the United States, we analyze narratives of outreach. We identify discipline-specific barriers to outreach and gender-specific rationales for commitment. Physicists view outreach as outside of the scientific role and a possible threat to reputati...

Scholarship on technological change in academe suggests that the adoption of instructional technologies will erode professional control. Researchers have documented the pervasiveness of new technologies, but neither demonstrate how technological change is experienced by faculty nor collect data that permit assessment of consequences for professiona...

Many authors suggest that having children leads to gaps between the number of hours people prefer to work and the hours they actually work. Existing research, however, offers mixed support for that claim. We discuss the roots of this popular but poorly supported hypothesis and offer the first review of research on the topic, paying special attentio...