Guillermo Gonzalez

Two years later, an article in the local newspaper The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported Gonzalez' appeal against his denial of tenure and claimed he was "the unnamed target" of the ISU petition. The article noted that "Gonzalez won't discuss the reasons for the tenure denial" but that he "noted, however, that he has frequently been criticized by people who don't consider intelligent design as a legitimate science." Comments from John West, the associate director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture – with whom Gonzalez was a senior fellow – blamed the failure to secure tenure directly upon Gonzalez' belief in intelligent design and compared it to a "doctrinal litmus test" typical of his native Cuba.

On 12 June 2013, Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, announced it had engaged Gonzalez as an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy. At the time, the university was already investigating a complaint that another assistant professor in that department, Eric Hedin, had been promoting intelligent design in an honors symposium titled "The Boundaries of Science". Concerns about the teaching of religion in science courses had been raised by academics, including professor of biology Jerry Coyne, who commented on the new hire that if Gonzales "wants to talk about it in his writing and speeches, he has a right to do that. But he can't pass that stuff off in a university classroom. He doesn't have the right to get tenure working in discredited science." The university's investigation into Hedin had begun following a letter from the Freedom from Religion Foundation, whose attorney said that the university "already has a serious issue with creationism being taught as science" by Hedin, "Now they've hired another astronomy professor and creationist to teach science at their university, Gonzalez", and this pattern could damage the university's reputation as well as involving the administration in work "to ensure that proper legal, ethical, and educational boundaries are followed by Gonzalez." The Discovery institute's Evolution News and Views website published a statement Guillermo Gonzalez had issued about his new position as a faculty member:

Gonzalez's failure to obtain research funding has been cited as a factor in the decision. "Essentially, he had no research funding," said Eli Rosenberg, chairman of Gonzalez's department. "That's one of the issues." According to the Des Moines Register, "Iowa State has sponsored $22,661 in outside grant money for Gonzalez since July 2001, records show. In that same time period, Gonzalez's peers in physics and astronomy secured an average of $1.3 million by the time they were granted tenure." On February 7, 2008, his appeal to the board of regents was denied.

Additionally, Gonzalez appeared in the controversial 2008 movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The American Association for the Advancement of Science describes the film as dishonest and divisive, aimed at introducing religious ideas into public school science classrooms, and the film is being used in private screenings to legislators as part of the Discovery Institute intelligent design campaign for Academic Freedom bills. Expelled portrays Gonzalez as a victim of religious discrimination and the Discovery Institute campaign asserts that his intelligent design writings should not have been considered in the review. However, Gonzales listed The Privileged Planet as part of his tenure review file. Dr. Gregory Tinkler of Iowa Citizens for Science stated that "Being a religious scientist is perfectly normal and acceptable, but scientists are supposed to be able to separate science from non-science, and good research from bad. Academic freedom protects a scientist's ability to do science, not to pass off a political or religious crusade as science."

In April 2007 Iowa State University denied Gonzalez tenure.

On June 1, 2007, Gregory Geoffroy, president of Iowa State University, rejected Gonzalez's appeal and upheld the denial of tenure. In making this decision, Geoffroy states that he "specifically considered refereed publications, [Gonzalez's] level of success in attracting research funding and grants, the amount of telescope observing time he had been granted, the number of graduate students he had supervised, and most importantly, the overall evidence of future career promise in the field of astronomy" and that Gonzalez "simply did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect in a candidate seeking tenure in physics and astronomy – one of our strongest academic programs." Geoffroy noted, "Over the past 10 years, four of the 12 candidates who came up for review in the physics and astronomy department were not granted tenure." Gonzalez appealed to the Iowa Board of Regents and the board affirmed the decision on February 7, 2008.

The Chronicle of Higher Education said of Gonzalez and the Discovery Institute's claims of discrimination "At first glance, it seems like a clear-cut case of discrimination ... But a closer look at Mr. Gonzalez's case raises some questions about his recent scholarship and whether he has lived up to his early promise." The Chronicle observed that Gonzalez had no major grants during his seven years at ISU, had published no significant research during that time and had only one graduate student finish a dissertation. The Discovery Institute misrepresents an op-ed by John Hauptman, one of Gonzalez's colleagues in the physics department. Hauptman states clearly that Gonzalez's work falls far short of what scientists know to be science, containing not one single number, not one single measurement or test of any kind. "I believe that I fully met the requirements for tenure at ISU," said Gonzalez. On May 8, 2007, Gonzalez appealed the decision.

The Discovery Institute filed a request for public records and as a result, in December 2007, Des Moines Register obtained faculty email records from 2005 that included discussions of intelligent design, and made mention of the impact that Gonzalez's support for it might have on his prospects for tenure. Emails included one by John Hauptman who worried that the anti-Gonzalez sentiments were "starting to smack of a witch's hanging." Hauptman went on to vote against Gonzalez's tenure in part over concerns about Gonzalez's support of intelligent design. The Discovery Institute writes that the email records "demonstrate that a campaign was organized and conducted against Gonzalez by his colleagues, with the intent to deny him tenure". In a letter to the Iowa State Daily, Physics and Astronomy Professor Joerg Schmalian stated that the e-mail "discussion was prompted by our unease with the national debate on intelligent design", not the issue of tenure.

In late 2007, Gonzalez accepted a non-tenure track position in the astronomy program of the Grove City College in Pennsylvania starting in fall semester 2008. Grove City College acquired an observatory from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in February 2008 that will be utilized for astronomy classes as well as faculty and student research.

In 2004 he published The Privileged Planet and its accompanying video, which takes the arguments of the Rare Earth hypothesis and combines them with arguments that the Earth is in prime location for observing the universe. He then proposes that the Earth was intelligently designed. William H. Jefferys, a professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, reviewed the book writing "the little that is new in this book isn't interesting, and what is old is just old-hat creationism in a new, modern-looking astronomical costume." Co-author Jay Richards responds to such criticism with the following statement: "It has absolutely nothing to do with biological evolution. We are talking about the things that you need to produce a habitable planet, which is a prerequisite for life. It doesn't tell you anything about how life got here." A documentary based on the book was produced by the Discovery Institute.

Observers such as PZ Myers have stated that the Discovery Institute's statement "relies heavily on fragmentary quotes taken from emails that they obtained through an open records inquiry", that the "entire anti-evolution movement" has a track-record of taking quotations out of context, that "the DI has not made the full text of the sources available for examination", leading to a "reluctan[ce] to accept the quotes provided at face value", and that in any case "[t]his is precisely what his colleagues are supposed to do: discuss concerns about his tenure case." A review and analysis of the list of Gonzalez's publications supplied by the Discovery Institute found that "he peaked in 1999, and the decline [in his publications] began even while he was still at the University of Washington" and that "[e]ven more pronounced than the drop in publications is the complete bottom-out in first authorships that is almost sustained throughout his entire probationary period leading up to tenure." Another academic commented:

Gonzalez obtained a BS in 1987 in physics and astronomy from University of Arizona and his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Washington in 1993. He has done post-doctoral work at the University of Texas, Austin and the University of Washington. He has received fellowships, grants and awards from NASA, the University of Washington, Sigma Xi, and the National Science Foundation. He supports the Galactic habitable zone concept, which was coined in 1986 by L.S. Marochnik and L.M. Mukhin, who defined the zone as the region in which intelligent life could flourish. Until May 2008 he was an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa State University, then taught at Grove City College, an evangelical Christian school, and since 2013 is an assistant professor at Ball State University in Muncie.

Guillermo Gonzalez (born 1963 in Havana, Cuba) is an astrophysicist, a proponent of the principle of intelligent design, and an assistant professor at Ball State University, a public research university, in Muncie, Indiana. He is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, considered the hub of the intelligent design movement, and a fellow with the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, which also promotes intelligent design.