College professor gets $20,000 to settle claim
Written by Staci Hupp -- (The Des Moines Register)
July 19, 2008

A community college professor who was fired after he offended students with remarks about the Bible will get $20,000 to settle his wrongful termination claim.

Steve Bitterman, who taught world civilization at Southwestern Community College in Creston, was fired last September after students complained that he told them the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be taken literally.

The school's lawyer, Patrick Smith, said the college settled to avoid an expensive lawsuit, which Bitterman had threatened to file.

"There is no admission of liability," Smith said Friday.

Bitterman said college officials fired him over the phone and told him it was for teaching religion instead of history. He argued that academic freedom should have outweighed religious concerns.

"What was for him a purely objective, academic exercise in studying the religious beliefs of different Western civilizations became a group of fundamentalist students taking exception when it came time for their God to be put under the microscope," Bitterman's attorney, Brad Schroeder, said earlier this week.

The case drew national attention. Bitterman, 60, received support from the American Humanist Association, which says people who shun organized religion can lead ethical lives and contribute to the greater good. Group members praised the settlement this week.

In Iowa, the case fueled an ongoing debate about academic freedom and religion.

An Iowa State University physics professor complained in 2006 that faculty leaders denied him tenure because he supports the study of intelligent design, which disputes part of the theory of evolution. Scientists have attacked intelligent design as a scheme to bring religion into the classroom.

ISU President Gregory Geoffroy and the Iowa Board of Regents backed the tenure decision. The professor, Guillermo Gonzalez, left ISU earlier this year to take a job at a private Christian college in Pennsylvania.

Bitterman taught this summer on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in Norfolk, Va., through Central Texas College's Instructor At Sea program for sailors. He is scheduled to return to the ship in the Persian Gulf but said he has applied for jobs at other community colleges.