Re: David Randall on racial SCS controversy - National Association of Scholars

Well, well.  The National Association of Scholars casting doubt on
Princeton's hiring of minority faculty.  It is significant that the
Princeton Department of Classics is the target, since in 1974 it set a
standard by hiring three female classicists.
Currently, Princeton University is a national leader in the
African-American studies.

Women and minorities have long been targets for NAS.  In 2006, the fax
machine I'd inherited from a more conservative colleague hummed, and out
popped a fax from Steve Balch, then the leader of NAS, announcing the
sudden end of Larry Summers' term as Harvard President, an hour before.
Balch *did not hesitate *to state the cause: Summers' widely publicized
doubts that women could do well in mathematics, and to add, that this
demonstrated the undue influence of radical women at Harvard.

Whether Balch had a pipeline to the Harvard trustees seems dubious.
Whether those trustees were influenced by worries about women
mathematicians is to this day wholly undemonstrated.  It *was* true that
the Summers presidency had been roiled by faculty complaints, and --
perhaps more than anything else -- by a lawsuit that cost Harvard $25M (see
here
<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.institutionalinvestor.com%2Farticle%2Fb150ns6bplx7f1%2Fhow-summers-lost-harvard&amp;data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C706e5b40814f492cdd1d08d691ffd6a6%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C1%7C636856925339051905&amp;sdata=fHz1cWxzzT9gv0otbW33CTezY3D6X3EbQZ5W1Lc%2BR%2Bc%3D&amp;reserved=0>
and here
<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2006%2F02%2F27%2Fbusiness%2Fmedia%2Fdid-an-expose-help-sink-harvards-president.html&amp;data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C706e5b40814f492cdd1d08d691ffd6a6%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C1%7C636856925339061913&amp;sdata=yNghlpqKTaYz3JXtNOMj7rNllX6UGSkXyEgje3ddMNA%3D&amp;reserved=0>).
About that, Steve Balch had nothing to say, but to many of us, it seemed
that even for Harvard $25M was a lot of money.

The NAS piece seems to be cut from the same cloth: raise doubts about women
and minorities, make Princeton seem bad. (Emphasis on *seem*.)

As of this writing, Dr. Peralta's book on Roman religious institutions is
under contract at Princeton, which is one of the pre-eminent publishers in
our field.  We'll have to see how the book fares when it appears.  But as
David Randal, with a Ph.D. himself from a fine program (Rutgers) would
likely acknowledge over a beer, a book contract with Princeton is nothing
to sneeze at, nor is a Stanford Ph.D., written with a stellar group of
supervisors.

I think you'll see the book soon enough.

By my rough count, the "staff and board" at NAS totals 38 people, only 8 of
them women.  21% more or less.  One is Virginia Thomas, who gets in the
news a lot but not as an academic.  A smattering of minority
representation.  Whether that qualifies them to judge, I'll leave to others.

Dan






On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 3:40 PM John Lauritsen <[email protected]>
wrote:

>      An article on the SCS racial imbroglio by David Randall
> has been posted on the website of the  National Association of
> Scholars:
>
>
> https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nas.org%2Farticles%2Fracial_preferences_shakes_a_classical_studies_conference&amp;data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C706e5b40814f492cdd1d08d691ffd6a6%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636856925339061913&amp;sdata=CLSv0BwBB4vrX63wshA0lviUf9jv%2FLmIjDuMBgjzGhM%3D&amp;reserved=0
>
>      Randall calls for the Society for Classical Studies "to
> post the video of Peralta’s panel as soon as possible, so that
> the public  may view and judge the event directly."
>      Randal considers Freethought and Free Speech to be
> at the heart of this controversy:
>
> "The Society for Classical Studies should state publicly that
> classics scholars have the right, as a basic principle of
> intellectual freedom, to oppose all race-conscious policies.
> They should also state publicly that classics scholars have the
> right as members of the profession to say publicly that
> affirmative action, however euphemized, is the reason that
> another member of the profession has a job. This is impolite --
> but it is no more impolite than Peralta’s call for white men to
> surrender their ‘privilege’ of academic publication. If civility
> trumped a scholar’s right to say what he believes is true, the
> Society for Classical Studies would have banned Peralta along
> with Williams."
>
>
> John Lauritsen, Independent Scholar.
>