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

Apologies. At end of first paragraph:
*Currently, Princeton University is a national leader in the
African-American studies.*
should be
*Currently, Princeton University is a national leader in the broader field
of African-American studies.*

Dan

On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 5:08 PM DANIEL P. Tompkins <[email protected]>
wrote:

> 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%7C1e402b8081a84d04446908d692004dea%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C1%7C636856927341952269&amp;sdata=pi85RTmHGU5HDfUghhDg8q3KY%2FwVk74Y%2BU%2BC5gDpSTw%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%7C1e402b8081a84d04446908d692004dea%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C1%7C636856927341952269&amp;sdata=cm5a3hhR0fK0j5Orr1DzqNmjj%2F8pLGiLiUZg4d1fuZ0%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%7C1e402b8081a84d04446908d692004dea%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636856927341952269&amp;sdata=Hyv0tJZGncOwSiJLHO0BQE7ca2BGqUR17RZz%2FmlXcvA%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.
>>
>