Peterson and Gee's libel against Ritner?

[_Trevor]

Trevor, you seem to be in the know on these situations, so I ask, if Ritner had the power, didn't he also have the power to just go along as his advisor and deny him his doctorate, essentially destroying whatever career he had planned? From what I understand from what you're saying, it seems Ritner was rather gracious by advising Gee to go elsewhere so he wasn't throwing away everything he had accomplished at that point. This would seem to go against the Peterson/Gee innuendo that Ritner had it out for Gee because he was LDS.

The whole thing is a huge mess. Yes, Ritner could have done worse by Gee. He could have slammed him at his dissertation defense and refused to sign off on his dissertation. That would have been bad form, but he could have done it. Most profs don't want a reputation for being bad advisors, so I don't imagine that too many people do this to their students anymore.

Actually, there are much more subtle ways of killing a "bad" student's career chances. Most of them involve not-so-benign neglect. For one thing, anyone who had high aspirations for a successful career as an Egyptologist would have probably seriously considered the risks of pissing off Ritner. Why? Because, if one is looking for a job in a small field like Egyptology, and one is studying at Yale, one does not leave with a dissertation signed by someone else, when people in the field likely know one started under Ritner. This just raises big questions that it would be better to avoid.

But Gee was fairly immune to this threat, because he had a job lined up at BYU, I am assuming. Legends of Gee's genius were well-established when I was an undergrad at BYU, so I have the sense that he was all but assured of a job when he got his degree. I could be wrong. So, what can Ritner do to him? Not a lot with BYU, because, after all, who is BYU going to believe? In the wider field of Egyptology he can do more, but he risks looking like a total jerk if he pursues the matter too far. Rather, he just passes over Gee when he has a say in some post-graduate career opportunity.

Gee can presumably overcome this to some degree. He can publish good work and build a decent reputation on that. But, it is the case that personal squabbles have retarded advances in an area of scholarship when a powerful person with a certain opinion used that power to squash the opposition. I don't know enough about this disagreement to say anything, but it can get ugly and the effects can be lasting. Much depends on the personalities involved and their respective positions in the field.

So Gee may have had employment fairly well lined up (I don't know), but he still took a pretty big professional risk in breaking with Ritner. Depending on Ritner's personality, that risk could result in lost opportunities for Gee where Ritner has some say in the matter. On the LDS side of things, it is not helpful for the apologetic cause to have Gee's former advisor taking issue with Gee's apologetics. And it could be the case that Ritner does have a problem with Gee using his credentials to add the air of legitimacy to an apologetic. Many academics do look down on people trading on their degrees in ways they do not approve of.

In short, we don't know. Both people are motivated the lay the blame on the other person. Both can come up with stories that help their cause. Ritner's story sounds credible in a number of ways, but, hey, the guy is brilliant and I am sure he could maneuver around this problem with a good story if he wanted to. I am not impeaching his honesty. I am not impeaching Gee's. I am simply refusing to come down on either side. My experience with academic politics leads me to conclude that this is the best path.

[_Yahoo Bot]

Squabbles amongst academics seem to be more common than most of us lay folks would understand. Reading Michael Coe's Mayan Code book I can see how he dislikes some fellow academics and how they dislike him.

With Gee and Ritner, it would be pretty easy for somebody to piss all over Gee because of his fondness for Mormonism.

One of my favorite econ profs converted to the Church while teaching at Berkeley and came to teach at BYU; I can just imagine what his collegues thought of him there.

[_Trevor]

Squabbles amongst academics seem to be more common than most of us lay folks would understand.

Oy vey! It is a topic that could fill volumes. It is vicious.

[_SoHo]

Isn't it entirely reasonable for a trained Egyptologist to doubt the sincerity of Gee's support for the Book of Abraham being related to an actual ancient Egyptian text? I'm no expert, but have a really hard time believing that Gee actually buys his own arguments on the subject - much like I spent most of reading "Echos and Evidences" thinking that the authors couldn't possibly believe much of what they wrote. If the Book of Abraham as authentic is really as ridiculous a position as Ritner has asserted, any bias towards a trained Egyptologist that supports it seems to me to be at least understandable.

[_Yahoo Bot]

Isn't it entirely reasonable for a trained Egyptologist to doubt the sincerity of Gee's support for the Book of Abraham being related to an actual ancient Egyptian text? I'm no expert, but have a really hard time believing that Gee actually buys his own arguments on the subject - much like I spent most of reading "Echos and Evidences" thinking that the authors couldn't possibly believe much of what they wrote. If the Book of Abraham as authentic is really as ridiculous a position as Ritner has asserted, any bias towards a trained Egyptologist that supports it seems to me to be at least understandable.

Not being an Egyptologist, I don't feel qualified to handle this. Before Ritner there was Ashment challenging Gee. Actually, it was Ashment, training as an Egyptoloist at the University of Chicago where I knew him; it was then Gee as a doctoral candidate challenging Ashment's views of the Book of Abraham, and then it was Ritner and Gee in conflict.

But it seems to me that the whole notion of the Book of Abraham is such a ridiculous story to outsiders (as was the resurrection of Christ) that it is just too easy to piss all over Gee for the way he is approaching the Book of Abraham. So I don't find Ritner's approach all that unreasonable.

[_Kevin Graham]

Simon, you didn't answer the question. "What 'point' Peterson was trying to get across if not that Ritner has a bias towards Gee and so therefore his critiques of Gee cannot be trusted, as evidenced by his 'removal' from his advisory committee?"

I mean why mention this at all, let alone five times over the course of three years? Peterson's rumors always come in response to something someone says that cites Ritner as a source. Every time. So what do you think Peterson was trying to accomplish here?

It is plainly obvious, I am sure you would agree, that Ritner was biased towards Gee, and that Gee was biased toward Ritner. It was simply a relationship that proved unproductive, in my opinion.

I don't agree because there is no evidence that Ritner was "biased towards Gee." This is clearly the picture the apologists are trying to paint (obviously, for apologists anyone outside of Mormonism who says something critical of Mormon related issues, must be acting on some preexistent anti-Mormon bias). In fact, Ritner refutes that assertion when he said his grades didn't suffer under his wing. And according to Trev's input, it seems that advising him to choose another advisor is quite common, and is about the nicest thing someone could do.

You seem a bit vindictive towards Dr. Gee, implying that you wish Ritner had "essentially destroy[ed] whatever career [Gee] had planned," if this is the case, and you are biased toward Gee, are you not just as guilty as Dr. Peterson?

Two things. First, I never said I wanted him to destroy Gee, I simply said he could have if he were truly that biased towards him. Secondly, I am biased towards Gee because I know first hand that he is a liar who cannot be trusted. From his deceptive usage of "color" KEP clips, to the blatant misuse of Gustav Seyffarth, to his ludicrous 700 meter scroll theory that was just blown out of the water by a couple of talented kids... nothing in Gee's apologetics carries an ounce of credibility.

But that is beside the point since I am not the one starting rumors. Dan Peterson did. If it weren't for Dan Peterson, I suspect nobody on the web would even be aware of the Gee/Ritner incident. It doesn't really respond to anything Ritner has presented contradicting Gee, but since it showed promise as an apologetic red herring, Dan decided to bring it up for years, every time someone cited Ritner's work to contradict Gee's.

[_Kevin Graham]

Yahoo Bot, you knew Ed Ashment? What were your impressions of him? You say he is a trained Egyptologist, but I remember Dan Peterson ridiculing him for not being one. He said it was highly unusual for someone to be a doctoral candidate for ten years.

[_Trevor]

He said it was highly unusual for someone to be a doctoral candidate for ten years.

I was accepted into the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago. When I visited, I was told that the average time to PhD at Chicago was 9 years. The reason for this, according to the professor with whom I spoke, was a Chicago graduate culture in which there was very little administrative oversight over the students on the departmental level and little pressure exerted on them to finish. In short, he gave me the impression that there wasn't much of a cohesive community of grad students and faculty, so I decided to go elsewhere.

Am I surprised that a grad student at Chicago could be a doctoral candidate for ten years? Frankly, no.

[_Kevin Graham]

So it was just Dan Peterson's way of casting a shadow of doubt over Ashment's credentials. That figures.

[_Yahoo Bot]

I knew Ashment, but I was merely a zone leader with the University Ward as my home ward, and Ashment was the gospel doctrine teacher. He seemed like a decent person and was active in the Church at the time. I was in a gospel study group with members of the ward and they thought extremely highly of him.

According to those who knew him years later, he just didn't have the resources to complete his studies and, the last I heard, was selling insurance in southern California. I have read his attacks on the Book of Abraham and Gee's counter, but I really don't feel all that competent to comment upon them.

To me, it is just a matter of faith.