Doctor Scratch wrote:DCP wrote:None of the staff at the Maxwell Institute have CFS, strictly speaking.
Which is to say, in BYU terms, that nobody there has a BYU "faculty slot" -- i.e., a permanent stream of professorial funding. "Slots" exist in departments. For years now, there has been a set number of them, determined by the Board of Trustees and not subject to increase.
Professor Gee, though, has the Gay Professorship, which works out to pretty much the same thing (if not, indeed, much better). It effectively adds to the number of "slots" at BYU by bringing new monetary stream into the system.
It has not, to my knowledge, been definitively established that Gee still occupies the Gay Research Chair.
That is very strange. I don't know how you get an endowed professorship housed in one part of the school to another one like that. Maybe BYU isn't rigid on these things, but I have seen attempts to do that elsewhere, and it was contentious and legally complicated. One department I was in tried to snag an endowed chair that was housed in another department (how I wish to god there were actually real chairs involved); a successor hadn't been named for some time and the chair was a better fit in our department in many ways. The emeritus professor who had held that chair, who happened to be a mentor of mine and is now of blessed memory, opposed the move and that alone held everything up. It was one of oldest chairs in the country, so the drastically altered educational and legal environment was also an issue. At one point, the original department was looking into ways to sue my department (according to rumor, anyway), which finally just gave up. I don't know if that would have been possible, but it was an indication of how difficult it was to just move the thing around like that and the level of rancor that an attempt to do so could incur. As I say, though, maybe at BYU it's no big deal, and maybe it's significant that Gee has not been in any department. Maybe everyone is excessively collegial drink orange juice together in the Wilkinson Center every Thursday, and maybe no one at the Maxwell Institute, past or present, would ever fight over money and prestige.
Also, if he has not been in a department, how were his raises and promotions (e.g. potentially to "continuing status") advanced and approved (or not)? It would certainly be an usual for a fresh PhD to get an endowed chair as a full professor, so if he was awarded BYU's version of tenure, I wonder how that process worked. This doesn't really seemed like an endowed chair in the usual sense. That it was a "research" chair with outside funding housed in an institution at BYU but not in a department suggests that it was never a tenure-stream position in the first place. In other words, it might be more a long the lines of a fellowship, and those do tend to be revolving, nor are named-fellowships uncommon. I wonder whether, again, it is just something more pedantic at work here: perhaps this wasn't supposed to be a permanent position, or the current MI people want to be like other places that usually have revolving fellowships.
In any case, why not go to the College of Religion? Their standard seems to be only that you have to be as publicly and fervently traditional as John Gee. Seems like a good fit to me.
