My Interview with Brian Hauglid is Up!

[_Dr Exiled]

It seems pretty clear that Dr. Peterson denies having sent the email or called local authorities to come down on Brian. Why is it still a debate?

This is how I see it.

1- We know that somebody informed the SCMC committee (or its contemporary equivalent) about what Hauglid said in the JSP volume, which resulted in Hauglid having to answer to his bishop.

2- Hauglid indicates that doing this is the 'MO' of the usual suspects.

3- We know somebody informed Gee about the podcast and its announcement here.

4- We know Gee took it upon himself to bring this to the attention of BYU.

Peterson doesn't indicate whether he knows who ratted on Hauglid to the SCMC.

Peterson says that he personally doesn't rat out people, but doesn't address Hauglid's acquisition that doing this is in fact their MO. Does Peterson know who informed the SCMC? Heck, did Peterson delegate it to somebody else?

Peterson does NOT deny that he emailed Gee about it (although personally I'm inclined to I suspect it was Schryver). Assuming it was Schryver, how did he find out? Does he monitor this place, or did somebody like Peterson mention it to him?

Peterson says he didn't attempt to interfere with anybody's employment. So what? We already know it was Gee who did this.

From my seat, Peterson's denials are so specific and evasive, it is hard to imagine that he is telling the whole truth about this. He doesn't say whether he knows anything about who informed the SCMC, nor does he say whether he knows who informed Gee. And he doesn't say whether he condones Gee's actions or knew about them ahead of time.

I don't necessarily think Peterson is lying, but I do think his comments need to be cross-examined and should not bectaken at face value.

The problem with cross examining Dr. P is that when he needs to be compelled to answer, there isn't anyone to compel him. So, he continues to be evasive, especially to someone from this board. If someone from his neck of the woods were to get incensed at the thought of Dr. P and his buddies running to the BYU Administration or local authorities merely because a professor took an alternative view, perhaps we would get somewhere.

[_moksha]

Where did those halcyon days go when BYU professors could simply resort to fisticuffs to resolve a dispute?

Can you point me to a thread or post where this was discussed? It'd be fun to read about it.

- Doc

The part about Professors Gee and Muhlestein is from Dr. Hauglid in his RFM interview. I am simply guessing about BYU having some past halcyon days where disputes were dealt with directly rather than in a cloak and dagger manner, I mean there must have been some time when people were more honorable. Think of that silent generation era when they built the nation's infrastructure with the CCC and fought the Nazis.

[_Water Dog]

William Schryver, where are you?

sup?

[_Shulem]

William Schryver, where are you?

sup?

Ah, there you is.

:biggrin:

[_Lemmie]

sup?

Ah, there you is.

:biggrin:

Hah! We knew it.

[_Shulem]

Hah! We knew it.

We're all one big happy family!

[_Lemmie]

Hah! We knew it.

We're all one big happy family!

:wink:

Yes, we are.

“ The family we choose for ourselves is more important than the one we were born into...”

[_Shulem]

Unfortunately, Dr. John Gee will not be appearing on Radio Free Mormon any time soon. Below is the email he sent me in reply to the one I sent him.

_________________________________________
_________________________________________


Dear _____________,

I'm sorry. I would like to address this personally, but you did not leave a name so I cannot. I usually do not respond to anonymous emails.

I am somewhat aware of certain accusations made. I am, however, already committed to another podcast and thus cannot appear on yours at this time.

Thank you for thinking of me. I appreciate the generous offer.

John Gee
William (Bill) Gay Research Professor
Asian and Near Eastern Languages
Brigham Young University

If not sooner, maybe later.

[_Symmachus]

I have listened to most of this so far, Consiglieri, and would like to commend you for this extraordinarily helpful interview. Hauglid obviously has a comprehension of the details that is so intricate and total that it can be hard for him to unwind it all into simpler terms for those of us like myself who haven't done as much homework on this as John Gee. The Egyptological and linguistic arguments are much more up my alley, but I've never really thought much about the material issues of the scrolls and know next to nothing about the Abraham Papers, so it has been very helpful to me whenever you have summarized the main points of what he is talking about and connected them to the core arguments that are advanced or implied.

I have always been hesitant to assume duplicity in the apologists. I tend to think most are like Michael Rhodes, who comes off well in this podcast, because, as someone who detests uniformity, I celebrate approaches to scholarship that are unorthodox or eccentric, if that scholarship is done well. If an apologist (or faithful scholar, if you prefer) starts from the assumption that the Book of Abraham (or what have you) is ancient and then proceeds to offer an interesting idea about the text, I find I can generally learn something or stretch my mind while wrestling with it. The Interpreter's editor (or at least its symbolic editor) has claimed, if I recall rightly, that the starting premise is the only thing that distinguishes what they do from what non-LDS scholars are doing. He's right but not in the way he intends. So why doesn't it actually live up to the promise?

Part of is that is that they just won't or can't do scholarship all that well on technical grounds (a basic factual grasp of things, you know, like what the Canaanite Vowel Shift is). Yet the deeper issue is not simply that so few of them work from their assumptions before they go on to do their scholarship but that they actually never move beyond their assumptions. It is all an attempt to prove the antiquity of Mormon scripture, which means they are always stuck in the assumptions phase and never get to ideas and understanding phase that we are promised—and that is what scholarship is about. It's a tedious enterprise of circuitous restatement and unidirectional recycling of previously determined positions that never gets off the ground. They promise us an acrobatic airshow but instead we get NASCAR: turning left for four hours, but with regular cars. Still, the faults are intellectual and not ethical in the main. That's been my view anyway.

But oh boy, Gee does not come off well here. I have studied and learned from one of his Egytpological papers on the Coptic imperfect, which was suggested to me long before I came here or knew much about apologetics, though I had heard that that was something he worked on. The mutual acquaintances that we have are all Egyptologists, and all I ever heard was that he seemed a bit eccentric, which to me is no bad thing. But I started from an angle that he is a highly competent scholar with a firm grasp of his subject, so I assumed in his LDS work that he was simply a believer who starts from a certain premise, hopefully secure enough in that premise that he doesn't need to spend his time proving and reproving them in an endless ring of logical circularity. The first I really looked at some of his aplogetic work, though, I was a little taken aback because it seemed to me that no one with his level of competence could handle the evidence as he did without being consciously dishonest (I discuss it in this thread here). The most I could bring myself to say there is "very close to unethical." Stubbs is an astounding special pleader, Rhodes makes amateurish mistakes, Muehlestein overstates, Nibley is sloppy, but some of what Hauglid says about Gee confirms that he simply unethical. I am astounded that he accepted and was paid for the responsibility of reviewing a book pre-publication but then withheld his scathing criticisms (which have no validity anyway) until after the book was published—and even then he published those criticisms in his friend's partisan blog, so that he didn't have to moderate them in a way that any genuine intellectual would want to.

Unbelievable. I thought it was wrong to oust Gee from MI because I interpreted his presence their as a healthy dose of heterodoxy. I can see now why people wouldn't want someone like that around for reasons that have nothing to do with intellectual disagreement.

Good observations, Reverend. Smoot is a strong candidate, in my opinion. He hasn't updated his blog since January. My guess is that, instead, he's been pouring all his energy into the "Neville Nevill Land" blog, which seemingly gets updates almost every day.

As a sidenote: if he doesn't get the Ph.D., that is going to pose a problem for him in all sorts of ways.

Why is that? It would seem to me a PhD in Egyptology is more of a hindrance than a help these days.

[_Doctor Scratch]

Good observations, Reverend. Smoot is a strong candidate, in my opinion. He hasn't updated his blog since January. My guess is that, instead, he's been pouring all his energy into the "Neville Nevill Land" blog, which seemingly gets updates almost every day.

As a sidenote: if he doesn't get the Ph.D., that is going to pose a problem for him in all sorts of ways.

Why is that? It would seem to me a Ph.D. in Egyptology is more of a hindrance than a help these days.

I would argue that it poses a problem because of the value that the Mopologists place on degrees, "prestige," and so on.