Connecting Some Apologetic Dots

[Guest]

1 - Ritner "explicitly disowned" Gee because of his apologetics pretended that "these non-Egyptological writings had the stamp of scholarly accuracy and my own personal approval as his teacher."

2- "There is no negative, personal 'history' between us, as his class grades would reveal."

3- "I probably shall post on-line mycorrespondence with him (which is my unrestricted intellectual property) urging him to find a new advisor at Yale." [emphasis mine: If true, then this is huge, as it would prove that Ritner was the one who suggested Gee find another advisor!]

4- "Despite Mr. Peterson's remarks, such changes are not at all unusual or problematic, particularly as I initiated thesuggestion and detailed many changes regarding the accuracy of his work that would be needed for him to continue writing under my direction."

5- "It is my understanding that the offer of a job at BYU spurred the need for a fast conclusion to the dissertation, which required an advisor more willing to accept what I noted as severely problematic." [Wow. This makes sense, because Gee did get a job at BYU almost instantly]

6- "Under the circumstances, it is not extraordinary that Gee followed my suggestion." [contra Peterson]

7- "I was not in any way faulted or reprimanded" ["removed" according to Peterson]

8- "I was fully in agreement with the change that I had urged." [It was Gee's idea, not Ritner's, according to Peterson]

9- "To be blunt, any insinuation that there was a forced removal because the Department accused me of improprieties is false, and the spread of such a lie is being done only to discredit my reputation, as you note."

10- "I am shocked that Peterson, as a professor, would improperly hint at supposed details of confidential reviews (which cannot be seen nor analyzed by non-committee members). This is disgraceful."

11- "It is my wish to let the matter rest after the publication of Brent's volume."

12- "...if my writings have been of assistance to you or others in seeing the reasonable problems with the Abraham text and the actual content of the papyri, then any personal attacks are a minor issue, easily forgotten and forgiven."

Here is my take on this situation as someone who was groomed, to a degree, to go from his doctoral program in ancient studies to take up a job at BYU.

Nothing that Ritner writes here is at all unbelievable. Nothing. It simply is the case that BYU rushed students to take jobs before they could be captured by other institutions. The pressure to apply usually came right after passing qualifying exams. I saw this happen to two of my BYU professors in Classics, who joined the faculty after their qualifying exams and before the completion of their dissertations. An older member of the Classics faculty later confided to me that he was trying to put a stop to this because it was bad for a young scholar's career. In fact, he fought pressure from one of his colleagues to get me hired to BYU Classics right away. I was in the room when his colleague said, "Well, now we need to get K. hired, don't we?" I laughed nervously because it struck me as kind of crazy at the time.

So Ritner saying this independently is absolutely credible. I consider it confirmatory evidence.

Here is what I see. Gee did well in his coursework, even though he was probably awkward, an obtrusive Nibley-phile, and an occasional pain in the ass. Sound unbelievable?

To a non-LDS academic this can be trying. And, let's be clear. Academia can be really unkind. A guy who behaves the way Gee is reported to have behaved (weren't we all kids once?) sticks out and does not look like a good prospect for a stellar career. Gee was too obviously captured by his niche interests. Can a superstar prof at an Ivy League university be faulted for not placing his money on this horse?

Still, the guy's a professional, and he feels responsible to do well by all of the students the university and program have invested in. He agrees to direct the diss because it is in his wheelhouse, his specialty, and so it falls on him to do a responsible job. Gee starts to write, and Ritner gets an offer from Chicago. Chicago is better for Ritner, and he knows he will be taxed by his new responsibilities and a big move.

Gee turns in his chapter, and Ritner sees that there are problems. Not fatal, but definitely requiring time and attention. Ritner comments on the problems in detail, and Ritner concludes that Gee needs more guidance than he can give Gee from Chicago. He passes Gee on to his colleague. Gee is upset, but what can he do? Gee is sensitive about being let go, because it was a big deal to work with Ritner. He may have wanted Ritner to play Klaus Baer to his Hugh Nibley. But Gee lacks Nibley's charm and wit. He never really won over Ritner, and Ritner was probably more than a little relieved that he would not have the burden of taming Gee's text and taking responsibility for Gee's future.

Ritner also already knew that Gee was in a rush to get out to BYU. It is one thing to tame an unruly text with a young, stubborn PhD student. It is another to sign his name on a rushed job because the student wants to run off to his future employment defending a religion. Why would Ritner want to sign off on that? The truth is that Gee would not be the first to have lost a director under such circumstances, especially of those young scholars who started their career prematurely at BYU. I have seen such things unfold before my own two eyes.

Is Ritner some kind of hero in this? No. But he is also no villain. He did what was probably in everyone's best interest at the time, except perhaps Gee's timetable. It really hurt Gee. All Gee could do was make sure he tucked in a nice acknowledgement of Ritner's help in his dissertation. That way he could say, "I was THE Robert Ritner's student," and maybe Ritner would see that Gee had learned something from the critique that Ritner would want to claim as the result of his influence.

Then Ritner jumps into the Book of Abraham debate, partly because of what he perceives to be the errant nonsense of someone who was his former student. Remember, American Egyptology has long had a hand in this question. Ritner is not acting out or doing something unjust. Egyptologists were always going to say that Joseph Smith could not translate Egyptian because that is what the evidence clearly points to. Gee is incensed that his former professor would insert himself against Gee's work. In anger, he lashes out at Ritner and takes whatever perceptions of being wronged public in various veiled accusations and insinuations delivered by associates. Ritner, it is claimed, was a bad guy. Ritner was "removed from Gee's committee" for being a bad guy.

I do not know that this is what happened. But this is my read based on my experience of a number of other, similar situations I have personally observed as a student, a graduate student, and as an academic. I see nothing in anything I have been told that suggests to me that Ritner did something unprofessional or wrong in Gee's case. I think it is very likely that Ritner was impatient with Gee and was not really thrilled to deal with the oddball wearing the "Hugh Nibley fan" t-shirts. I have run into more than one ancient historian who was similarly not enthused about dealing with Nibley fans.

Here's the deal: If you make such an accusation against a former professor, you'd better have good cause. It was a very bad idea to trot out the weak accusations and insinuations we have seen from Gee's associates. They have only hurt Gee and his associates. They have only hurt BYU and the Church. Mostly they have hurt Gee. I have also seen the student whose wounded pride led him to lash out repeatedly at a senior scholar at the top of his field on the basis of allegedly unfair treatment in graduate school. Grad school is rough. Professors are not always great guys. I can see all of this. But I can tell you that it usually takes something pretty severe to result in any official reprimand of a tenured faculty member.

If you don't have that kind of issue, the best thing to do is get over it, especially if you have your degree in hand and your dream job. The people I have seen hang on to these things were the ones who were left without secure, permanent employment. Sure, the cases like Gee's might moan to you about Professor X late at night after a rough day at the conference, but they sure as hell don't bring these moans to a scholarly disagreement over the interpretation of ancient evidence.

Imagine the following scenario. You're at a conference. Prof. R gets up and delivers a talk that corrects the errors a former student made in a series of articles that the student published over the years. Dr. G, the former student, gets up at the same conference and says, "Oh yeah? Well, you left my dissertation committee! What right have you to correct my work in accordance with the standards of our field? You're only doing this because you hate me!" I think everyone would look on in silent disbelief, feeling very sorry for Dr. G.

"You're a big meanie!" is beside the point. What about the evidence, Dr. G? What about the standards of the field? Dr G, you started a conversation on the basis of bringing a certain expertise to the table, aren't you the one who invited others with the same expertise to comment on your conclusions? If you don't want this to be about our discipline, then keep our discipline out of it? If you can't do that, then be prepared to defend your interpretations and conclusions. "My old professor is a mean guy" is not cutting it.

Let me state for the record, I am not an Egyptologist. I am someone, however, who has been around academics for three decades of my life. I think I know what flies and what flops. This flops. And hard.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Good Lord this is an interesting peek into the world of not just rotten apologetics, but academic reputation and politicking.

- Doc

[_Dr Moore]

Sheesh. If Ritner made one mistake, it was believing these academic matters would be resolved in a strictly academic ring. Gee brought his own referee, and is beholden to no such rules.

[_Symmachus]

Let me state for the record, I am not an Egyptologist. I am someone, however, who has been around academics for three decades of my life. I think I know what flies and what flops. This flops. And hard.

Yes, none of the insinuations or rumors by the apologetic wing make any sense, nor does Gee's situation seem all that unusual. The antipathy is a bit mysterious to me. The apologetic rumors are essentially asserting that Ritner had had something against Gee long before either of the two of them were publishing about the Book of Abraham, but no claim to that effect appears to have surfaced until after Ritner published in Dialogue and JNES. Gee, why would that be? I can't imagine Gee would have been all that disappointed at the time of his move to Chicago, at least in terms of the prestige of his committee post-Ritner: Ritner was a junior professor at the time, and the real éminence grise in that department at the time was Kelly Simpson, who as, I understand it, ended up directing Gee's dissertation. It's not like he moved from Ritner to some second-tier scholar! Of course, Yale's Egyptology was already past its glory days by that point.

It is hard to understand why, unprovoked, John Gee would choose to pick a fight with Ritner through a review of his Libyan Anarchy, which is NOT a monograph (it's an edition and translation of inscriptions) and NOT about the Book of Abraham even remotely. Gee's work is torn to shreds throughout the footnotes in Ritner's edition, but that hadn't been published yet—I'm not sure Ritner had even mentioned Gee in print, except to say (if memory serves) that he his former student's apologetic work did not meet the Egyptological standards that Gee had had to face in class under Ritner—even Gee might have agreed with such an innocuous dissent. I wish I could find Gee's 2010 review of Ritner, published in volume 37 of the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities, but as you can see (click here), Gee's review is not listed, nor do I find it accessible in any databases. If I could read it, perhaps I could figure out just what it is that he finds such a problem with what is an important contribution (have a look for yourself; it's a fantastic collection). Why pick a fight over this and not, for example, Ritner's work that actually has something to do with the Book of Abraham, even tangentially? To date, this is the only response to Ritner that has appeared from Gee, as far as I am aware, but while it is listed on Gee's CV and quoted by Mormons who list Gee's publications when they are trying to evidence his Egyptological bona fides, I can't find it (I believe Ritner said it was retracted in the Mormon Stories Interview). It is the only response to Ritner's scholarship from Gee, as I say—but it has nothing to do with the Book of Abraham!

No doubt egos are involved, as in any controversy among academics. But I think part of the issue is answered by my initial post, namely, that the academically employed apologists had been long used to not having a real opposition (a couple of evangelicals wrote about this with concern in the 1990s; see here). Ritner caught them off guard, and they responded with their usual attactics. Disinterested dismissal had been the rule from 1912 to the 1960s, after which there was basically just silence. Other than translating some of the Joseph Smith papyri in Dialogue, there wasn't much from the Egyptologists. In the 1960s, they did show that Joseph Smith couldn't read Egyptian and that the documents don't reflect the text of the Book of Abraham, but Nibley had already admitted that—indeed, embraced it, for that led to several new lines of apologia that no non-scholar could really keep up with or even follow, while rhetorically he undermined the Egyptological position. Accepting the initial Egytpological response while pursuing these other angles had the effect of making the Egyptological position banal, even obvious: "Well, duh! We never thought Joseph Smith could read Egyptian! You've really wasted your time telling us what we already know. Now, here's 1,000 pages about Egyptian religion and esoterica that Joseph Smith couldn't have known and yet got right—we're way ahead of you guys!" Silence from the Egyptologists was presented as tacit agreement or fear that Joseph Smith might be a true prophet after all and the Church true. It was in this environment Gee gets his PhD in the late '90s while already teaching at BYU and becoming an important lieutenant at FARMS Command, functioning as a kind of security blanket for the Book of Abraham. Then out of nowhere comes Ritner on some video or other, followed by publications not just in Dialogue but in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, and to top it off he did an edition of the papyri that was not merely a translation but a demolition of all the apologetic arguments in the commentary and supporting essays. Naturally, blindsided and unable to muster a scholarly response, they resorted to personal attack.

But what about the mysterious review in 2010? Gee surely knew that Ritner was then working on Joseph Smith Papyri book when published his review of Ritner's 2009 The Libyan Anarchy. My suspicious is that Gee, without solicitation and abusing his position as editor of the journal, published his negative review of Ritner 2009 because it could be done in a non-Mormon venue, thus creating the rhetorical room for an eventual attack on the Ritner's edition of the Joseph Smith Papyri: "His poor scholarship has already been documented in non-Mormon venues..." Of course, such a review never happened, because in 2012 the garden at the Maxwell Institute was pruned. A few years ago I would not have thought Gee capable of that—and I emphasize that is just my speculation—but the affair surrounding Gee's recent Joseph Smith Papers project shows another use from him of the review process as a guerilla tactic in waging ideological warfare. In this case, he was asked—and I believe Hauglid claims he was paid— to provide a feedback on the recent volume in the Joseph Smith Papers. That means he would have received a copy pre-print, so if he had noticed any issues then, he could and should have raised them at that stage. Instead, he didn't return the feedback before publication (according to Hauglid), and he sat on his criticisms until he could publish them as a review of the book. And of course this is all of a piece with these guys: they have perfected the use of the book review as an ideological weapon. That is, indeed, the only contribution of the post-Nibley generation of apologists.

[_consiglieri]

It now seems clear it was Kevin Graham who notified Dr. Ritner about these spurious allegations by Professor Gee and trumpeted by Professor Peterson.

Though Dr. Ritner did not recall Kevin Graham, he did remember that "some guy named Peterson" was involved.

[_Kishkumen]

Yes, none of the insinuations or rumors by the apologetic wing make any sense, nor does Gee's situation seem all that unusual. The antipathy is a bit mysterious to me. The apologetic rumors are essentially asserting that Ritner had had something against Gee long before either of the two of them were publishing about the Book of Abraham, but no claim to that effect appears to have surfaced until after Ritner published in Dialogue and JNES. Gee, why would that be? I can't imagine Gee would have been all that disappointed at the time of his move to Chicago, at least in terms of the prestige of his committee post-Ritner: Ritner was a junior professor at the time, and the real éminence grise in that department at the time was Kelly Simpson, who as, I understand it, ended up directing Gee's dissertation. It's not like he moved from Ritner to some second-tier scholar! Of course, Yale's Egyptology was already past its glory days by that point.

Thanks for this correction, consul. I have spent most of what little time I have read scholarship on Egypt on Ptolemaic Egypt, so my sense of the relative prestige of various scholars is no doubt inaccurate.

So, Ritner left Yale around 1996, and Gee graduated in 1998. Ritner's Dialogue article appeared in 2000 (copyright 2001), while the IRR film, "The Lost Book of Abraham," appeared in 2002. The 2000 article contains some harsh criticism of Gee's scholarship and scholarly ethics both in the main text and in the footnotes. Ritner repeatedly points out Nibley's errors of translation and interpretation. I don't know that we need to look elsewhere for his motivation. As a recently minted PhD, Gee had to be burnt by the very public thrashing Ritner gave him.

At first, I was quite surprised that Ritner did what he did. Why would a scholar of his stature in the field take time to correct the backwoods cottage publications of a minor sect? Digging into the text a little further, it started to look like Ritner was of the opinion that Nibley had betrayed the generosity of Baer and run down the ability of competent Egyptologists while benefiting from Baer's generosity (which took many forms, some very personal). At a certain point, I think that would have to strike anyone who understood the history of Egyptology and the Joseph Smith Papyri as outrageous and irresponsible behavior for those claiming to be academics.

I dunno. You could be right that this was a tactical move. The timing is suggestive. But, I tend to think it was just plain vindictiveness. It is really remarkable how many times Ritner feels he needs to explicitly point out and reject Nibley's and Gee's errors of translation. Would it not be appropriately tit for tat on Gee's part to attack Ritner's efforts as a translator of Egyptian?

[_Philo Sofee]

It now seems clear it was Kevin Graham who notified Dr. Ritner about these spurious allegations by Professor Gee and trumpeted by Professor Peterson.

Though Dr. Ritner did not recall Kevin Graham, he did remember that "some guy named Peterson" was involved.

It was Kevin Graham and he DESERVES THUNDEROUS ACCOLADES~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[_Symmachus]

Thank you for correcting my characterization of the Dialogue/JNES piece, Reverend. I haven't read it in more than ten years or so, and was only untutored undergraduate when I did. I don't remember it having a personal quality too it's rebuttal to Gee, though I can see how someone like Gee, who is probably accustomed to praise a la Seariac, would take it that way.

At the risk of pulling the "it's both" card, I would reply simply that I have no convictions about Gee's motivations per se, and that my interest is really focused on his strategy in servicing those motivations. I don't doubt, for example, that he dislikes what the Joseph Smith Papers project has done in terms of the Joseph Smith papyri, but if Hauglid is to be believed, he has a very calculating and deliberate way of going about it. Sitting on feedback that was solicited only to save it for a review-attack may have a malicious streak to it but it is also strategic. I am simply speculating that a similarly strategic aim was behind the Ritner review. Ritner is a very prolific scholar, so there is a lot to critique. But he focused on what he did, when he did. It strikes me as odd. Could just be coincidence.

[_Kishkumen]

I doubt it is a coincidence. I take your point.

[_Philo Sofee]

Thanks you guys for bringing the academic background and context out even more. Very educational for all of us.