Kevin Graham wrote:EAllusion wrote:I don't buy that Analytics. If his piece had a lot of merit and he went to the Maxwell Institute first to publish it, then they should have regardless of his personal issues. Granted, I'm skeptical of that merit piece, but I'm also skeptical of the MI's standards. He's not being hired to be a personal representative of the Church, he's seeking to contribute to the knowledge of the LDS standard works. The latter stands or falls irrespective of his personal character, and it would be wrong to ignore his views because of that.
Good point. What evidence do we really have that his work was ever slated for publication to begin with?
All we had was Will's say so. But Will has always hyped up future publications that never came to be. NAMI never advertised a future publication with his name on it, so I'm inclined to believe they didn't feel it was a worthy piece. Otherwise, why would Will need to spend so much time and effort lobbying on his own behalf, trying to court the NAMI talking heads on date nights and luncheons? Most people just submit a paper and have it judged on its own merits. Will has to spend months trying to woo these people in advance.
I don't think that the M.I. rejected Will's work on the basis of scholarship. For one thing, consider what MsJack was told: this person told her that the would not be publishing his work. If they never had any arrangement to begin with, and the possibility of an MI publication was all just puffery on Will's part, I don't think this M.I. person would have worded his email(s) to MsJack in this way.
But there are other reasons, too. For one thing, I'm pretty sure that the M.I. commissions almost all of its stuff. This isn't the standard scholarly article submission process, where a scholar submits to the journal which then seeks out peer review. Rather, the M.I. asks people to write articles, and then sends it along to whatever constitutes "peer review" in DCP's eyes. If Will was saying that he was planning to publish with the M.I., I would assume it was because he was invited to do so.
Another reason is the fact that his work was praised by people connected to the Maxwell Institute--notably Dan Peterson and Greg Smith. Granted, this had to do with his presentation, but I think this counts as evidence in favor of the fact that they really were genuinely planning to publish something of his. You have to wonder if the people at the M.I. would tolerate Will blatantly lying about his publication prospects. (I can't see them doing that.)
Yet another point here is the fact that the M.I. has published all kinds of crap from "writers" and "scholars" with pretty sub-par scholarship and writing skills. What I'm saying is: How bad would Will's work had to have been for it to get jettisoned by The Maxwell Institute? They're willing to publish drivel from the likes of Gary Novak and Pahoran, so how could poor quality possibly be a reason for giving the thumbs-down? Plus, so much has been invested in Defcon-5 Book of Abraham apologetics at this point that I would assume that they'd scramble to edit the crap out of Will's paper just in order to throw out something. So I don't think poor quality would ever function in the decision to put the kibbosh on the publication.
We really have to consider the larger context here. The apologists would do practically anything to score a point against Brent Metcalfe, who, I would argue, they hate perhaps more than any other living human being. Will was an active and loyal foot solider in the Mopologists' war against Metcalfe--he functioned as a buffer for people like Hauglid and Gee, and so I don't think the M.I. apologists would have wanted to give him up easily.
It had to have been a really painful decision for them to pull the plug like this. They must have agonized over it. To some of the old veterans, this must have seemed like capitulation to anti-Mormon blackmail, and I bet some of them were livid at this decision.
For my money, what has been most important/revealing about all of this is what it tells us about the M.I. as an organization, and the way they make decisions. Contrary to what Analytics said and related to what EA said---this really isn't about scholarship at all. It's purely about the image of the Maxwell Institute in general and FARMS in particular. As EA rightly points out, I think, the decision didn't have to do with Will's hypotheses or scholarship, it had to do with risk management. Clearly, the powers-that-be decided that risks involved in publishing Will were greater than any potential apologetic or scholarly benefits that they might have gotten out of the deal. Or, to put it slightly differently: whereas a normal journal would care more about the scholarship, the M.I. seems to be more concerned with the possibility of Will's antics being used as a weapon by the "antis."
But, as I said, it doesn't seem like scholarship had anything whatsoever to do with the decision. The apologists view everything that they're doing in the terms of warfare; intellectual endeavor always takes a backseat to that basic world-view.