WMLdeWette wrote:
You are right, to an extent. I was thinking of the Maxwell Institute's earlier name, ISPART, which changed to the Maxwell Institute in 2006. FARMS was organized by Welch in 1979. While you are right that individuals who were a part of FARMS were involved in CPART, ISPART, METI, and then the Maxwell Institute, but for those institutions it was not their involvement in FARMS that was key. It was that they were BYU employees. FARMS was brought to BYU in 1997, but in 2001 taken under the ISPART umbrella, which then changed it's name to the Maxwell Institute in 2006. FARMS was not the key to all of this; rather, the training of a handful of scholars at BYU was crucial. FARMS was tertiary to all of that, but Peterson, Hamblin, Midgley, and others have made it sound like FARMS was the Maxwell Institute when it was only one small part.
From what I understand, ISPART was formed in 2001, replacing CPART and taking METI in, but not FARMS, which certainly existed beyond 2001 (it was still there when I was there, which was after 2001). As I understand it, FARMS existed until 2006, when the Maxwell Institute was formed and took in all of these. Thus, FARMS did exist alongside but not as a part of ISPART. Is that incorrect?
I am sure you are right as regards the institutional players, and for the early 2010s onward. My point is that the picture suggested above—one where a variety of projects were underway, only one of which involved FARMS—seems not to capture the record, at least of the late 1990s and 2000s. Other than METI, which was always Peterson's baby, just what else was published or being done by anyone under the umbrella of any of these institutes or as a result of their work there until the late 2000s? In other words, what published evidence is there that the existence of ISPART had any results to speak of that could justify its existence at all? FARMS, meanwhile, was rather busy. Within the alphabet soup of METI, ISPART/CPART, FARMS was by far the most active, and I thought that that was actually the problem once FARMS became part of the MI.
From an administrative perspective, you are surely right that FARMS wasn't the justification for the MI, but if we're talking about exaggerative delusions, I'm not sure Peterson is all that wrong for the decade or so after FARMS became part of BYU. Thinking of all those papers published, those talking heads in documentaries, and sponsored conferences under the FARMS aegis, the idea that all that activity was "one small part" seems less than accurate. It was the only thing really going on at the time. Midgley, Peterson, and Co. may seem to be exaggerating from the perspective of how the Maxwell Institute is constituted now, but they had a journal for original scholarship (let's generously call it that for the moment), a review journal, Peterson controlled METI, etc. Elsewhere, ISPART had a project to digitize some Syriac texts, a few things that never went anywhere...and what else? It seems to me that, rather than being one small part, FARMS and the the FARMSians at the early MI constituted the major component of all this, sucking up the resources and dominating the discourse, and that some merely
wished it to be one small part (I certainly did).
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie
