Old school students of Mopologetics will no doubt remember Dr. Peterson's infamous assertion: "Not one dime of my salary comes from apologetics." This was a refrain that was repeated, perhaps, hundreds of times in various venues. It was hard to believe, though: so much of his professional time seemed to be devoted to Mopologetics and FARMS. He was clearly spending a lot of time doing that, and then we came to learn about the machinations that took place to allow FARMS publications to count towards promotions in certain BYU departments (not Hamblin's, though--he "took one for the team"). We even were made privy to publicly available, non-profit tax documents that showed, irrefutably, that Dr. Peterson had been compensated over $20,000 one year while he was serving as "Chair of FARMS." When we questioned him about this, he insisted that he was never paid the money. Was this an accounting error of some kind, then? "No," explained Jason Bourne--a poster from that era with experience in tax rules--"it's very common for a professor to get 'bought out' by another department, and that seems to be what happened here." Oh, okay! we said. That means that, yes, many, *MANY* dimes of DCP's salary came from Mopologetics: over $20,000, in fact, since that was the sum that, evidently, was "bought out." (It's either that, or he was paid the $20,000+ *on top* of his normal salary. Take your pick.)
This is an issue which has come up repeatedly on "Sic et Non," with the proprietor repeatedly denying the truth of the matter, which is that he was paid for his Mopologetic work at FARMS. Well, it may be that, at last, he's ready to come clean about it. Check this out:
Right...I guess? So he doesn't understand how he got paid. Sort of. But he at least was able to distinguish between "the primary portion of [his] paycheck," versus the "portion" that came from "the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship." So, yes: the $20,000+ was no doubt real. Glad to finally get that cleared up. You can't help but wonder, though, how big of a "portion" really was devoted to Mopologetics.DCP wrote:When I was hired, I was hired in some sense as a Jerusalem Center employee. Via arcane accounting paths that I never really cared to explore and cannot fully explain, I have always been a Jerusalem Center employee, although assigned to and responsible to the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages. And when I went over for several years to what became the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, the primary portion of my paycheck still came from the Center via the Department. Or something like that.
Meanwhile, Midgley had some extraordinarily uncouth things to day about Dr. Peterson's "work":
Whoa...You mean he wasn't working as a Professor of Middle Eastern Studies? Midgley, once again, helps to clear things up:Louis Midgley wrote: Now that I am a ripe old 90, and sort of have time to think back on how I got to, as Hugh Nibley insisted on calling it, "the Brigham Young University," despite the fact that I had never once given teaching in Provo a single thought, I can see why Dan is now thinking back trying to figure out how he ended up in Provo. I must say that he being hired to do whatever he has been doing at the BYU has very much blessed my life.
Holy crap! Talk about nepotism! This seems like an admission that Midgley basically doesn't have any actual skills beyond being born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Then again, I wonder if we might interpret this another way. Maybe this "Apostle" knew about young Midgley's temperament, and *wanted* him there at BYU in order to stir up trouble? Perhaps to get Wilkinson kicked out as Pres.? Midgley *was* embroiled in that affair, after all.Midgley wrote: I could not have imagined or designed a better EDITOR than Dan, of a better academic journal than what he began to call attention to publications on the Book of Mormon. That soon changed academic publishing among Latter-day Saints. My world also was radically changed by discovering Hugh Nibley who came to the University of Utah when I was an undergraduate to give a lecture on ancient political regimes. But I never imagined that I would end up teaching at BYU. But when I was working on my PhD at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, I suddenly was invited by Ernest Wilkinson, who was then the President of BYU, to visit with him in Provo. He did this to hire me, he told me, because an Apostle had ordered him to do so. My father had introduced me to several of the Brethren. One of whom asked my father how I was doing. That conversation led to my being hired by ELW. I taught for a year, and then, as planned, took a leave, and returned to Brown to finish my degree.
Very interesting revelations, in any case.
