I just noticed the following, down in the "Terrestrial Forum," from poor Joey:
He attempts to use his credentials at BYU, in an area of study that has no students (we know) . . .
I know too many in the Law School and Business School at BYU who know what his tenure means! His college, and his particular areas of teaching, brings no interest or revenue to the church, so he gets paid, instead, to post on obscure boards like this. He and Hamblin. He's a paid chump - not my words but those at BYU!
This is silly stuff, but, since it involves my employment, I suppose I'll set the record straight.
* Do I get paid "to post on obscure boards like this"?
Of course not. The very idea is ridiculous. Nobody pays me to post on message boards, any more than anybody pays Some Schmo or Joseph to post.
* "He and Hamblin."
If Professor Hamblin gets paid to post on message boards, he'd better increase his productivity. Otherwise, he's going to starve to death.
* Does my area (Arabic and Middle Eastern studies) really have no students? Or even
few students?
Well, it's all relative, I suppose. There aren't as many Middle Eastern Studies (Arabic) majors as there are accounting and English majors, but ours is one of the largest and most successful undergraduate Arabic programs in the United States.
This fall, we'll be sending about seventy advanced Arabic students on our biannual study abroad program in the Middle East.
* Do substantial numbers of faculty in the law school and business school at BYU, knowing what my tenure means, describe me as (not Joey's words, but theirs, confided to their good friend Joey) "a paid chump"?
Possibly.
But I know lots of people at the law school and the business school, and I doubt that the people who know me think of me that way, let alone use that language. Perhaps everybody else does, though.
Still, I can't imagine myself saying anything analogous (particularly to a Joey) about any of my colleagues in the business or law schools, so I'm still a bit doubtful that hordes of BYU faculty are scurrying up to Joey to confess to him that Dan Peterson is "a paid chump." On balance, the claim doesn't seem very plausible.
And why would they say such a thing, anyway? There's nothing out of the ordinary about "what my tenure means." I had to go through the same tenure process, with reviews from department, college, and university-wide committees, and from department chairs and deans and the academic vice president, that they did, according
mutatis mutandis to the same standards.
* Is it true that my college, and my particular areas of teaching, bring no interest or revenue to the Church?
It's very likely that philosophy and English and Arabic bring little revenue to the Church.
But no interest?
It would take me far more time than I have or am inclined to spend to report on the general status of the College of Humanities at BYU, so I'll simply offer a few links on areas that interest me in particular:
http://news.newsreleaseagency.com/2010- ... Supplementhttp://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Cosmos ... t_ep_dpi_1http://www.amazon.com/Aristotles-Two-Sy ... 0198249705http://www.nmelrc.org/Home (headquartered at BYU)
posting.php?mode=reply&f=3&t=17726 (formerly headquartered, and its journal edited, at BYU)
Finally, as for the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, which I founded and for which I'm the editor in chief: Writing already in 2006 in his
Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy, the prominent Irano-American historian of science Seyyed Hossein Nasr remarked that "What is needed for Islamic philosophy is something like the Loeb Library for Greek and Latin texts where the text in the original appears on one side of the page and the English translation on the opposite page. Fortunately during the last few years Brigham Young University has embarked upon such a series in which already a few important titles have appeared." And that was five years ago. During 2010 alone, we published four volumes. (They're distributed by the University of Chicago Press.) And we hosted an international conference on the philosopher Avicenna, drawing participants from across the United States, Belgium, the UK, Malaysia, Egypt, France, and etc.
This is, I realize, more than a bit like using a sledge hammer on a gnat. But Joey obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.