Has John Gee Been "Booted" from the Maxwell Institute?

[Guest]

Is he teaching Hebrew or just in the same department as Hebrew? And anyway, you're forgetting that Nephitish Hebrew is basically interchangeable with Egyptian, as well as Akkadian, Eblaite, all forms of even modern Arabic, Amorite, and every dialect of Aramaic, even that of the tiny of villages of Maaloula and Jubbaadin in modern Syria. Mormon apologistics is the flux capacitor that makes dialectical time-travel possible.

ROFLMAO!!!

The learning of the Jews, the language of the Egyptians, and the blarney of the Irish.

Yes, thanks for your digging about, Tom. I can't say that it is strictly corrupt, but, wow, a situation where a board member has endowed a chair to help the career of his favorite professor is not exactly a model of ethical administration. Daniel Peterson is right, then: in this case, BYU is a just the stage on which Gee performs for his patron.

After a few false hits that violated the innocence of my eyes, I learn that Robert Gay "served as chairman of the Self-Reliance Services/Perpetual Education Fund Committee with responsibilities for worldwide self-reliance services and as the President of the Asia North Area."

I wish I had the kind of self-reliance that Gay offers Gee.

He had to pay a very high price for it, but he seems to have been fully willing to pay it.

[_Tom]

The Maxwell Institute’s 2018 report features this bit of trivia from Dr. Gee: “According to Oxford University’s and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München’s Online Egyptological Bibliography, I am already in the top 4 percent of Egyptologists historically in terms of number of Egyptological publications.“

Dr. Gee’s CV (https://humanities.byu.edu/wp-content/u ... y-2019.pdf) lists two books and 148 articles, including book reviews. I’d be interested to learn which of these made the OEB grade.

[_moksha]

Like Dr. Kerry Muhlestein would say, "You find one mummy and you get wrapped up in all the excitement".

[_Doctor Scratch]

I must admit that these developments have put me in a pensive--perhaps even rueful--frame of mind. I think we all have to admit that the Mopologists were correct (well....more or less) in their reporting of this event. They, of course, have already set the stage in terms of how they would like the viewing public to interpret what happened: this is a huge blow to the Maxwell Institute, and a follow-up to "unprecedented" (Tanner's word) "spanking" (Midgley's) that was delivered by Elder Holland back in the fall of 2018. Peterson, meanwhile, framed this as "good news" insofar as John Gee no longer has to be around the odious and repugnant Maxwell Institute.

To be honest, I think this is throwing fuel onto the fire. The Mopologists are going to sharply ratchet up their nastiness. Now that they see that blows can be successfully landed on the "new" MI, they are going to gather up their energies for renewed levels of aggression. You can see some of this in the "Comments" thread of the "Sic et Non" post, where Dr. Peterson is practically frothing at the mouth over getting to trash people he doesn't like. Meanwhile, Midgley, in a separate Comments thread, is holding up Mike Norton as an exemplar of how LDS Church critics speak and behave.

It's tough to say what this will mean in the grand scheme of things. I'm sure that, on one level, the MI is glad to be rid of Gee. It's unclear to me what they gained from having the Gay Chair connected to the MI (though I guess we've now come to learn that there is a "mentoring" thing attached to the Gay funding is well? Has this been flowing into Smoot's pockets? He seems to be the Book of Abraham "heir apparent," no?). It always feels like a bummer to have something taken away; even if they remove your diseased appendix, you still feel a little "lesser," even if your reasons for feeling that way are dumb and irrational. I guess the trickiness for the MI at the moment is figuring out how to maneuver around the fact that the Mopologists are going to definitely frame this as an institutional "rebuke," and they are going to do everything in their power to make this hurt, to burn them down, and to get revenge.

I stand by my assertions concerning 2019 as an "historic" year.

[_Dr Exiled]

Let them return to their nasty ways. They are defending silly nonsense and the smug lack of self-awareness will come back to bite them when the Jenkinses of the outside world take notice. They are paper tigers. Their rhetoric and reasoning is weak (thank you Dr. Dale). They deserve to be singled out as irrational flat-earthers and their faux high and mighty attitude will only fuel the fire. I think I smell napalm in the morning like the Robert Duvall character in Apocalyse Now.

[Guest]

The Maxwell Institute’s 2018 report features this bit of trivia from Dr. Gee: “According to Oxford University’s and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München’s Online Egyptological Bibliography, I am already in the top 4 percent of Egyptologists historically in terms of number of Egyptological publications.“

Dr. Gee’s CV (https://humanities.BYU.edu/wp-content/u ... y-2019.pdf) lists two books and 148 articles, including book reviews. I’d be interested to learn which of these made the OEB grade.

That's the thing I saw that made me ask how big an Egyptological big shot Gee was, but I couldn't find his CV.

148 articles is certainly a lot, but only about one-third of them are Egyptological research articles. If it were my CV I would have separated out publications by type more, but formats vary.

Fifty papers in 20 years post-PhD is two or three a year. I don't know what's normal in Egyptology but my guess is that this is a respectable output for a research professor who is mostly writing alone. A famous mentor of mine who has long held a purely research position and does not lean on a host of co-authors aims for 2-5 papers per year, feeling that more than five would mean he'd let quality slip in favor of quantity. Theoretical physics papers can often be ridiculously short compared to papers in other fields, so my mentor's high end of five may be too high for Egyptology.

So two-to-three Egyptology papers each year for Gee is probably neither too few nor too many, as far as simple quantity goes. Adding the reviews and all the Mormon articles does make it look as though Gee has been doing what an occupant of his chair should be doing.

Is there a meaningful way to assess how much Gee's Egyptological work has been cited? Are there citation indices in his field?

[_Kishkumen]

2-3 articles a year is what one should expect of a professor whose appointment is to do research almost exclusively. Whereas others have to put more effort into teaching and service (to the department, college, and university), a research professor is expected to do research and lots of it. I write this to put his level of productivity into perspective. Still, he has been very prolific.

I consider this a big win for everyone, and what could be better than that? Gee’s MI gig has been an albatross around his neck. New MI has had to deal with a colleague in rebellion. Now Gee can begin to pull himself out of the horrible bog of Book of Abraham apologetics he has been mired in. MI can take a huge breath of fresh air. DCP has another buddy in his department. It’s all good!

Most of all, we have been treated to a real bird’s eye view of how the wealthy Mormon elite can mold BYU and apologetics with their oversized clout. This Robert C. Gay business is absolutely fascinating. Remember that Howard Hughes was afraid of William Gay, Bob’s father. Bill was the guy who surrounded Hughes with Mormon bodyguards. Bob is at the heart of the Who’s Who of the LDS Church, and he has a strong interest in Mopologetics, to the point that he funded a professorship, and, when that was in jeopardy, used his clout to get it moved to an entirely different department.

Wild stuff.

[_I have a question]

Now Gee can begin to pull himself out of the horrible bog of Book of Abraham apologetics he has been mired in.

I may have misunderstood, but isn't the whole purpose of the Gay Chair to fund Gee staying mired in Book Of Abraham apologetics?

[_Kishkumen]

I may have misunderstood, but isn't the whole purpose of the Gay Chair to fund Gee staying mired in Book Of Abraham apologetics?

That's a good questions, IHAQ. I would say that at the beginning this was most definitely the case. It seems to me, however, and here I am following the observations of others as well as my own, that Gee has let up on the gas pedal on his Book of Abraham apologetics in recent times. I am not suggesting that he believes in the Book of Abraham any less or that he feels it is any less an ancient text than he has always felt, but he does seem to have treated the whole thing like a tiresome slog lately.

Maybe this will afford him the opportunity to focus on other LDS texts more than he has in the past, thus allowing him to remain faithful to his charge as the William "Bill" Gay Professor.

[Guest]

DS wrote...You can see some of this in the "Comments" thread of the "Sic et Non" post, where Dr. Peterson is practically frothing at the mouth over getting to trash people he doesn't like.

Hey Doc...

I'm not sure which is more important to him.. trashing folks he does not care for, or exchanges like those in the comment section allowing him to play out his need to be a victim. But either way it has got to be hard for him to not be able to be the DCP he once was, leading his "army of apologists against the enemy."

Looking back over the years at Mopology, specifically FARM's, NMI, and all the "board wars"...what were the "victories" for them? Honestly the only one that I can think of, that I said to myself..."okay, I'll give you that one" is "adieu" being a french word only, and even then their work unwittingly proved it was a word that gave support to the Book of Mormon being a American 19th century work.

If you were to be objective, and you were hired to write DCP's resume, what would you list as his greatest accomplishments in regards to LDS apologenticts? I would love to read how his resume would read from your (or anyone else's) point of view, being as objective as you can? If this interests you maybe it deserves it's own thread.