John Gee leaves bizarre message as he steps down from editorship, also his inappropriate Ritner review

[Dr Moore]

Gee certainly does have a checkered past when it comes to blenderizing, eg smuggling his apologetic obsessions into mostly unsuspecting arenas of academic research.

Pick a panel of 10 BYU professors from non-religious and non-Egyptian disciplines, put Gee’s published works track record up for review, and you are certainly going to get a failing grade. And I guaran-damn-tee if a professor of Physics or Chemistry or Electrical Engineering had snuck such blatant personal bias into their academic publishing, they would have been censured and shown the door by self-respecting peers.

[Physics Guy]

Stephen Hawking once had a technical dispute with another theoretician about some aspect of black hole physics, and I guess he got testy. He published a paper which as I recall concluded, referring to some point made in the paper, “I think that even David Gross would agree with that.” And it was published just like that in a major journal.

He was Stephen Hawking, of course. Most people can’t get away with stuff like that. The editors just strike it out and if you object you can withdraw your manuscript and have a good day.

Other than that, though, there’s not a lot anyone can do to censure tenured faculty. You can be as picky as you want before you grant tenure, but if someone goes wacky after that, you’re just stuck with a wacky colleague until they retire.

There’s a Stephen Leacock story in which a university dean is eagerly soliciting donations so that the college can demolish buildings and retire faculty. It’s funny because it’s true.

[Philo Sofee]

That would have been Leonard Susskind. The book "The Black Holes War" was his account of it, and, truly, it was on friendly terms, absolutely nothing even remotely like the Mopologists get into, thank God/science!

[Kishkumen]

I am going to offer what I think is the only valid defense for John Gee's behavior from a fellow academic's perspective. I have thought about this for some time, but I have not spoken out because my sympathy for John Gee is very limited. I have known for years that he was fudging in all kinds of troubling ways in his Abraham apologetics. I have watched from afar with some degree of fascination and horror for a couple of decades.

The first part of my defense is a little shakier than later parts, but I think it is important enough for grasping the whole picture to make a stab at it all the same. Others with firmer knowledge can correct me, and I will be thankful for it.

When Dehlin and RFM interviewed Ritner, I came away with the distinct impression that Ritner resented the way he perceived Hugh Nibley as having been two-faced with his own teacher, Klaus Baer. Baer was very gentlemanly with Nibley, in that he felt that Mormons should be able to draw their own conclusions about their religious texts, and he was happy to contribute to their education in Egyptology as far as he and his Mormon students were comfortable. Nibley was nice to Baer to his face but would then turn around and slag the academics and their secular knowledge of Egyptology to his own Mormon community. Ritner became aware of that, and it made him very angry.

He also dealt with Gee as his student, and the sense that I get from Ritner's recollection is that Gee was a barely tolerable PITA who behaved badly in his seminars with Ritner. Gee probably came to his Yale program with an inflated sense of self worth and a huge Nibley-cult complex that did not endear him to Ritner. People at BYU tended to think of Gee as Hugh Nibley 2.0, and that probably helped inflate Gee's ego a fair amount. I think it would anyone in the same set of circumstances. In any case, when Ritner got his offer at Chicago, he was only too happy to cut Gee loose, even though he would have done his professional duty with regards to Gee's dissertation had Ritner stuck around at Yale.

Ritner gets pulled into the whole Book of Abraham debate, and I think he felt, based on his own distaste for Nibley's and Gee's behavior, that he would not restrain himself in the way Klaus Baer had. He was going to step into the Mormon sphere and put Nibley and Gee in their place.

From an academic perspective, I think he made a very questionable choice in doing so. However odd and off-putting he found Gee, and however offended he was by Nibley being a two-faced asshat, he had been Gee's teacher, and a former teacher does not attack a former student in public, especially in regard to matters of faith. Now, some of you may disagree with me, but it is important to remember that Gee was just starting his career and Ritner was already well advanced in his. Any guy who was choosing between Yale and Chicago was pretty much playing in the big league. So, another way to characterize what Ritner did to Gee in his Dialogue article is to call it punching down.

When you are at the top of your field, you don't punch down. You don't go out of your way to pick on Flat Earthers, even if you are horrified that one of your former students is one of them. You certainly don't go out of your way to humiliate your former student the Flat Earther.

I understand we are offended by Gee using his credentials to pull rank in the Mormon community and pretend like the Book of Abraham is something only adult Egyptologists get to talk about. Yeah, I get it, Gee is an asshole. Sorry, he just is. That said, I don't think Ritner is some kind of selfless hero either. I hold what he did in pretty low regard as well. I mean, on a human level I get it. Why should we stand by while Flat Earthers misinform others? And yet there is a certain sacredness to the professor/student relationship. Former professors generally do not attack their former students, especially in the early stages of their career. I don't think this is something one does, so to speak, and I don't pat Ritner on the back for having done it.

I also think that there is something somewhat unseemly about Ritner devoting so much time to "educating" Mormons on why their scriptures don't make sense. Perhaps this is because I think most religious explanations have little to do with the facts of history in any tradition. I understand that our civilization has a difficult time getting its collective head around this problem without descending into nasty attacks and counter-attacks, but I think Klaus Baer knew how a decent person behaves, whereas Ritner and Nibley had lapses in this regard.

All of that said, I think Professor Ritner is a top-notch scholar and a very decent fellow. At the same time, it seems to me that he does have somewhat of an ax to grind, whether he can admit that to himself or not. Of the two people, I would much rather hang out with Ritner than Gee, and I hold Gee to be much more culpable, if not somewhat creepy. But that does not mean that Ritner walks on water. I think his commitment to his own view of the past interferes with his ability to cut Mormons some slack in their theological misprision (to borrow from Harold Bloom here) of antiquity. Historians are not going to agree with Mormons in Mormon idiosyncratic views about ancient history, which are akin to the ludicrous Christian rewriting of Western chronology to accommodate the Bible. What one should perhaps say, however, is that people are welcome to their religious views, but they do not accord with scholarly history.

[Dr Moore]

Reverend, as always your voice of reason and compassion reminds me to slow down. But upon reflection I have to disagree about your “punching down” framework in this situation. Ritner may not be a saint, but I think he had no choice but to call Gee’s B.S. in public. Let me explain.

Is it not true that Egyptology suffers both from a lack of substantive source material and a very small number of credentialed academic experts? Correlated realities, I’m sure, but the point is, this field is so incredibly narrow that it is borderline non-existent.

Gee himself lamented this very fact in his anti-peer-review memorandum at the front of his final edition as editor of the journal in question. There are so few experts in this field, in fact, that true double blind peer review is, according to Gee, impossible. The mere mention of a theme or vignette provides a dead giveaway of authorial identity. In other words, at any given time it is highly likely that we can map any area of active research to one single person.

Now you may say, the same thing is true for any sufficiently narrow sub-discipline. But that isn’t the same. In Egyptology, it seems, either you can read the language or you cannot. Either you know the texts, stories, archaeology and culture, or you don’t. Egyptology doesn’t appear to be a sub-discipline of anything bigger, for which a generalist expert could offer valuable insights through peer review or collaboration.

I bring this up because such a narrow, arcane field exists at the very limit of what we can even call academia. It borders on extinction, and it might share a border with speculation and another border with nonsense. I mean, who’s to say if a discovered text is the work of an ancient Pharaoh or a troll? I bet Ritner is trained to know the difference, but there are not many others and unfortunately that means the greatest possible opportunity for abuse and misinformation.

As such, I suggest that market structure imposes a greater than average burden on credentialed Egyptologists to apply the highest standard of rigor and discipline in their works. Failing to do so exposes the entire field to critical errors and, potentially, practical and actual regression into worthlessness. One bad actor in a field like physics or biology will quickly find him/herself marginalized by the natural workings of the system. One bad actor in Egyptology can actually kill the field.

How much Nibley or Gee, legitimized through gentlemanly disagreements in academic papers, would it take to ruin Egyptology for good? Would 5 articles be enough? 10? 25? I bet 100 gentleman’s exchanges over disagreements centered around the truth or falsity of the Book of Abraham would sufficiently wreck any chance that the field remains credible with future aspiring scholars. So if you are Ritner and you see this coming - what do you do?

I think Ritner knew all of this well by the year 2000, having watched Nibley and then Gee with fascination - followed by horror - and he acted appropriately with the Dialogue article. He loves his field he cares about the legacy of Egyptological studies, and he chose to speak up rather than stand still while these two conspiratorial asshole cranks ruined it for every scholar who, like Ritner, despite having no real shot at fame or money, decided to give a crap about making an academic study of Egyptology.

Gee’s campaign against peer review based on the narrow field of experts in Egyptology proves that he (Gee) perceived both the opportunity to bend his chosen field of study, and also the difficulty in getting away with it scot-free. Like Nibley, Gee surely noticed the relative few scholars who might stand in his way of harnessing the tools of Egyptology to promote the Mormon agenda. And I bet that Gee did the math on the whole gambit — either he could bend the field enough to justify Joseph Smith, or worst case he would bring enough conflict to the field to muddy the water and win a lesser victory in which conflict itself can be pointed to as evidence of truth.

[Physics Guy]

That would have been Leonard Susskind. The book "The Black Holes War" was his account of it, and, truly, it was on friendly terms, absolutely nothing even remotely like the Mopologists get into, thank God/science!

I haven’t read that book. Does it have a quote in it or something that shows I’ve garbled some details about the published snip, which I remember as being by Hawking and directed at Gross? I certainly might have mixed it up—it’s a memory from years ago.

But Hawking certainly argued with a lot more people than just Susskind. He liked arguments. He could also, however, admit forthrightly that he was wrong.

[Morley]

I am going to offer what I think is the only valid defense for John Gee's behavior from a fellow academic's perspective. I have thought about this for some time, but I have not spoken out because my sympathy for John Gee is very limited. I have known for years that he was fudging in all kinds of troubling ways in his Abraham apologetics. I have watched from afar with some degree of fascination and horror for a couple of decades.

The first part of my defense is a little shakier than later parts, but I think it is important enough for grasping the whole picture to make a stab at it all the same. Others with firmer knowledge can correct me, and I will be thankful for it.

When Dehlin and RFM interviewed Ritner, I came away with the distinct impression that Ritner resented the way he perceived Hugh Nibley as having been two-faced with his own teacher, Klaus Baer. Baer was very gentlemanly with Nibley, in that he felt that Mormons should be able to draw their own conclusions about their religious texts, and he was happy to contribute to their education in Egyptology as far as he and his Mormon students were comfortable. Nibley was nice to Baer to his face but would then turn around and slag the academics and their secular knowledge of Egyptology to his own Mormon community. Ritner became aware of that, and it made him very angry.

He also dealt with Gee as his student, and the sense that I get from Ritner's recollection is that Gee was a barely tolerable PITA who behaved badly in his seminars with Ritner. Gee probably came to his Yale program with an inflated sense of self worth and a huge Nibley-cult complex that did not endear him to Ritner. People at BYU tended to think of Gee as Hugh Nibley 2.0, and that probably helped inflate Gee's ego a fair amount. I think it would anyone in the same set of circumstances. In any case, when Ritner got his offer at Chicago, he was only too happy to cut Gee loose, even though he would have done his professional duty with regards to Gee's dissertation had Ritner stuck around at Yale.

Ritner gets pulled into the whole Book of Abraham debate, and I think he felt, based on his own distaste for Nibley's and Gee's behavior, that he would not restrain himself in the way Klaus Baer had. He was going to step into the Mormon sphere and put Nibley and Gee in their place.

From an academic perspective, I think he made a very questionable choice in doing so. However odd and off-putting he found Gee, and however offended he was by Nibley being a two-faced asshat, he had been Gee's teacher, and a former teacher does not attack a former student in public, especially in regard to matters of faith. Now, some of you may disagree with me, but it is important to remember that Gee was just starting his career and Ritner was already well advanced in his. Any guy who was choosing between Yale and Chicago was pretty much playing in the big league. So, another way to characterize what Ritner did to Gee in his Dialogue article is to call it punching down.

When you are at the top of your field, you don't punch down. You don't go out of your way to pick on Flat Earthers, even if you are horrified that one of your former students is one of them. You certainly don't go out of your way to humiliate your former student the Flat Earther.

I understand we are offended by Gee using his credentials to pull rank in the Mormon community and pretend like the Book of Abraham is something only adult Egyptologists get to talk about. Yeah, I get it, Gee is an asshole. Sorry, he just is. That said, I don't think Ritner is some kind of selfless hero either. I hold what he did in pretty low regard as well. I mean, on a human level I get it. Why should we stand by while Flat Earthers misinform others? And yet there is a certain sacredness to the professor/student relationship. Former professors generally do not attack their former students, especially in the early stages of their career. I don't think this is something one does, so to speak, and I don't pat Ritner on the back for having done it.

I also think that there is something somewhat unseemly about Ritner devoting so much time to "educating" Mormons on why their scriptures don't make sense. Perhaps this is because I think most religious explanations have little to do with the facts of history in any tradition. I understand that our civilization has a difficult time getting its collective head around this problem without descending into nasty attacks and counter-attacks, but I think Klaus Baer knew how a decent person behaves, whereas Ritner and Nibley had lapses in this regard.

All of that said, I think Professor Ritner is a top-notch scholar and a very decent fellow. At the same time, it seems to me that he does have somewhat of an ax to grind, whether he can admit that to himself or not. Of the two people, I would much rather hang out with Ritner than Gee, and I hold Gee to be much more culpable, if not somewhat creepy. But that does not mean that Ritner walks on water. I think his commitment to his own view of the past interferes with his ability to cut Mormons some slack in their theological misprision (to borrow from Harold Bloom here) of antiquity. Historians are not going to agree with Mormons in Mormon idiosyncratic views about ancient history, which are akin to the ludicrous Christian rewriting of Western chronology to accommodate the Bible. What one should perhaps say, however, is that people are welcome to their religious views, but they do not accord with scholarly history.

Thank you for posting this, Kish. This is my sense of things, too--but my sojourn in academe was so brief, I wasn't sure that I had it quite right. As I followed this story, I could only conclude that something had to have pissed Ritner off so bad that he was willing to somewhat risk his reputation to strike out at Gee and one of Mormonism's holy books. I appreciate your speculation.

.

[Morley]

Reverend, as always your voice of reason and compassion reminds me to slow down. But upon reflection I have to disagree about your “punching down” framework in this situation. Ritner may not be a saint, but I think he had no choice but to call Gee’s B.S. in public. Let me explain.

Is it not true that Egyptology suffers both from a lack of substantive source material and a very small number of credentialed academic experts? Correlated realities, I’m sure, but the point is, this field is so incredibly narrow that it is borderline non-existent.

Gee himself lamented this very fact in his anti-peer-review memorandum at the front of his final edition as editor of the journal in question. There are so few experts in this field, in fact, that true double blind peer review is, according to Gee, impossible. The mere mention of a theme or vignette provides a dead giveaway of authorial identity. In other words, at any given time it is highly likely that we can map any area of active research to one single person.

Now you may say, the same thing is true for any sufficiently narrow sub-discipline. But that isn’t the same. In Egyptology, it seems, either you can read the language or you cannot. Either you know the texts, stories, archaeology and culture, or you don’t. Egyptology doesn’t appear to be a sub-discipline of anything bigger, for which a generalist expert could offer valuable insights through peer review or collaboration.

I bring this up because such a narrow, arcane field exists at the very limit of what we can even call academia. It borders on extinction, and it might share a border with speculation and another border with nonsense. I mean, who’s to say if a discovered text is the work of an ancient Pharaoh or a troll? I bet Ritner is trained to know the difference, but there are not many others and unfortunately that means the greatest possible opportunity for abuse and misinformation.

As such, I suggest that market structure imposes a greater than average burden on credentialed Egyptologists to apply the highest standard of rigor and discipline in their works. Failing to do so exposes the entire field to critical errors and, potentially, practical and actual regression into worthlessness. One bad actor in a field like physics or biology will quickly find him/herself marginalized by the natural workings of the system. One bad actor in Egyptology can actually kill the field.

How much Nibley or Gee, legitimized through gentlemanly disagreements in academic papers, would it take to ruin Egyptology for good? Would 5 articles be enough? 10? 25? I bet 100 gentleman’s exchanges over disagreements centered around the truth or falsity of the Book of Abraham would sufficiently wreck any chance that the field remains credible with future aspiring scholars. So if you are Ritner and you see this coming - what do you do?

I think Ritner knew all of this well by the year 2000, having watched Nibley and then Gee with fascination - followed by horror - and he acted appropriately with the Dialogue article. He loves his field he cares about the legacy of Egyptological studies, and he chose to speak up rather than stand still while these two conspiratorial asshole cranks ruined it for every scholar who, like Ritner, despite having no real shot at fame or money, decided to give a crap about making an academic study of Egyptology.

Gee’s campaign against peer review based on the narrow field of experts in Egyptology proves that he (Gee) perceived both the opportunity to bend his chosen field of study, and also the difficulty in getting away with it scot-free. Like Nibley, Gee surely noticed the relative few scholars who might stand in his way of harnessing the tools of Egyptology to promote the Mormon agenda. And I bet that Gee did the math on the whole gambit — either he could bend the field enough to justify Joseph Smith, or worst case he would bring enough conflict to the field to muddy the water and win a lesser victory in which conflict itself can be pointed to as evidence of truth.

Thank you for this, Moore.
.

[Kishkumen]

I think Ritner knew all of this well by the year 2000, having watched Nibley and then Gee with fascination - followed by horror - and he acted appropriately with the Dialogue article. He loves his field he cares about the legacy of Egyptological studies, and he chose to speak up rather than stand still while these two conspiratorial asshole cranks ruined it for every scholar who, like Ritner, despite having no real shot at fame or money, decided to give a Crap about making an academic study of Egyptology.

Gee’s campaign against peer review based on the narrow field of experts in Egyptology proves that he (Gee) perceived both the opportunity to bend his chosen field of study, and also the difficulty in getting away with it scot-free. Like Nibley, Gee surely noticed the relative few scholars who might stand in his way of harnessing the tools of Egyptology to promote the Mormon agenda. And I bet that Gee did the math on the whole gambit — either he could bend the field enough to justify Joseph Smith, or worst case he would bring enough conflict to the field to muddy the water and win a lesser victory in which conflict itself can be pointed to as evidence of truth.

Hmmm. Well, I may be persuaded over time, but as of now I am not. Dialogue is not an Egyptology journal; it is a “Mormon thought” journal that is in itself a tiny fish tank. What the community of Mormons who read it thinks or mistakenly believes about Egyptology is not going to be fatal to the discipline. Indeed, what usually happens to one-time admirers of Nibley who take things so far as to get a graduate education is that they discover Nibley was wrong and they either abandon the apologetic enterprise or the LDS Church. I bet Nibley has inspired more Mormons to get PhDs and teach competently than he has inspired hopeless Mopologists to get PhDs. A proper education usually reforms them from Nibleyism.

Ritner might have believed he was motivated by the noblest aims, but having listened to him talk for hours and having read his piece in Dialogue, I sense an edge and a bias against Mormonism. Moreover, I just can’t fathom what makes a top Egyptologist rake his former student over the hot coals in a backwater Mormon magazine. That, in my view, is just bullying if it is not some kind of retaliation. Either way, there is something unseemly about it, and I cannot approve of it, however generally praiseworthy Prof. Ritner undoubtedly is. Something just isn’t right about it.

ETA: The punching down here is the top-flight academic publicly humiliating his early-career former student. That just *is* punching down by definition, however one chooses to justify it.

[Lem]

Reverend, as always your voice of reason and compassion reminds me to slow down. But upon reflection I have to disagree about your “punching down” framework in this situation. Ritner may not be a saint, but I think he had no choice but to call Gee’s B.S. in public. Let me explain.

Is it not true that Egyptology suffers both from a lack of substantive source material and a very small number of credentialed academic experts? Correlated realities, I’m sure, but the point is, this field is so incredibly narrow that it is borderline non-existent.

Gee himself lamented this very fact in his anti-peer-review memorandum at the front of his final edition as editor of the journal in question. There are so few experts in this field, in fact, that true double blind peer review is, according to Gee, impossible. The mere mention of a theme or vignette provides a dead giveaway of authorial identity. In other words, at any given time it is highly likely that we can map any area of active research to one single person.

Now you may say, the same thing is true for any sufficiently narrow sub-discipline. But that isn’t the same. In Egyptology, it seems, either you can read the language or you cannot. Either you know the texts, stories, archaeology and culture, or you don’t. Egyptology doesn’t appear to be a sub-discipline of anything bigger, for which a generalist expert could offer valuable insights through peer review or collaboration.

I bring this up because such a narrow, arcane field exists at the very limit of what we can even call academia. It borders on extinction, and it might share a border with speculation and another border with nonsense. I mean, who’s to say if a discovered text is the work of an ancient Pharaoh or a troll? I bet Ritner is trained to know the difference, but there are not many others and unfortunately that means the greatest possible opportunity for abuse and misinformation.

As such, I suggest that market structure imposes a greater than average burden on credentialed Egyptologists to apply the highest standard of rigor and discipline in their works. Failing to do so exposes the entire field to critical errors and, potentially, practical and actual regression into worthlessness. One bad actor in a field like physics or biology will quickly find him/herself marginalized by the natural workings of the system. One bad actor in Egyptology can actually kill the field.

How much Nibley or Gee, legitimized through gentlemanly disagreements in academic papers, would it take to ruin Egyptology for good? Would 5 articles be enough? 10? 25? I bet 100 gentleman’s exchanges over disagreements centered around the truth or falsity of the Book of Abraham would sufficiently wreck any chance that the field remains credible with future aspiring scholars. So if you are Ritner and you see this coming - what do you do?

I think Ritner knew all of this well by the year 2000, having watched Nibley and then Gee with fascination - followed by horror - and he acted appropriately with the Dialogue article. He loves his field he cares about the legacy of Egyptological studies, and he chose to speak up rather than stand still while these two conspiratorial asshole cranks ruined it for every scholar who, like Ritner, despite having no real shot at fame or money, decided to give a Crap about making an academic study of Egyptology.

Gee’s campaign against peer review based on the narrow field of experts in Egyptology proves that he (Gee) perceived both the opportunity to bend his chosen field of study, and also the difficulty in getting away with it scot-free. Like Nibley, Gee surely noticed the relative few scholars who might stand in his way of harnessing the tools of Egyptology to promote the Mormon agenda. And I bet that Gee did the math on the whole gambit — either he could bend the field enough to justify Joseph Smith, or worst case he would bring enough conflict to the field to muddy the water and win a lesser victory in which conflict itself can be pointed to as evidence of truth.

If I recall correctly, didn't Ritner publish his piece in Dialogue and within a couple of years, roughly the same article in Joirnal of Near Eastern studies?

Its hard to see that as simply a slam against Mormons when the documentation clearly shows that the traditional Mormon take is simply wrong.

As an academic, i also see the unusualness of talking about your student, but given what he said in his article, i don't see how one can fault him for his position:

With regard to the articles by my former student John Gee, I am constrained to note that unlike the interaction between Baer and Nibley, and the practice of all my other Egyptology students, Gee never chose to share drafts of his publications with me to elicit scholarly criticism so that I have encountered these only recently. It must be understood that in these apologetic writings Gee's opinions do not necessarily reflect my own nor the standards of Egyptological proof that I required at Yale or Chicago.

That's not said to illustrate a bias against the Mormon religion, but rather a convincing argument that the current Mormon research is dead wrong.