Thu 16 Sep 2004
Given all the new information in the Transcript article — History is not the guilty department; the African American faculty member present is female and currently on leave — doesn’t it have to be the Art Department?
As always, I will gladly print a correction if this speculation is incorrect, but I think that we have run out of options
To repeat: Is there another female African American faculty member on leave this year besides Laylah Ali ‘91?
I don’t think so. If this is correct, it shouldn’t be hard to figure out which female art professor is the guilty party.
September 16th, 2004 at 3:44 pm
I know of at least one more female African-American faculty member on leave. I bet there are more too, and its not worth trying to blame anyone until we can get some more information
September 16th, 2004 at 8:30 pm
Are you thinking of Professor Kaye Fealing in the Economics Department? It is interesting that the department homepage:
http://www.williams.edu/Economics/faculty.html
lists her as on leave for the fall but the registrar’s page (linked above) does not. I am not sure what to make of that. So, I guess that we now have two possibilities, Ali and Fealing.
A priori, I would be much more shocked at someone acting racist in the presence of Fealing (a senior and tenured member of the department) then in the presence of Ali, but that is more speculation on my part.
September 16th, 2004 at 9:08 pm
Another tidbit from the Transcript article is that the perp has tenure, as we guessed. (Score one for the “speculation” on EphBlog!) Well, if the African American professor is Fealing, then the perp would have to be one of:
Hill
Brainerd
Shore-Sheppard
Or am I missing other tenured female members of the economics department?
It is inconceivable to me that Cathy Hill ‘76, Provost, would say something like this. Moreover, the academic work of all three is clearly in the mainstream of economics. There is no way that any of them could (rationally) raise “a concern about the status of her own field of professional work relative to the fields of the others.”
So, my money continues to be on Art.
September 16th, 2004 at 9:52 pm
Someone has passed me information from someone else “in the know” that the department is Art. (I provide you with this secondhand speculation as is. I learned my journalism from CBS.)
*If* the department is Art, who could the perp be? As best I can determine, these are the only tenured female members of the Art Department.
Filipczak
Laleian
Ockman
Takenaga
Jang
McGowan
Podmore
Please correct me if I am missing anyone. In thinking about this list, we should keep in mind the distinction between Art History and Studio Art. (I had actually thought that these were separate departments, but apparently not.)
We know that department business was conducted at the fateful meeting but we do not know if it was a department meeting. In other words (and if it is the Art Department) was this a meeting of the full department or just the studio art portion of it that Ali belongs to.
You can see here how the department splits out:
http://www.williams.edu/Art/wcart/faculty.htm
Update your probabilities accordingly.
Note that is has been almost 8 hours since I initially posted a guess about the Art Department. No one has contradicted this yet. Political Science and History seemed to act much more quickly to clear their good names . . .
September 17th, 2004 at 8:18 am
Eva Grudin isn’t tenured? I would have thought for sure that she was… but then I don’t suppose it matters since I wouldn’t expect her to say such a thing.
To be fair, of the art profs I knew, I wouldn’t have expected any of them to say such a thing - although out of context it is hard to say what was going on.
September 17th, 2004 at 2:36 pm
“Are you thinking of Professor Kaye Fealing in the Economics Department? It is interesting that the department homepage lists her as on leave for the fall but the registrar’s page (linked above) does not.”
The Economics site was formerly very out-of-date, but I happen to know the TA who is currently redoing the whole site, and he just updated the faculty page within the last few days. Thus, Husbands Fealing is on leave for the fall, at least in the eminent opinion of the Economics Department; who knows about the Registrar.