If the relevant faculty– in ANSO– do not have an immediate objection, why not appoint Bouknight-Davis as adjunct faculty? Similar structures certainly exist in many institutions.

Now, as far as “faculty quality” is concerned, we may have very specific concerns. As far as I can recall, I’ve only read five or six “top rate” scholars whose work focuses on the Carribean. Surely Williams cannot– in each similar situation– attempt to acquire such level of speciality. Berkeley cannot.

But it seems Hu-DeHart’s implicit argument is that academic qualification– the process of CV reading etc– is a process of “institutionalized racism.” Wherein the argument is, that many otherwise potentially qualified and productive individuals are excluded from the top ranks because of considerations outlined (unintentionally) by someone such as Lawrence Summers.

Not entirely accepting these arguments, I’d mention that Hu-DeHart also makes short shrift of the ANSO faculty. In my quick opinion, the quality of ANSO at Williams is not exceeded by any comparable institution. As with any similar department, to “lower the bar” to make appointments would potentially compromise such quality.

On the other hand, to make adjunct appointments– wherein faculty (who may or may not be well-represented by Bouknight-Davis) could pursue scholarship and publication on different routes and paces– might open up the so-called “top rank” to a variety of individuals whose social and personal choices do not typically fit the career paths demanded by the top colleges and universities.

And certainly it might serve other of our purposes as well. In the fall of ’94, Stanley Rosen stopped in the middle of one of his seminars at Berkeley to reflect that many of his mentors only produced meaningful work towards the end of their careers– “they thought, and they thought for thirty years, and that is scholarship, unlike the constant publication of ill-considered ideas we see today.” His implication was, at least in the disciplines he was referring to, that the contemporary pressure for publication does not produce top quality.

Following a different version of Hu-DeHart’s project, we might find that alternate structures than the current high-pressure “tenure track” produce better and more varied results.

her language is actually quite remarkable, interesting in its awkward stumbles– is the reader supposed to pity her, or does she intent to be obscurantist, or both?

The above can certainly be read as unnecessarily “making fun” of Hu-DeHart’s speech or ‘accent.’ I hope it will not be.

After some difficult parsing Hu-DeHart’s sentences, my next initial reaction was indeed to “wonder if they were composed in another language;” more specifically, I tried to translate them directly into German and Czech to get a different sense of them.

Without picking apart sentences– and without charting how the personal voice used in Hu-DeHart’s initial paragraphs pops up here and there in her more formal (and “standard English” grammar and diction) paragraphs– the interesting thing about her “personal voice” here is that it is full of subordinations (beyond just clauses), a feature more typical of (say) German than English; its predicates often slip into subjects; the paragraphs– almost– sound like someone thinking through a topic and changing their perspective…

Worth mentioning, that they may be simply be formulated according to the grammatical and other rules of a language other than standard English.

That this may thus be an exercise in cross-cultural understanding and misunderstanding.

And that the above phenomena may be much more important in what “diversity” is about, than appointing professors with certain disciplinary and topical interests.

Frank’s comment is certainly the funniest of the year, at least for those of us who know consultants. Too bad only the regulars read this far into a thread. The only thing he left out was that a bunch of 22 year-olds would do all the interviewing and fact-gathering (and probably writing and “analysis” as well) while the senior BCG folks were invisible until the final presentation.

But you can be certain that the Powerpoint slides would be beautiful!

Seriously, while I don’t remember the firm (it was smaller?), I believe the job done at UCSC (which doubtlessly included some of the above) was generally good work. As well as more or less totally ignored.

As far as dressing, someone remind me to get a suit made in Italy sometime next year…

Essentially, their narrative structure claims (something like): “I came to Williams at the bequest of XYZ, [implicitly: to solve problem P,] saw a, b and c, and therefore propose solution Q.

Well not quite: her language is actually quite remarkable, interesting in its awkward stumbles– is the reader supposed to pity her, or does she intent to be obscurantist, or both?– my intent is not to do a close reading here.

What is also evident from her remarks is that Hu-DeHart has had an long and particular connection to Williams and the central figures of the MCC (begining with “Preston Smith”), over at least two decades. Whatever this means– and I am by no means suggesting that it is inappropriate– she is by no means an “outsider”– at least in the sense, say, of the consulting group which visited Santa Cruz in the mid-90s and suggested radical changes in the structure of the HistCon program.

Hu-DeHart seems to be an intimate, and an insider, as are we all. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but…

First, in that wonderful phrase of Oakley’s, we seem to lack institutional memory.

Referencing the Santa Cruz history above– and the fact that HistCon took a route absolutely opposite from what the outside consulting group recommended (requiring, for instance, that grad students focus their work on a “historically oppressed group”)…

I certainly have cause to wonder how differently a group from Boston Consulting would approach the question of “Diversity” at Williams, and how different their suggestions would be?

It is at times like these that those of us old sysadmins who write from very specially outfitted SUSE installs like to step up and mention how anonymous the Internet is not.

Movable Type is not a very secure platform and it is trivial to find your posting origin.

I do not know the residential subnets over at Washington University as well as I know Williams, Harvard or Berkeley, but anyone who did could identify you quickly. Or I could find a friend at WUSTL, if I cared, which I don’t.

Equally, WUSTL publishes rather detailed reports on its network and usage… just nosing around, I can see that someone within a floor or two of you was a top bandwidth user last June… and, thanks to this forum, some of us who like to nose around in such things know that a recently indicted Williams grad shared a similar honor. A most interesting causal coincidence…

And of course, if I cared, I could probe your machine for security vulnerabilities (and if I was unethical, exploit them). I don’t care, I don’t want to potentially give some poor sysadmin at WUSTL any extra work, and my ethics generally prevent anything that could remotely be seen as unfair.

In the cases of ephgal and ephguy, I intentionally step around any information that might highlight their identity in my mind, which is another story, but also sysadmins’ ethics (at least from a decade ago).

Etc etc etc, blah blah blah. My point is that, unlike David’s (occasionally hack, occasionally ill-considered) posts, yours is downright vicious. And while no one here cares, get into a situation where the stakes are high– see Ethan Zuckerman’s blogs– and tracking you down is trivial, the consequences potentially not-so-trivial.

As with Ethan’s considerations, that point is meant for the audience, who may one day find themselves in need of it. (For that matter, one of the McAfee founders used to date a housemate of mine, if any Eph ever needs real security advice).

Cheers,

If you are looking for a blog that does nothing but sing the praises of all things Eph and praise Williams as the best of all possible colleges, then you have come to the wrong place.

It’s funny: Sometimes I get accused of dragging Williams down and sometimes the claim is that I write too much “Ephtripe.” I suspect that both claims have merit.

Do you have any idea how unusual or even out of place it was for Hu-DeHart to mention a specific person’s name in this report? She is, essentially, claiming that there is something wrong with Williams as an institution because it denies Bouknight-Davis a spot on the faculty. I have read my fair share of such reports, from Williams and elsewhere, and I have never seen such a calling out.

Riddle me this: If Bouknight-Davis is an “expert” and has a Ph.D. and is such a great person, then why hasn’t Williams offered her a spot? We know that she has a Ph.D. I have been told by people that I trust that she is a fine person and does a great job at MCC. Then, what is the problem?

To anyone who knows the highways and byways of American academia — not just at Williams, but most places like it — the problem is almost certainly Bouknight-Davis’s CV. (If this isn’t the problem, then tell me what is? Why isn’t she a shoe-in for the 2 AAS openings this year? Why won’t Joy James offer her a faculty position?)

Again, I feel vaguely bad dragging this all out into the open. Yes, my little Ephs, academia can be a cold and competitive place. But Hu-DeHart was way out of line to argue that Bouknight-Davis deserves a place on the Williams faculty unless she, you know, actually deserves one.

Now, it could be that she does! I do not know! How clear do I need to be on this? Yet the fact that she doesn’t have one yet is very much the dog that is not barking — unless you want to argue that Williams is unfairly biased against her. Virtually every serious academic I know interested in a faculty appointment at a place like Williams maintains a CV. Maybe Bouknight-Davis does maintain one and just doesn’t post it. Fine. Modesty is a virtue.

The problem here, as should be obvious to anyone who read Hu-DeHart’s report and KC Johnson’s critique, is that, fortunately or not, Bouknight-Davis-as-faculty serves as a perfect example of what Hu-DeHart wants to see — lots of minority faculty without too much concern for field or scholarship — and what KC Johnson argues is not in Williams interest.

If you want to engage in that debate, fine. You have come to the right place. You are certainly not going to see that discussion happen in public at Williams. But, you ought to come up with something more concrete than “character assassination by implication.”

Again, I am ready to believe that Bouknight-Davis is an “expert on the Caribbean.” But, those references to unpublished works notwithstanding, we need to have a CV to judge fairly. The vast, vast majority of Ph.D. experts with an interest in faculty appointment at places like Williams maintain updated CV’s. Where is Bouknight-Davis’s? I had assumed that there was not one available because she had not interest in or expectation for a faculty place at Williams. If she does have a real interest, then she should produce a CV.

Once we see a CV, we can judge whether or not Hu-DeHart’s description is accurate.

By the way, it would be great if Bouknight-Davis’s article were available for reading. There is nothing we like more at EphBlog than reading Eph-produced research.

Bouknight Davis’ academic work is on the caribbean and before going to williams did teach at Landmark (certainly nowhere near the same type of student) on those topics.

from the MCC’s website on her:
Her research focused on ethnic minorities and economic development in the Caribbean. She has two works forthcoming, Ethnic Markers: East Indians in Jamaica (Maryland: University Press of America) and “Chinese Economic Development and Ethnic Identity Formation in Jamaica,” Chinese in the Caribbean, (ed.Wilson. Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner Press)

By the way, my statement is almost certainly correct. The Coordinating Committee chose Hu-DeHart (from Brown). Bouknight-Davis (Ph.D. from Brown) is a member of the committee. Do you really doubt that they know each other? Do you doubt that Bouknight-Davis was in favor of hiring Hu-DeHart? Would you not describe the gig as an easy payday?

Now, of course, we all wish that the College would be more transparent, that it would describe the process by which Hu-DeHart was selected, that it would tell us what she was paid for her efforts. It could have been that, behind the scenes, Bouknight-Davis did everything possible to prevent Hu-DeHart from being selected. Perhaps Bouknight-Davis was terrified that Hu-DeHart would recommend her for a faculty position at Williams . . .

Ha! I doubt it very much.

Although there is nothing that EphBlog likes more than details about how MCC relates to ASSiA, MinCO and other campus arcana, do you really doubt that the director of MCC attends most of these sorts of speeches? Do you doubt that she knows Hu-DeHart?

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with any of this. People know each other, especially people involved in a particular field or interest. I was just explaining why, I suspect, Williams hired Hu-DeHart despite her pathetic record with regard to Ward Churchill.

In other words, the members of the coordinating committee did not sit down, draw up a list of plausible consulting candidates, review the records of those candidates and then make a decisions. Instead, they probably said: Let’s invite our buddy Evelyn! Moreover, they probably knew what she was going to say ahead of time. They did not consider, in any meaningful way, her record with regard to Churchill.

But what was the best part? Well, there is a lot to choose from and much of it deserves its own post. But I’ll go with this bit:

Finally, identify under-utilized academic resources already on campus and afford them an opportunity to teach courses that add to diversity in the curriculum.*

[*One such person I have identified is MCC director Dr. Gail Bouknight-Davis, who has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brown and an expert on the Caribbean, an area of the Americas not well represented in the curriculum even as Williams actively recruits students from the region. She can obviously contribute to diversity in the Anthropology department, which currently lacks faculty and curricular diversity, so it is a mystery to me why she has not been offered an affiliation with her disciplinary field and invited to teach a course on a regular basis.]

Nice payback! Bouknight-Davis helps get Hu-DeHart a easy payday at Williams and Hu-DeHart repays the favor. Sweet!

And, just for the record, how is any outsider (or even Williams professor) supposed to evaluate the claim that Bouknight-Davis is an “expert on the Caribbean”? Just asking! Experts normally do stuff like write books and academic articles . . .

I have no information on how Williams is currently handling job searches, so Rory could be correct that the institution isn’t doing enough to make sure that all candidates know about its openings. Even if this were the case, however, it’s a problem easily solved: Pres. Shapiro could simply order department chairs to fulfill a checklist for all searches. The school doesn’t need Evelyn Hu-DeHart to tell it that, nor does it need to adopt any of Hu-DeHart’s recommendations to fulfill this task. Moreover, in an era where (unlike even five years ago) websites exist in most fields that list all available job openings, it’s tough to believe that talented people (of all races and ethnicities) don’t know about Williams jobs. (H-net, for instance, is the appropriate site for History: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/jobs/)

The issue regarding the Bolin or Ken Thomas’ point about recruiters is harder. But to me a successful faculty search must have the department applying the same criteria to all candidates, chiefly by comparing the qualifications of each candidate against those of the other applicants. The danger with these milder versions of the Hu-DeHart approach is that even if there’s no guarantee of an ultimate hire, one candidate gets judged according to different criteria (was the candidate the best of the Bolin pool?; did the candidate look like a good potential recruit for the Williams faculty in the abstract, without having a sense of what the overall pool might look like?). Hu-DeHart would have no problem with this, because implicit in her critique is that all faculty searches are biased against URM candidates. I’m dubious.

One last point on the Churchill connection. I raised this point only to observe that Hu-DeHart had a track record: in an administrative position at CU, she had a chance to implement her ideas, and did so with the Churchill hire, tenuring, and promotion. We all make mistakes–but in this case, there’s no indication that Hu-DeHart learned from her mistakes or even that she views the hiring of Churchill as a mistake. A good portion of her recommendations for Williams replicates the program she implemented at CU. Again, I’m commenting from outside the structure, so I have no idea of the decisionmaking process that led to Hu-DeHart being brought on board as the sole consultant on faculty issues for this study. But that act alone raises questions about the standards used by those making decisions during the course of the self-study.

In fact, it’s the exact opposite. It’s not even an issue that alumni are up in arms about to protect the “Spirit of Williams” These, like other ideas, seem to be majority faculty-driven at most (or fringe driven, like Hu-DeHart, at worst).

What ties this in with so many other changes, both implemented and merely proposed — is that this proposal is exactly contrary to student demand. Even you noted that that you “disliked Hu-DeHart’s review”!

Within certain reasonable limits (the exact contours of which people can disagree on), the faculty and administration should be responsive to student demand for courses. Rarely, if EVER, should they eliminate wildly popular courses (like Prof. Wood’s) or avoid seeking a replacement with all possible speed. Even more troubling is if they didn’t just get rid of some well-liked courses, but actively transformed the entire curriculum from promoting rigorous academic inquiry to a far-left brainwashing academy.

I agree most strongly with Prof. Johnson’s comment about the sciences. Western Science’s relative immunity to this racial Lysenkoism has been why their objectivity has been shrilly challenged by the Crits and Postmodernists.

WKU has a position for a Islamicist. It is a wonderful position. Whoever takes the position will have the opportunity to build an Islamic studies program and the course of how such issues are dealt with in this section of the mid-South– which, given our position vis-a-vis Fts. Campbell and Knox, the Defense Language Institute, etc., might be a significant course indeed.

The search closed Nov 15th or such, with no candidates of (adjectives deleted). WKU had “published” “everywhere,” as far as I know… which means they had put notice in the standard journals and publications, online and off.

Included in the posting were various criteria, including essentially “Ph.D. in hand.” Contrary to this, one of the senior search committee members told me “we don’t need that. We need a competent Islamicist.”

I’ve hardly done all I could here, but my (very rough, and very roughtly parallel) point is that the system is filled with inefficiencies… some negative, some positive.

But surely if Williams appointed a recruitment manager to visit the major grad schools, and actively go to departments and talk to people about possibilities at Williams, it would indeed mine diamonds in the rough. If it founded an institute with Amherst and Bates etc. to fund one or more such recruiters, it could acheive some amazing results… including what there is of worth within Hu-DeHart’s otherwise questionable vision.

Loved the phrase “Such analysis, which was last fresh around 1969…”

i do have some doubts about some things Professor Johnson does not doubt, namely the efficacy of Williams’ advertisement of its job posting. It is one thing to ensure all ph.ds hear of a job, it is another thing to advertise it through groups like the association of black sociologists (please note, I chose my field randomly, not because I am insinuating about williams’ hiring policies in my field).

Also, I agree that giving a bolin fellow an undue inside track is wrong, though i will say that again, post-docs are often in the final three of a schools job search. i see no reason why bolins who like williams and were good enough to get the bolin fellowship should not get that far at least, and be encouraged by williams to do so.

again, i found hu dehart wrong in a lot of ways, but i do not think that williams is anywhere near where it can and should be in terms of ensuring that its pool of faculty applicants and hires are as diverse as possible without in any way changing the quality of its research and teaching.

and middlebury and amherst are so different from williams?

Look, I disliked Hu de-Hart’s review and thought her relationship and, more importantly, defense of Churchill was idiotic at best, but let’s not claim an absolute difference from other schools that doesn’t exist. Amherst and Williams are remarkably similar. but, of course, I can put two and two together and see you connect:
-churchill to berkeley to evergreen state to OH MY GOD WE DON’T WANT WILLIAMS TO BE LIKE SOME CRAPPY UNDERFINANCED LEFTIST LIBERAL ARTS SCHOOL!!! DOWN WITH THE DIVERSITY INITIATIVES!!!

I can’t imagine anything more likely to curtail contributions to Williams than a far-left, racialist curricular transformation such as “Momma Churchill” is proposing. There are plenty of places like Berkeley and Evergreen State. There is only one Williams… why do WE need to change?