"Making a Monster"

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"Making a Monster"

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1timspalding
Mar 24, 2016, 6:11 pm

Holt Parker, a fairly well-known Classics professor who specialized in gender studies, has been arrested for child porn activities. The evidence seems pretty damning, and extensive.
https://eidolon.pub/making-a-monster-3cd90135ef3f

Here's his CV
http://classics.uc.edu/~parker/CVHoltParkerweb.htm

This is going to be quite the deal. I'm assuming his Harvard, Cambridge and Blackwell books go poof. But any study of Roman sexuality, and some specific topics in Roman poetry, are going to need to cite the guy. Can his arguments about sexuality, modern and ancient, be pried loose from his sexual predation (and online comments about it)?

Anyway, check out the first link. Much to think about.

2stellarexplorer
Modifié : Mar 25, 2016, 11:04 am

Awful on so many levels. And the link offers up the academic conundrum(s) that present themselves.

My first perhaps simplistic response is that good scholarship out not be discarded because of the biography of the scholar. Much like that most would not refuse to listen to Miles Davis because of his abuse of women, and so many other examples. But the relationship between his research and his activities demands a reckoning itself. Maybe in the psychology department...

3anthonywillard
Modifié : Mar 27, 2016, 2:31 am

I found the Scullin article fairly hysterical. She seems to think millennial university students, who are more au fait than even their immediate elders about anything online, need to be protected from hearing about a child-porn collector. This guy is accused of nothing that her students can't see reported online every day.

She also thinks Parker's writings are so fundamentally important that they are indispensable to any classical education. If that is so then she will be required to go on citing and assigning them no matter what. But it is not so and she won't be. If she is uncomfortable with them, she can just bypass them. The Classics will survive. Parker's writings will also survive, if they inherently deserve to. Other less concerned instructors and scholars will continue to refer to them.

The fear that reference in a scholarly paper to an academic work makes one complicit in any sexual aberrations of its author is just sort of weird.

4shikari
Modifié : Mar 27, 2016, 10:50 pm

I have to admit to never having heard of the man (I assume a man?). But then as I regard most of the Anglo-American gender-studies-in-Antiquity industry to be an ephemeral playground for ideologues, that's not surprising. It's one part of classical scholarship I confidently predict in fifty years will seem as outdated as Frazer's mythological theories do to us now. Fortunately for its practitioners, jobs in academia are before everything dependent on fashion.

5timspalding
Mar 27, 2016, 11:16 pm

Well, he had tenure. I don't suppose he shall retain it.