Purdue University President Retires - He Kept Tuition Low. One of the Few

 Salute - Purdue University president retires.

Someone wisecracked that most universities are investment companies with a college attached. The endowments - permanent piggy-banks - keep expanding while the school and tuition grows.

Augustana College in Rock Island now has tuition, board, books, and et-ceteras at $62,000 a year. They also bragged about endowment gifts, not giving the total, which is listed at $166 million.

Yale's endowment is $42 billion.

We met a Notre Dame mother who said her daughter was accepted because the family did not request any tuition help.

Notre Dame annual cost is now at $76,000.

Yale is $80,000 so ND is a bargain!

Grand Canyon University has kept tuition down, in part by becoming non-profit and no longer paying $300 million a year in taxes. They are way below Augustana, Yale, and Notre Dame.

 Sterling is the main library at Yale University. We went to see Roland Bainton there, where he had an office. He helped me with my dissertation and offered to do some xeroxing for me!

 The interior of Sterling boasted one of the largest card catalogs ever. Computers replaced them.

Top Universities - Review

Yale Divinity School - Lawrence Eyre and I went there. Lawrence is a Whiffenpoof, the famous singing fraternity for undergraduates. I did eat lunch at Morey's once, the closest I got to being in a singing group.

Roland Bainton, author of Here I Stand, A Life of Martin Luther.

Yale Library - Roland Bainton had an office there. We went to meet him some years after finishing the STM degree. He helped me with my dissertation and offered to do some xeroxing for me! Ann Johnson earned a master's degree in music at Yale, so three of us from the Garfield Elementary School, MHS 66, earned degrees there.

Campanologists love the Harkins bell tower.

National Review has a report on universities, which prompted the nostalgia above. Yale College costs $57,000 for tuition and fees. Add on room and board! The top rated universities were in the same category, $50,000+ for tuition and fees.

Every college and university (with rare exceptions - like Purdue) raised prices as if the debt engine would never run out of gas.

Anton Boisen studied forestry at Yale. No, I am not kidding. Now it is the School of Environmental Studies, though forestry is easier to spell.  Boisen made his mark by championing chaplains at hospitals and similar institutions. The idea was to help people by integrating their illness with Christian care, an idea similar to the Inner Mission, which promoted nursing care and hospitals. 

Institute of Lutheran Theology Is an ELCA Seminary Online

This Yale Divinity Library is dedicated to world missions.

SpenerQuest dolts are struggling with their Pietistic perspective while dealing with these academic issues. Most of them have never studied outside of Holy Mother Sect, so they remain bewildered.

Many divinity schools today began as seminaries for their denomination. Yale began as a school for ministers and for those in public service. Princeton, Harvard, and Duke have similar histories.

Those established universities do not deal with denominational standards and certifications for ordination. If any denomination asks, the transcript is sent. That also means a freedom for scholarship and discussion. One does not fear loss of ordination for criticizing Holy Mother Sect, which is a constant threat danger at LCMS, WELS, and ELS schools.

WELS has several volumes worth of unwritten rules about always honoring the sanctity, perfection, and faux-orthodoxy of their dying group.

Notre Dame has a separate school for future priests. The university makes it clear that those who study for a graduate degree are not under the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

Jay Webber's Institute of Lutheran Theology operates just like an ELCA seminary. ILT reminds me of the failed ELCA Southern Seminary, which set up certification programs at the seminary for Methodists and other denominations, plus ELCA. Instead of having hordes of students, Southern went under and had to glorify its merger with another school - a new mission for us! Having an in-house multi-sect certification program did not work to fill up the berths on the sinking ship.

ILT certifies women for ordination. Those candidates are either ELCA or ELCA branches - the two groups which left ELCA but kept women's ordination and other hallmarks of mainline apostasy.

Denominational schools are always political, always slack in academics. Jay Webber confessed to me how weak the Bethany Lutheran Seminary faculty was. Now he defends Gaylin Schmeling for getting an STM at the Episcopal gay and women's ordination seminary, Nashotah House.

Webber defended ILT for its future "doctoral" programs. The DMin at ILT has already started, but those programs are as doctoral as a televised conference from Brigham Young University.

Will the illiterate Jack Kilcrease teach in the "doctoral" program at ILT? Rolf Preus praises Kilcrease for the adjunct's UOJness, but Kilcrease would never find a spot on a real doctoral program.

Has anyone ever heard this? "Wow, you have a doctorate from Marquette?" Ha. Kilcrease is proof they have no standards at that old Jesuit school.

Like the MDiv, the DMin is a practical degree, with a little of this and a little of that, quite superficial, but full of awe and wonder for those who want to call themselves "Doctor." Larry Olson will not answer questions in class unless he is addressed as "Dr. Olson," a sign of toxic insecurity. The DMin used to be an STM, but the name was changed so the seminaries could sell more degrees.

Higher education does not consider the DMin a doctoral degree. Nor should anyone else.

Fuller Seminary should use the old name for the final degree, STD, so Larry Olson could say, "I picked up an STD at Fuller Seminary" while waiting for the WELSian applause.

Ironically, getting a Fuller degree is a great resume enhancer for the LCMS, WELS, and the ELS. The CLC (sic) loves Church Growth too.

Those same sects are terribly allergic to academic excellence. While groveling at the feet of Fuller false prophets, they despise scholarship.

Would Jay Webber be accepted at Notre Dame's doctoral program in theology? He would have to pass two modern language tests (French and German) and two ancient language tests (Hebrew and Greek) to qualify for the written comprehensive tests.

Comprehensives for the Notre Dame PhD program were so much fun. The written comprehensive tests took two complete days. If the candidate passed, the oral test followed. If that was passed, the dissertation phase started. Coursework took two or three years beyond seminary, so comprehensives were at least another year later, with plenty of study in that third year. Three of my friends failed part of the comprehensives at Notre Dame.

We called the dissertation "back to kindergarten" because it meant starting all over with reading, original research, and approvals. The time expended was always open-ended. The dissertation had to be approved by the adviser. If it did, the committee also had to approve it. Then it was defended before the committee, and that defense also had to be approved.

Robert Marshall (LCA President) wrote me that the dissertation was often the end of an academic career. He never finished his PhD, like many others I knew. From beginning to end, the Yale and Notre Dame programs took me 8 years.

Another irony - I worked on the PhD for my union card in publishing. I wanted to write and publish. Stan Hauerwas said I needed that degree to be taken seriously. I also modeled publishing after his prolific output and Roland Bainton's.

In the abusive Lutheran sects today, scholarship means nothing and publishing is even more despised. If you want to be influential, constantly politick on the phone, via email or whatever else works. Above all, like Buchholz, Webber, and McCain, get rid of anyone who threatens your cherished position of ease, luxury, and comfort.

The Church and Changers in WELS and their counterparts in Missouri and the ELS have parked their fat rears in the crow's nest and watched for any and all sightings of Church Growth critics, UOJ-deniers. And off they go, searching to destroy that threat with Ahab-like madness and obsessions.

That is the Lutherdom of America today.

This is your future, WELS, funded by your offerings,
approved by Mark Schroeder and Keith Free.

A Moliner at the Whiffenpoof Reunion - And It Was Not This Blogger

Someone is selected to sing the solo "and will" each year, so those people have a special bond within the Whiffenpoofs. Lawrence Eyre was chosen for his year.

http://www.whiffalumni.com/origins

Eyre won various national awards for coaching tennis.
Hoffman is a PhD rocket scientist.
Not pictured - the General Counsel at State Farm Insurance.

Origins
The following history was generously written by Charles Buck '69 and Robert Birge '68 for inclusion in The Twentieth Century Project, the most complete compilation of Whiffenpoof history available, by Richard "Dog" Gould '68.  Visit www.thetwentiethcenturyproject.com to purchase the two-volume set.

The Reverend James Merriam Howard wrote his ‘authentic’ history of the founding of the Whiffenpoofs for the 50th Whiffenpoof anniversary to set the record straight about how the Whiffenpoofs began and how The Whiffenpoof Song was created. Howard’s recollections are more than just a factual account. He created a genuinely intimate and detailed portrait of day-to-day life at Yale that might otherwise have been unavailable to us. In fact, his brief history gives us perspective on and insight into the 1907-10 period that we have yet to find for any later period up to World War II.

As remarkable as Howard’s description of Whiffenpoof origins may be, another contemporary source, from 1906, should be considered:

…the only organized effort at singing at Yale was a large choral society, taking into its membership those who could sing at all reasonably, without being especially scrupulous that they should be good and available singers; and practicing only heavy and serious compositions. About this time it occurred to some of the undergraduates that the habit among the students of singing their college songs in on offhand way in their rooms, on the Campus, and on the street, might be utilized and developed by the formation of a small club, which should practice together in order to do the same things with more finish, add to them other light and catchy songs, and sing them for the public enjoyment. The first attempt of this kind that was substantial and successful was made when about eight voices met with some degree of regularity and learned, besides many of the old songs commonly about the Campus, a few additional pieces of the some character.

-The Yale Glee and Banjo Clubs: A History (Bartholomew Archive)
The group described is not the Whiffenpoofs, but the Yale Glee Club, and the year referred to is 1867. The quotation comes from a promotional piece prepared for the Glee Club’s 1906 Christmas vacation trip. This source parallels Howard’s account, but looks back half a century to the origins of what was then considered informal singing, except that the Glee Club was then the new informal singing group.

This account reveals that the Whiffenpoofs emerged from a tradition of singing in America, epitomized by the male quartet, that was already more than fifty years old. Marshall Bartholomew ’07s, in his unpublished manuscript A History of Music at Yale, remarked “the male quartet became a regular feature of Yale Glee Club concerts soon after the Civil War.” Even before the first Yale Glee Club was formed, close harmony had made its appearance on the Yale campus, as he records:

In 1856, for example, there were informal singing groups which took fanciful titles unto themselves, as similar groups do at present [the 1950s]. We find the Beethoven Bummers - evidently poking fun at the more serious Beethoven Society; also there were the Owls and the Four Sharps.

Invitation for the First Official Dinner of The Six Little LambsThis tradition continued into the 1880s with other groups including the Midnight Caterwaulers of 1870 (a quintet), the Singing Club of 1872 (a quartet), the Crows of 1872 (an octet), and the Offenbachanalians of 1874 (a quartet). The Beethoven Bummers lasted into the 1870s with as many as fifteen singers.

Howard’s account understandably ignores the roots of informal singing in the 19th century. Even so, it begins far too late: the Whiffenpoofs did not in fact begin with the well-known gathering of five singers in 1909, but as early as 1902, when a group of Glee Club members calling themselves the ‘The Six Little Lambs’ sang their own version of Gentlemen-Rankers, the song that would soon be transformed into The Whiffenpoof Song. Carl Lohmann recalled the group in a letter to Austin Bruff, a member listed on the invitation to The First Official Dinner of ‘The Six Little Lambs’ at Mory’s, February 7, 1902:

All my correspondence is now with Bee Van Vetchten including a menu of the first dinner held by the ‘Six Little Lambs’ at Mory’s which Buff [Kimball] loaned me… It seems to me that the ‘Six Little Lambs’ might have grown to be what the Whiffenpoofs are today only, unfortunately, it was allowed to die out instead of passing on from class to class.

Kipling’s Gentlemen-Rankers remained popular throughout the first decade of the 20th century at Yale and was known to have been sung at Class Day exercises in 1908. The following 1908 New York Herald account of the Yale Glee Club’s western trip during the Christmas holidays also shows that a lamb-inspired version of Gentlemen-Rankers was sung by Glee Club members before the song acquired its Whiffenpoof lyrics.

During this decade undergraduates with a love for harmonizing formed a cappella groups that just as quickly disbanded when their members graduated. These groupsincluded the Growlers, who immediately preceding the Whiffenpoofs, and the CupMen and Hogans, their contemporaries, with whom the founding Whiffenpoofs freely associated musically. Although there is now a difference of opinion about the function of these groups, any excuse for good singers to gather was sufficient to generate apparently high-quality music making.

The Hogans of 1909
To appreciate the quality of the first Whiffenpoof group, it is important to set a musical context for its founding. By this time, singing at Yale had already become more than a pastime; it was then the most popular extra-curricular activity on campus. In 1909, the total undergraduate population numbered only 2,198, including Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, a three-year institution that, notwithstanding the lower status it was accorded compared to Academic, participated fully in the musical life at Yale. Each class had an identity that was reinforced by frequent singing, generally spontaneous, at its portion of the Fence, the traditional gathering point originally on the corner of Chapel and College Streets. When Osborne Hall was built on this site, a new Fence was erected within the campus itself.

This account of Glee Club tryouts shows the popularity of singing in 1906:

At the beginning of each college year, in order to fill vacancies made by those who have graduated or those who have been adjudged not worthy of being reinstated, competitive examinations are held at which two hundred or more applicants are canvassed to fill possibly ten or fifteen vacancies… The direct result of these very exacting competitions is to induce the students to prepare for them in advance by training under good teachers, and thus the standard of the applicant is raised to a far higher point than if they were merely untutored musicians.

Marshall Bartholomew recalls Carl Lohmann’s tryout with uncharacteristic awe:

Lohmann’s voice trial remains unforgotten amid thousands of similar trials that have been since then. Asked to vocalize a few scales upward this mellow, well-modulated voice sang up to and including a robust tenor F. ‘Hmm,’ commented the director, ‘Good tenor material here.’ Then he ran the candidate downward in arpeggios. Down, down, down, down, to a good E-flat in profundo, also with good quality and volume. Here was material for a one-man quartet with range enough to sing any part and the quality of a ready-made soloist.

All the while, the Glee Club performed works in an intentionally popular vein, as documented again in the 1906 promotional history:

[In preparing for the 1906 Christmas trip] the management has decided to omit all choruses of a technically difficult and pretentious character, and fill the programme entirely with light, cheerful, jolly songs that will give each audience a genuine good time. There will be new songs of an airy, dainty character; new humorous numbers for the chorus; new solos for the individual singers; new ‘stunts’ for the funny men; but there will also be a liberal selection of the old standard songs which appeal to the Yale spirit, which call up the memory of happy days, which disclose the special character of college life and which raise anew the thrill of pride in the mother university.

These performances featured the Varsity Quartet, soon to become the Whiffenpoofs.
First, the group intended, from the start, to establish an ongoing institution, as shown by the drafting of an immutable constitution and the agreement, weather permitting, to sing publicly on a regular schedule.
Second, it had a bona-fide theme song, adapted from a popular tune and lyrics of the time, but assimilated by the group as a distinguishing feature (the song could be sung only at Mory’s).

Last, but not least, the group set a standard by the quality of their singing, amply corroborated by the reports of their contemporaries and the popularity of their weekly singing at Mory’s, that made continuing the tradition worthwhile (three of its members - Lohmann, Minnigerode, and Pomeroy - were in fact juniors).
The thread connecting this activity, then, was a shared consciousness of this enterprise’s value, not only to its current members, but also to Yale singers that they might never know.


***

GJ - A member took us to lunch at Morey's during my year at YDS. It is great to have that connection with so great a tradition.

Who Is Left Standing? A Marriage and a Department Are Wrecked, So Colleen Is the Only Egyptologist at Yale for Now

John Darnell was considered the department's Indiana Jones.

The first Mrs. Darnell was actually a pioneer in the field
and was listed as a member of the Yale Egyptology faculty.

http://neveryetmelted.com/2013/02/02/scandal-strikes-yale-egyptology-department/

And who’s left standing?

When John Darnell agreed to a one-year suspension from the Yale faculty following numerous University policy violations, he left the Egyptology division of the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department without a chair and with just one full-time faculty member — associate professor Colleen Manassa ’01 GRD’05, with whom he allegedly had the intimate relationship that led to his suspension.

Hat tip to John Brewer.

Colleen Manassa Darnell (the second Mrs. Darnell)

By JDZ
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Yale Admits to Covering Up for Adultery, But Do Not Expect WELS To Follow Suit

Darnell used to matriculate with his wife,
then he switched to an undergraduate,
who graduated in Egyptology, under him,
earned a PhD under him,
and also got tenure under him,
always with his enthusiastic support.

New details in Darnell suspension

By Carole Bass ’83, ’97MSL | 10:29pm January 17 2013

• 
  John Darnell and Colleen Manassa ’01, ’05PhD.

When tenured professor John Darnell announced his suspension from the Yale faculty last week for sexual misconduct, he did not name the student-turned-colleague with whom he had an improper relationship. But last October, Darnell’s wife did just that in a publicly available divorce court filing, asserting that Darnell began an affair with Colleen Manassa ’01, ’05PhD, in 2000.

Darnell, a prominent Egyptologist, last week announced his resignation as chair of the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and his one-year suspension from the faculty. Officials confirmed to the Yale Daily News that the suspension is unpaid and that Darnell will also not serve as director of the Yale Egyptological Institute during that time.

In an January 8 e-mail to colleagues, Darnell acknowledged several violations of Yale policy, starting with “maintaining an intimate relationship with a Yale student, who was under my direct supervision.” In addition, “I violated the provisions of the Faculty Handbook by participating in the review of a faculty member with whom I had an intimate relationship,” he wrote. “Finally, I improperly used my leadership role in Egyptology at Yale in an effort to ensure that these policy violations would not come to light.”

After Darnell’s e-mail became public, anonymous sources named Manassa and contended that the affair began when she was a student and continued while Darnell’s department hired and then promoted her. The divorce filing, which the Yale Alumni Magazine obtained from Connecticut Superior Court, is the first on-the-record identification of Manassa. In 2000, when the affair allegedly began, Manassa was an undergraduate.

Reached by phone, Manassa says: “I really have no comment on the matter.” Neither John Darnell nor his estranged wife, Deborah Darnell, could be reached for comment after several attempts.

John Darnell filed for divorce in August 2012, saying the 23-year marriage had “broken down irretrievably.” Deborah Darnell—also an Egyptologist who collaborated on projects with her husband, but is not a member of the Yale faculty—filed a cross-complaint alleging that “on diverse days since 2000,” her husband “committed adultery with one Colleen Marie Manassa.”

Manassa earned both her bachelors degree and her PhD in Darnell’s department, known as NELC, which hired her as an assistant professor in 2006 and promoted her to associate professor in 2010, according to her faculty page. She is currently the director of undergraduate studies. She is not known to be accused of violating any Yale policies.

During Manassa’s student years, Yale policy prohibited faculty members from having consensual relations with students they taught. That is still the case for relationships between faculty and graduate students. In 2009, the university barred faculty from  “sexual or amorous relationships” with any undergraduates, regardless of whether they were their teachers.*

John Darnell apparently participated in his lover's hiring and/or promotion, a conflict that his e-mail acknowledged as a violation of the Faculty Handbook.

A senior faculty colleague says in an interview that Darnell improperly participated in “more than one” employment decision involving his lover, whom the colleague declines to name. The colleague—Benjamin Foster ’75PhD, an Assyriologist and former department chair—says that while Darnell’s “announcement came out of the blue, the basic situation has been known for a very long time,” because “Yale’s a village.”

Foster declines to explain why the improper relationship was allowed to continue for so long or how it finally came to light.

In recent years, critics have accused Yale of not taking sexual misconduct complaints seriously enough. The university has overhauled its handling of such complaints and now releases semiannual reports documenting their number and nature and how they are resolved.

In his four decades at Yale, Foster says, “I’ve never heard of a faculty member being suspended.”

Spoiling the Egyptians - But They Are Not Even WELS. Should Yale Expect Its Faculty To Be More Responsible than Wisconsin's Pastors?

Manassa wore this for some social event,
likely at Yale.

Scandal brings new punishments
for Egyptology program

By Carole Bass ’83, ’97MSL | 1:46pm August 28 2013

• 
  Egyptologists John Darnell and Colleen Manassa ’01, ’05PhD

Yale's troubled Egyptology program is experiencing new fallout from a faculty sex scandal that rocked its department early this year, the Yale Daily News reports.

Professor John Darnell, the Egyptologist at the center of the scandal—who announced in January that he would resign as chair of the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizationsand serve a one-year, unpaid suspension from the faculty—will extend his absence until next fall, the YDN reports.

Citing an August 3 e-mail from department chair Eckart Frahm to senior NELC faculty, the News says Provost Benjamin Polak has imposed several new restrictions on the Egyptology program and the department as a whole.

The sanctions arise from a long-running affair between Darnell and one of his students, who later joined the NELC faculty as a junior professor of Egyptology. In an e-mail to colleagues in January, Darnell acknowledged violating the faculty handbook by having a relationship with a student under his supervision. He also admitted that he had improperly participated in the review of a faculty member with whom he had an intimate relationship, and that he used his position as department chair to cover that up.

The student-turned-professor has been widely identified as Colleen Manassa ’01, ’05PhD, who worked closely with Darnell as a doctoral student and then on the faculty. The department hired her in 2006 and promoted her to associate professor in 2010.

Further complicating matters, Darnell and Manassa are Yale's only two faculty members in Egyptology, a small program in the small NELC department. Their personal relationship and their abusive treatment of graduate students—who had nowhere else to turn—created a hostile environment, according to students who complained to the university administration.

An item in the university's most recent semiannual report on complaints of sexual misconduct, released this month, refers to that complaint, according to one of the students involved. The report notes that a Yale Title IX coordinator—assigned to shepherd sexual misconduct complaints in compliance with federal anti-discrimination law—brought a formal complaint against the faculty members, charging them with "threatening, intimidating, or coercing a person or persons."

The university "did not find sufficient evidence to support the allegations of sexual misconduct but did identify other problematic conduct," the report says, adding: "Disciplinary steps were taken and structures were put in place to address the academic environment."

Those steps include prohibiting Darnell from holding an administrative position until 2023, and Manassa until 2018; assigning classics professor Joe Manning to supervise the Egyptology program; barring the Egyptology program from admitting new graduate students until fall 2016; and reducing the overall number of graduate students NELC may admit, by one per year, the Yale Daily News says, citing Frahm's e-mail.

That last measure galls NELC's senior faculty. "I think it is quite unfair of the graduate school to reduce our admissions pool," Assyriologist Benjamin Foster says in an e-mail to the Yale Alumni Magazine. "The decision . . . is tantamount to group
punishment."

In an Alumni Magazine interview in January, Foster acknowledged having known that Darnell participated in "more than one" employment decision involving his lover. "The basic situation has been known for a very long time” within NELC, he said then, because “Yale’s a village.”

Another senior professor in the department, Dmitri Gutas, told the Yale Daily that he's frustrated by the administration's failure to address “breaches of academic integrity”:

A liaison between a professor and student, he said, raises the question of who produced that student’s work, and Yale’s failure to address the issue of academic integrity makes it seem tolerant of such behavior.

Gutas also criticized the secrecy of the disciplinary process, calling it "even worse than NSA."

Frahm declines to comment.

---

Profile – Man, Myth, or Legend?

BY CATHERINE KILLINGSWORTH

Friday, December 7, 2007

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This past summer, Hollywood descended on New Haven. For a week, Harrison Ford alternately lectured on archaeology in WLH and zipped on his motorcycle through SML as he and Steven Spielberg filmed the new Indiana Jones movie. For many, seeing the filming in action made it clear that Indiana Jones is a product of pure fiction. The idea of a professor calmly teaching classes between wild adventures seemed ridiculous to anyone watching — especially when the backdrop was a menagerie of grips, extras, phony props, and fake fronts.

But it may not be as absurd as it appears.

Professor John Darnell, the chair of Yale’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department, has almost as much legend surrounding him as Indiana Jones, and infinitely more credibility. For years, he has brought Egypt to students and, in many cases, students to Egypt. His charisma and quirky teaching style have made him such a Yale character that he has inspired the Facebook group “John C. Darnell: Man, Myth, or Legend?” Given his experiences in Northern Africa, he just might deserve it.

When I first opened the door to Darnell’s office, I was greeted by strains of choral music and the strong scent of sherry. He beckoned me in and shook my hand as a handful of NELC professors left the room. “We were having a faculty meeting,” he said, gesturing towards the wine glasses scattered around the room. With his three-piece-suit, pocket watch, monocle, and supremely erudite sense of academic zeal, Darnell appeared to be exactly what one would expect of a stuffy Ivy League academic chair. Although he looks as though he were plucked from Victorian London, Darnell actually hails from Prattville, Alabama, and is anything but stodgy.

Darnell has been a professor of Egyptology at Yale for nine years. His passion for archaeology came from his mother, who grew up near the Mississippian Indian burial mounds and had always been fascinated with the subject. Darnell’s first brush with Egypt came when he saw a mummy in a local museum as a child. He studied Egyptology at Johns Hopkins and the University of Cologne, followed by a stint at the University of Chicago and the Oriental Institute, where he began his desert work in Luxor, Egypt, and finally Yale. But the Near East doesn’t just inspire his academics: His dog is named after King Antef II.

When Darnell is not moonlighting as a professor, he spends his time wandering the Egyptian desert with his students and colleagues, hunting for archeological clues and combating heat, scorpions, and antiquities thieves along the way. “Let me think of some good stories for you,” he said, then paused for a few moments. “Actually… I’m going to ask Colleen. She’ll be able to think of some.” He banged on the wall of his office to summon Assistant Professor Colleen Manassa, the department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies, into the room. “Some people say I take the ‘assistant’ part of ‘assistant professor’ a little literally,” he said with a smile. Manassa, a sharp young woman with Cleopatra bangs, soon arrived. For the next hour, she provided prompts and offered helpful translations of Darnell’s occasionally labyrinthine digressions.

At first I had been suspicious of Darnell’s reputation. I wondered if he might, in fact, be less Indiana Jones and more a bookish academic who spent his time brushing dust from old rocks and pottery shards in the Egyptian equivalent of rural Texas. He does do this, and in fact, most of his time in Egypt seems consumed with the fairly mundane tasks of surveying, digging, and recording finds. But there’s a touch of Harrison Ford, too.

Most of Darnell’s memories of Egypt involve road disasters and his chief assistant, Abdu. Because research takes place as many as twelve hours’ hard driving from civilization, breakdowns are common. Abdu has been working on the expeditions for nearly as long as Darnell, and, apparently, when Abdu is not accidentally discovering relics in his neighborhood (“He must live next door to the Flintstones,” said Darnell) or perilously stacking bags atop the already top-heavy Range Rovers, he is fixing cars. Once, he and Darnell even managed to repair a dying engine using rocks as their main tools.

Aside from mechanical failures, they also contend with a variety of natural hazards. Temperatures in the summer can climb as high as 130 degrees, but that’s hardly the worst threat. Once, when they were digging up a site, the first shovelful came up with a baby horned viper. Another time, a policeman they were traveling with was stung in the ear by a scorpion. Out in the desert, even something as gentle as gerbils can make for a difficult time: The rascally rodents like to invade tents and clean out the food supply. At least, Darnell claims, “the shrieking jackals won’t bother you too much.”

But these stories of baby snakes and broken cars were only the warm-up to the real adventures. Though Darnell is no tomb raider, it turns out that he still has to race against thieves to make it to sites before they do. Often, local tomb raiders will dig right through valuable ancient inscriptions, hoping to find gold hidden in the rocks. “Every time you find a site, you have to act as though it is probably the last time that you will see that site intact,” Darnell said.

Perhaps the most incredible tale Darnell told involved chasing after a cadre of thieves that he, with his team and a group of soldiers, had frightened away from a site. As they drove back from the site, they noticed a large object the size of the house on the horizon. As they neared it, they realized that it was a quarry dump truck, a tall vehicle that requires a ladder to make it up to the driver’s seat. It clearly had no business out on the desert road, and when the vehicles finally neared each other, both stopped.

“At first,” said Darnell, “everyone was frightened, and then we realized, ‘Hey, we’ve got all these AK-47s and other sorts of arms.’” The soldiers fell into a loose skirmishing position. But a few heads popped out from the back of the dump truck and explained the situation. As it turns out, the truck had been borrowed by the police from a local quarry; they had captured one of the antiquities thieves and were looking to bring him out to Darnell’s team. Not having any vehicles that could handle the rocky terrain, they took a quarry truck out into the desert, thief in tow.

Of course, Darnell’s important work is much more restrained than chasing after thieves and tombs. Part of what makes his team interesting is that it is not focused on the traditional (and much glorified) strongholds of Egyptology in the Nile Valley. Rather, it explores the desert caravan routes, something that is rarely done and which has provided a wealth of new information on the culture of ancient Egypt. “It’s like you have the same incomplete puzzle, and you’re still trying to make those pieces fit, but they just don’t,” Darnell said, and explained that his goal with his desert data is to help find those pieces. He pointed out that, far from being isolated or irrelevant, the caravan routes actually have a great deal to say about Egyptian history: “You can be on an interstate highway, out passing through some large wooded area, but you’re not really in the middle of nowhere. You’re in a narrow, long, stretched-out strip of somewhere.”

Because Darnell’s research angle is fresh, his team has been able to close gaps in Egyptian history. They’ve found the earliest historical document from Egypt, the Scorpion tableau, and the earliest-known alphabetic inscription.

And his originality shows in the classroom. Ashley Young ’10, a student of his and the creator of the “Man, Myth, or Legend” Facebook group, couldn’t say enough in praise of Darnell’s unusual tactics and striking charisma. “He has such a command of historical knowledge that students can’t help but be in awe of him… He made ancient Egypt come alive in my eyes,” she said. She has particularly fond memories of quirky moments in class, such as when Darnell accidentally took a chunk out of a classroom chair with an ancient sword, or when he taught his students how to send Roman smoke signals to each other.

By the time I left Darnell’s office, I was tempted to join the Facebook group myself. As I walked out, he asked Manassa to bring me a Yale Egyptology T-shirt, and he was as enthusiastic about its hieroglyphic lux et veritas as he was about AK-47s and undiscovered alphabets. Watching him range from his wild adventures to his love of mundane minutiae, I found him about as fascinating and inscrutable as the hieroglyphics he studies. Here is a man who deserves his myth.

Yale Daily News:

Darnell suspension rattles Egyptology

BY NICOLE NAREA AND JULIA ZORTHIAN
STAFF REPORTERS

Friday, January 25, 2013

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When John Darnell agreed to a one-year suspension from the Yale faculty following numerous University policy violations, he left the Egyptology division of the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department without a chair and with just one full-time faculty member — associate professor Colleen Manassa ’01 GRD ’05, with whom he allegedly had the intimate relationship that led to his suspension.

Darnell, the only tenured Egyptologist at the University, served as chair of the NELC Department prior to his suspension and advised all seven Egyptology graduate students. Eckart Frahm, acting NELC chair, said he and Graduate School Associate Dean Pamela Schirmeister are in the process of establishing a “committee structure” advising program for Egyptology’s seven graduate students, who he worries will suffer from the effects of Darnell’s suspension even after they graduate and advance in their careers. Frahm said it would be “naive” to suggest that Darnell’s resignation and suspension will not taint the reputation of the department in the field, calling his departure a “huge psychological blow” to NELC.

“Clearly what we have to deal with right now is a rather major crisis that affects mostly the graduate students in Egyptology,” Frahm said.

Darnell announced his resignation as NELC chair in a Jan. 8 email to graduate students and faculty in the department, citing an intimate relationship with a student under his direct supervision and with a professor whom he reviewed as reasons for his departure. Since his suspension, multiple sources have told the News that the person involved in Darnell’s violations was Manassa, who allegedly began an affair with Darnell in 2000, according to divorce documents filed by Darnell’s wife before the Connecticut Superior Court on Nov. 5, 2012.

Frahm said he is determined to minimize the effects of Darnell’s resignation and suspension, especially for the Egyptology graduate students.

“Students shouldn’t be held responsible for anything outside their control,” Frahm said.

Frahm said he plans to meet with Schirmeister in the next two weeks to finalize the official structure of the advising committee, in which each graduate student will be assigned one primary adviser, as well as at least two additional professors or professional Egyptologists to consult on drafts of their dissertations. While members of the NELC faculty said they are willing to step into advising roles, Frahm said he also has been in talks with potential advisers at other universities and met privately with each graduate student.

Despite Frahm’s efforts, Egyptology students remain concerned for their academic career prospects.

One Egyptology graduate student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to a reluctance to be associated with Darnell’s resignation, said the disciplinary action taken against Darnell has resulted in an “unfortunate situation” that affects all Egyptology students to varying degrees. The student added that the Egyptology students have been approached by Graduate School administrators, who expressed their intention to work with students for the betterment of the program as a whole, and have been assured by Frahm and Schirmeister that the graduate students are their first priority.

Though another Egyptology graduate student said the program’s small size means that fewer classes will be offered to the students during their course-work years following the suspension, Frahm said he does not anticipate that the department will struggle to provide teaching in Darnell’s absence.

Manassa, who serves as director of undergraduate studies for NELC, declined to comment on the effect of the department’s leadership transition on undergraduates. She is currently the only Egyptologist on the NELC faculty.

Frahm said he does not think Darnell’s resignation and suspension have had an “enormous impact” on the other two subdisciplines of NELC — Arabic Studies and Assyriology. NELC graduate students said the three NELC subfields operate essentially as three different departments, despite the fact that they share the same administration. Arabic professor Beatrice Gruendler said her students have not interacted extensively with Egyptology and were “not at all affected” by Darnell’s absence.

Five graduate students in other NELC subdivisions said Darnell’s absence will not impact their research, adding that Frahm has fulfilled his duties as acting chair.

The NELC Department has a total of 21 graduate students across its subdivisions.