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| Manassa wore this for some social event, likely at Yale. |
Scandal brings new punishments
for Egyptology program
- 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."
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.
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Profile – Man, Myth, or Legend?
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
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.
