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The tales of Goffman con’t

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Alice Goffman is in the news again:

A group of “students, alumni, and allies” of the sociology department at Pomona College have written an open letter to the department and senior executives of the college to protest the hiring of the ethnographer Alice Goffman as a visiting professor of sociology.

The college confirmed in a statement emailed to The Chronicle on Sunday night that it had offered Ms. Goffman a position as a visiting scholar, starting this fall, and that she had accepted.

The letter’s authors, who remain anonymous, demand that the college rescind the hire and give students more voice in future hiring decisions. The authors protest Ms. Goffman’s hiring because they say it fails to “address underrepresentation of faculty of color” and demonstrates an “institutional inadequacy to recognize and advocate for the best interests of students of color.”

They base their objections in part on the recent controversy over Ms. Goffman’s research methods in her 2014 book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. Those methods, they say, have contributed to false perceptions about black people and have harmed black communities.

I’m not going to address the letter’s various claims, some of which seem highly problematic. Instead I’d like to focus briefly on the fact that Goffman got this job — it’s an endowed two to three year visiting position at a top liberal arts college — over two other finalists who have academic publication records that consist of something other than one in no small part fabricated book.

That the two other finalists were African American women just puts an exclamation point on the dispiriting fact that the sociology department at Pomona decided to stick its collective head in the sand in regard to Goffman’s history of publishing lies and/or confabulations in the guise of legitimate ethnography.

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