"Ancient Origins" Runs Article Hyping the "Genius" of a Biblical Master Race

1/16/2021

Before we begin today, a quick note that one of the men who participated in the failed insurrection at the Capitol rioted and threw a wooden post while wearing a Giorgio Tsoukalos Ancient Aliens sweatshirt. I need not point out exactly how on-brand it is for angry, rioting right-wingers to also be Ancient Aliens fans.

Ancient Origins published a racist article this week by a writer from India attempting to explain how the impetus for civilization emerged from the Aryan racial group, via Noah's son Japeth. Although the article is not white nationalist in the explicit sense we see in more extreme publications, it clearly has sympathies with the old Victorian ideas about a superior Aryan race stretching from India to England. Indeed, the article starts in the Near East, folds in India, and concludes by celebrating the tall, blond supermen who supposedly first colonized the British Isles. Alexander Jacob even cites outdated twentieth-century scholarship (Gordon Childe, who died in 1957) to support his views and brings in Victorian skull morphology studies to argue that various ancient populations were genetically distinct races derived from one of Noah's three sons, with--of course--the Aryan sons of Japheth being superior.

We've been over this racist nonsense many times before, but even so, it was still shocking to see Ancient Origins running a piece that openly spoke about superior races.

According to Gordon Childe, however, the predominant racial element in the earliest graves in the region from Elam to the Danube is the ‘Mediterranean’. So we may presume that these early cultures were founded by the genius of that broad racial group. The dolichocephalic Mediterranean, or “brown”, race may thus have constituted the earliest strata of the populations of Asia, Egypt and Europe.

Jacobs, being Indian, of course wants to link everything to India, so in his view, the master race is actually the "proto-Dravidians" of India, whom he alleges seeded all of civilization. "It is possible that the proto-Hurrians, or proto-Dravidians, typified the original Noachidian family," he writes. Everyone is ultimately a corruption of an Indian original:

Gordon Childe’s conjecture regarding the ‘Mediterranean’ aspect of the earliest populations of the large region between West Asia and Central Europe seems to be confirmed archaeologically by the fact that the graves of the Āryan culture of Bishkent (ca. 1700-1500 BC) related to the northern Bactro-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) have also yielded mostly Mediterranean skeletons.

In sum, Jacobs implies that the mixing of Aryan and Dravidian in India restored the "dynastic" glory of the House of Noah and in so doing created a civilizing force that eventually became the ruling house that led all other ancient peoples to glory. Convenient, typical, and racist.

57 Comments

Blurred Lines

1/16/2021 04:04:11 pm

Judging by the guy in the lower left photo and pictures of several other persons of interest that have been posted online the bar has been lowered significantly to be considered an angry racist aryan right-wing rioter. Maybe they are Dravidians.

Doc rock

1/16/2021 05:59:13 pm

Based on minority voting trends one could expect to see a wee bit of diversity among pro-Donalds. The added irony is having a Greek as a whitish power icon. This ain't your Granddaddy's KKK type folks. Interesting dynamics regarding popular perceptions of race.

Comrade obvious

1/21/2021 01:43:27 pm

Dr. Whiskey on the Rocks

Irony is people being adamant that Antifa wasn't involved in the riots.

Think about it.

The group whose reason for existence is supposed to be to use any means necessary to combat fascism.

Was nowhere to be seen.

When right wing extremist showed up at the Capital in mass.

Stormed the Capital.

Hung around

Took selfies

Left notes

Carried out momentos.

Walked away.

Antifa has one job.

They failed on the only occasion when they were really needed to do it.

No, Antifa wasn't involved in the riot.

Doc rock

1/21/2021 11:06:06 pm

I dont recall condoning Antifa style tactics. On a couple occasions when I interacted with those folks I told them that if they really wanted to bash the fash I could direct them to some bars that are known hangouts for honest to god Neo-Nazi biker types and they could bash away. Their interest in taking Nazi scalps (apparently a popular expression in that crowd) suddenly waned.

Kent

1/22/2021 12:52:02 pm

I hear some leather sniffing going on here.

People who want to fight or don't want to fight don't need directions t9 a neo-Nazi biker bar. Give us one address if you would please.

Waiting is great fun.

Jim

1/22/2021 02:14:08 pm

Here is an address especially for you Kent:

Monks Orchard Rd, Beckenham BR3 3BX,

Doc rock

1/22/2021 05:36:37 pm

Uh, Kent, if u think about it long enough after your meds have kicked in, your comments pretty much illiustrated my point.

We shall all wait for your attempt to grasp the obvious.

T. Franke link

1/16/2021 04:06:30 pm

This is indeed very dated research, and in our days simply pseudoscience and even racist. The basic idea behind this all is the discovery that the indo-germanic languages are related to each other, from Sanskrit to Iranian to Slavic to Germanic to Roman languages. Nevertheless, race and language resp. culture are not the same.

Such theories had their place around 1800 when French scholars speculated about the first human race coming from the high North and splitting into various peoples at the Himalaya mountains. For example, the first president of the French revolutionary National Convention Jean-Sylvain Bailly had such ideas. In his days this was maybe progressive research (but other scholars complained later about Bailly's rapture with such ideas.

Kent

1/16/2021 08:40:31 pm

No discussion of this concept is complete without a mention of Tilak's Arctic Home in the Vedas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arctic_Home_in_the_Vedas

T. Franke link

1/17/2021 12:45:12 pm

Thank you, interesting, but also this book is only a late cry of the French ideas from the 18th century. Atlantipedia has it:

https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/bailly-jean-silvain/

"In it, Bailly proposed that the region around Spitzbergen in the Arctic Sea was the location of Atlantis; ... and his conclusions were similar to the theory of his contemporary Buffon who had suggested that the Earth had originally an interior fire that gradually cooled. While this fire burned the northern latitudes were much warmer providing an ideal environment in which Atlantis could flourish. When the fire cooled the Atlanteans moved south. Bailly suggested that this migration brought them to Mongolia and from there to the Caucasus and finally to Phoenicia."

Kent

1/17/2021 09:09:42 pm

Wow, you can condescendingly worm Atlantis into any discussion, can't you?

Moving on, no mention of the Vedas there, so my point ("no discussion of this concept is complete without...") stands and yours ("this book is only a late cry of the French ideas from the 18th century") fails.

Indians having to depend on the French to research their own history = racist = not cool.

T. Franke link

1/18/2021 06:49:46 am

Kent, the Vedas do not contain such stories. Such authors only claim that they would. It's the same as with claims that Atlantis is mentioned in the Bible. It is not.

Your sentence "Indians having to depend on the French to research their own history = racist = not cool" is non-sensical since it is all about pseudo-science, not about the real history of India.

Kent

1/18/2021 09:39:17 am

I never said the Vedas contained ANY stories. You are simply unwilling to admit there is a book you don't know about, in your usual condescending manner.

T. Franke link

1/18/2021 04:57:58 pm

Kent, just to make you happy I admit that I did not know this book. (And in my condescending manner I add: There is no need to know this book.)

The Rooster

1/16/2021 05:26:39 pm

This is all silly and a waste of time. Thanks for documenting this, Capt. J. Incredibly valuable. On levels that outstretch the focus of current data collection.

I'm such a "Heinz 57" of genetic soup?'

I'm mostly Gaul, but the it gets really strange.

Politicization if "race" is worn out by one thing: Fucking.

All the world's women are quite beautiful.

In terms of genetics and the spread of diversity? It's all Fucking.

Why are academic assholes so narrowly focused?

❤️

Crash55

1/17/2021 10:42:34 am

Calling these morons academics is giving them too much credit. I have seen nothing like this coming from the various archaeological type magazines I read.

T. Franke link

1/17/2021 05:16:13 pm

Crash55, the author is indeed an academic, and he is active in academia in universities in UK and the US and Canada. It does not help to deny that he is an academic. He is one. Whereas Jason Colavito e.g. has no PhD and therefore cannot go "officially" as academic. He "only" majored in both anthropology and journalism.

Academia is the imperfect attempt to realize the ideal of science. This is worth thinking about.

Jason should have a PhD judging from the books he authored. It has been my opinion for a long time that a PhD should not be given for a certain work and some time spent at a university, but PhDs should be granted to a person who published various works worth it. Whether university or not. Jason should have a PhD.

Crash55

1/17/2021 07:44:53 pm

An academic is someone who works in academia. Where does Jacobs work? I did a search based on the name but got an Indian Police Chief.

Just having a PhD does not make one an academic. I have one and actively do research and publish but I am not an academic.

If he is working in academia I can’t believe it is at a well respected school.

Crash55

1/17/2021 08:12:15 pm

When I wrote the above I didn't realize you could click on the byline at Ancient Origins. That gives a bio that does little to impress. It reads like a wanna be academic. Someone that couldn't cut it in academic history so he decided to bland history and philosophy.

He is more of a talking head than an actual researcher of any sort. Jason is far more of a true historian than Jacobs.

Calling him an academic is definitely using the loosest version of its definition

Kent

1/17/2021 08:46:00 pm

"Indian police officers can't write articles or have a hobby" = racist

You should have tried looking at the article.

"Dr Alexander Jacob was born in Madras, India, and obtained his Master’s in English Literature from the University of Leeds and his Ph.D. in the History of Ideas from the Pennsylvania State University His post-doctoral research was conducted at the University of Toronto while he was a Visiting Fellow at the departments of Political Science, Philosophy, and English Literature of the University of Toronto.

His scholarly publications include works on natural philosophy:

De Naturae Natura: A Study of Idealistic Conceptions of Nature and the Unconscious, Franz Steiner, Stuttgart, 1992, 2nd ed. Arktos Media, 2011, Ātman: A Reconstruction of the Solar Cosmology of the Indo-Europeans, ‘Religionswissentschaftliche Texte und Studien’, Georg Olms, Hildesheim, 2005, Brahman: A Study of the Solar Rituals of the Indo-Europeans, ‘Religionswissentschaftliche Texte und Studien’, Georg Olms, Hildesheim, 2012; and The Grail: Two Studies (Leopold von Schroeder, “The Roots of the Saga of the Holy Grail' and Alexander Jacob, 'The Indo-European Origins of the Grail”), Colac, VIC, Numen Books, 2014.

Dr. Jacob also holds a Licentiate Diploma in Piano from the Trinity College of Music, London, and has given solo piano recitals in Canada, Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Germany, England, Brazil and Mexico. He has recorded three CDs of piano transcriptions of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (Numen Books, 2015), Parsifal (Numen Books, 2015) and Lohengrin (Numen Books, 2017)."

Crash55

1/17/2021 09:32:07 pm

Kent, I see you have slithered out from under your rocking again your ignorance and lack of reading comprehension. I do see you can manage to copy and paste his bio. That must really be a test of your abilities.

My second post was written before your reply yet you ignored it. I said I went back and realized you could click on the by line to get the author’s bio and that I found the bio unimpressive. As I said it reads like an academic wannabe or pretender. There are no journal articles you can look up. No DOI links. Just incomplete citations. There is no actual academic style CV.

By the way I never said the Indian police chief couldn’t have hobbies only that that was who came up when I did the search and it obviously wasn’t the correct person. That was because I read the wiki page for the police chief just in case it was his hobby. So don’t call me racist you pathetic troll.

So I stand by comment that he isn’t a real academic and only the loosest definition of the word would include him.

Also that Kent is a pathetic troll with limited reading comprehension skills who likes to make libelous statements

Raj obvious

1/17/2021 10:23:09 pm

An author with his academic background writing on this topic in this venue is like a geologist like schoch writing on egyptology in much the same venue or a zoologist like what's his name claiming to see ogham script in every set of scratches on a cave wall in new england. Crazy is crazy even if it has PhD after its name.

Kent

1/17/2021 10:43:24 pm

Calm the heck down, Scooter.

Your second comment hadn't been POSTED when I wrote mine. What we have here is what A.C. Doyle might have called "The Curious Case of the PhD Who Didn't Know That You Can Click On A Link". If you want to measure male parts, do it on your on time.

YOU said "An academic is someone who works in academia."
Then YOU said "Calling him an academic is definitely using the loosest version of its definition".

To quote the great philosopher Spicoli "What's your problem Bud?"

You want Ancient Aliens to post his entire C.V.? Piffle! You, being a PhD and all, must have seen a C,V. or two so you know they can be quite long. I think the issue is that you can't control the world and are probably feeling at a loss and helpless and like you can't cope but I assure you, you'll get through this and we will walk together into the sunshine

Your vituperation is most unbecoming, but you can only be yourself. If you think I've libeled you, Summer's Eve, bring it on.

Crash55

1/17/2021 11:04:28 pm

The big difference is Schoch is an actual academic. He is as a professor at BU. His ideas on about the Sphinx may be crazy but he does publish in the academic arena. http://www.bu.edu/cgs/profile/robert-schoch/

Jacobs appears to have no academic affiliation and his publication list is rather weak.

Though I will agree that crazy is crazy no matter the degree.

T. Franke link

1/18/2021 06:47:19 am

CRASH55, this is a very interesting discussion. You say, an academic is someone who works in academia. But what is academia?

For example, here in Germany, a Soros-like wealthy man established some 30 years ago a research institute for history, and it is completely included into the academic world, nowadays. But it is a private institution, and it has a clear political bias. Is this academia?

For example, here in Germany, when the climate change discussion started, politics established a new research institute for climate change. Yes, politicitans established it, not "the science". They gathered "reliable" researchers there. Today, this institution is at the front of radical claims concerning climate change and consequences, whereas the German researchers at the traditional institutions are not that radical (if not openly opposing, but this ceased over time). Where is the difference to an institution established by the oil industry?

And what about private researchers? Nowadays this is rather rare, but in the 18th and 19th century, progress in science came very often from private researchers. Are they academics, or not?

If academic journals are edited by a book editor, not by a university, as is the case with many of them, are they really academic?

Is it academic when academic journals decide to reject all articles not in favour of mainly man-made climate change, regardless of what these articles say?

Who decides and defines what is academia and what not?

I would really like to hear your's and others' opinions on this!

Jim

1/18/2021 08:04:36 am

"Crazy is crazy even if it has PhD after its name."

Exactly, invariably we see "academics" or other professionals touting their credentials to lend credibility to their pseudo hobby horses when in fact their credentials are in a completely different field that in actuality has little or nothing to do with their pseudo claims.

What exactly is a "Ph.D. in the History of Ideas from the Pennsylvania State University" ?

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-tha-talks-30946230/episode/edition-205-dr-alexander-jacob-39484142/

"Alexander Jacob was born in Madras, India, and obtained his Master in English Literature from the University of Leeds and his Ph.D. in the History of Ideas from the Pennsylvania State University His post-doctoral research was conducted at the University of Toronto while he was a Visiting Fellow at the departments of Political Science, Philosophy, and English Literature."

Kent

1/18/2021 09:55:58 am

His name is Jacob not Jacobs. You sound like an angry bitter old man whose PhD does nothing for him. I'm sorry I triggered you. Not really.

I suppose it's easy to envy people who convince book publishers to publish their books rather than journal publishers to publish their articles. I'm looking forward to seeing YOUR C.V.

Apparently research skills are an issue:

https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Jacob
https://arktos.com/people/alexander-jacob/

Thanks for playing our game, Mr. PhD or should I say Fredo?

Crash55

1/18/2021 10:07:35 am

Kent, My second post was submitted before my first post was posted. In fact they were submitted even closer than the posting times suggest. So what I see is someone who is quick to be a troll and baselessly through out accusations of racism. Who is the one measuring parts?? Everyone knows you are a troll with little to add.

What happened is I did the first response on a tablet and it wasn't obvious that the byline was a link. When I looked at it on the PC I saw it was and quickly put up the second post. In other words I fix my unintentional mistakes unlike you.

As for the definition of "academic" simply ask your favorite search engine search engine. Google replied with "noun
a teacher or scholar in a college or institute of higher education." Under that definition he doesn't qualify.

Now being an actual researcher and not a troll I went and looked at Webster's as well. It adds a second entry under noun, "b: a person who is academic in background, outlook, or methods." Even then I think you have to view that in a very loose definition of the word given his days in academia are far behind him and his methods don't appear to fit academia.

Now you being the troll that you are that is probably not good enough so I looked for the Oxford definition as well but I am not paying for it so here is the free version of the noun academic "b: a person who is academic in background, outlook, or methods."

So yeah only under the loosest of the definitions does he count.

You are right a full CV would be way to long but something in that style is the norm for academics. Look at pretty much any real academic's web page has a short background and selected publications. Alexander Jacob's pages (Ancient Origins, wordpres,, Amazon, Facebook) give pretty much the exact same badly formatted mess of publications. Even then searching for those publications yields almost nothing. The one original thing I could find in my brief search was a collection of his essays.

So I go back to my original statement: Calling Jacobs an academic is doing a disservice to actual academics and the only way to make the definition apply is by taking a very loose view of the word.

Crash55

1/18/2021 10:20:28 am

T. Franke, I think what we are seeing here is the fringe tossing that word around to either lend credibility or identify a target based on their need at the time.

If you look at Google, Webster's, and Oxford (leaner's as OED is behind a paywall), you will see that the primary definition of academic as a noun is "a teacher or scholar in a college or institute of higher education," with the wording shifting between sources. What is common though is that education must be part of the employer's mission.

Under that definition people at the German institute you mention would be researchers and not academics. Same with the 19th century researchers.

Often I will hear the phrase research and academia to bring together the two worlds. I work in S&T for the government doing research into next gen systems and technologies. When allowed I publish at conferences and journals. Neither I nor my coworker's consider ourselves academics, expect may the one who also teaches

Crash55

1/18/2021 10:48:25 am

Kent,

Jacobs vs Jacob is called a typo. Autocorrect kept making it plural. Guess I missed one.

My PhD has served me well. I get several book / chapter offers a year but I have no desire to write them so I ignore them.

So you found two references I didn’t, What a good researcher you are. Of course one is his publisher and the other an “alternative” encyclopedia. Those are really making your case for him being an academic. What does Google Scholar or Researchgate show?

Post my CV? Very funny. I have a job and would like to keep it so the last thing I want is for nut jobs like you to know who I am.

Angry? Generally yes. I am angry at the anti-science, anti-fact, anti-intellectual, fake news morons that are destroying society. I am angry at people misusing their PhDs and making the rest of us look bad in comparison. I am angry at trolls for being trolls. Most of all though I am angry at myself for even bothering to interact with a troll such as yourself.

Crash55

1/18/2021 10:52:28 am

Jim,

When he was working at a university/college I would have called him an academic. Fro what I could tell his thesis was ~1987 so that was a longtime ago, even with a standard post-doc.

People like Jacobs, give actual academics a bad name. At least Schoch appears to have done real academic work before diving head first into the fringe. My guess is he got tenure first, otherwise BU would have showed him the door.

T. Franke link

1/18/2021 10:56:36 am

Crash55, I see the point in making a difference between academics and researchers, but it does not help much to identify quality.

The articles of researchers and academics are published in the same academic (?) journals without distinction. There are even articles where academics and researchers cooperate. In the end, what counts is the article, and not whether researcher or academic.

But then .... what about a private researcher publishing in books with a non-academic editor, but his books bringing about a break-through in science: Well, it is science, but not academia and no academic journals.

IMHO, in the end, it makes sense to have universities as backbones of science, I don't deny this. Just to uphold the standards and to secure the education of the next generation. But truth and quality may come from elsewhere, too. Universities shall be open for input from outside. And having or not having a PhD is not really saying so much.

(Just recently another politician in Austria has been detected to have falsified her doctoral thesis .... nowadays quite common in German-speaking countries. It's a mess here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Aschbacher )

R&D

1/18/2021 12:39:30 pm

It is not uncommon for people with advanced degrees to work in a non-University-based research center but hold adjunct appointments at a University and occasionally teach a class or classes. Do they become an academic the minute they set foot on the college campus but then cease to be an academic the minute they leave campus? Some people work as faculty at the University where they earn their Ph.D. or function as such while working a Post-Doctoral Fellows. Do they suddenly cease to be academics if they graduate and take a research position outside of a university setting. Some people jump back and forth between university appointments and non-university research positions during the course of their careers. Does that mean that they can only comment as an academic during the times when they held university positions?

This debate is academic.

Kent link

1/18/2021 12:41:39 pm

Mr. Crash:

You've got serious issues and I sense anger. How's that libel suit going?

" Look at pretty much any real academic's web page has a short background and selected publications."
ancient-origins.net ISN'T HIS WEBPAGE YOU STUPID IDIOT.

Your pedantic quarreling with yourself or people you're hallucinating about who is or isn't "an academic".... well, it doesn't make you look good.
.
"Troll" is what someone who cannot cope says.

A real PhD would learn to spell the name of the person he's criticizing.

Crash55

1/18/2021 05:26:59 pm

Kent you really are a fucking moron and a troll after this post I am done acknowledging your existence as doing adds nothing to the discussion.

Sorry if I don’t fully proofread a blog post and miss a typo you nitpicking misanthrope.

I know the Ancient Origins website isn’t his page but is his bio, which he would have submitted. It is the same pathetic bio he has other places. It still reads like a wannabe or failed academic as opposed to an active.

Like it or not that is my opinion of him and these are the last word I ever intend to direct towards you so fuck off

Crash55

1/18/2021 05:39:39 pm

T. Franke and R&D,

There is a lot of crossover between the academic and research worlds. In general it is all left up to the individual as to which they consider themselves. In general though the academics view themselves as educators as much if not more than researchers. The researchers view their research as paramount and any teaching as secondary.

At least from what I have seen from 20+ years in STEM related research only active faculty at institutes of higher education consider themselves academics. The rest just consider themselves researchers. Yes arguing the point at all is rather academic.

My original point though was that Jacobs doesn’t have any of the ties to academia that a standard academic would have. Unless there is a different bio out there he appears to have not worked for an academic institution or independent research group for decades. He also doesn’t appear to have published in any academic journals that I could easily find.

So to me, and of course this is my opinion, calling him an academic is doing a disservice to everyone who does actively work at an academic or research institution. It is further reducing any credibility that goes along with that word. A credibility that his work hadn’t earned.

Doc Rock

1/18/2021 09:31:33 pm

As an academic who hasn't had enough Chard to want to get caught up in a discussion of how to define academic I will roll the dice for an intelligent discussion and raise another issue. It is not a sin for someone to develop research interests outside of their original graduate training and expertise. At one point in my career I found myself doing research far removed from what I had done as a graduate student and during the early stage of my career. However, I spent lot of time immersing myself in the new relevant literature and had to do a lot of work under the supervision of senior colleges with expertise in the new area.

That is a different scenario from someone like Shocky who managed to quickly transition from vertebrate paleontology to pontificating on the alleged date of the Sphinx in Wolteresque pseudogeological fashion without any apparent effort at training in archaeology or any other relevant field. Those are the people that give legitimate scholars a bad name.

Kent

1/18/2021 09:54:03 pm

The Curious Case of Mr. Crash:

I didn't make a mistake, Autocorrect is out to get me! Repeatedly and consistently.

And then no surprise comes the pottymouth. I thought Jason didn't allow that anymore. But in town it was well known that when they got home at night their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives.

Executive summary: Mr. Crash has issues and apparently no C.V. Alternatively he thinks he'd be fired if his employers saw the way he behaves here. very invested in his PhD, likes to say "troll".

Kent

1/19/2021 12:02:40 am

Mr. Rock makes a good point. Linus Pauling is a case in point. It's just sad that he didn't live to win his 3rd Nobel Prize.

Mr. Crash could take a lesson: massive alcohol intake can mitigate (or exacerbate, caution!) anger issues.

Crash55

1/19/2021 09:52:19 am

Doc Rock,

It is not at all unusual for a PhD to wind up working outside their original field. When I job hunting near the end of graduate school I remember coming across a statistic that 30% of PhD’s no longer work in their field.

Part of getting a PhD is learning how to teach yourself new things and how to approach a topic area as a researcher. Your comment shows that you learned this lesson well. At the same time though I have seen plenty of proposals where they toss on a person with an unrelated PhD just to try and lend credibility to the effort

I didn’t comment on whether or not Jacobs was in his field as I am not sure what exactly field PhD in History of Ideas is in. So I am more than willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one.

I do think calling him an academic is doing a disservice to academics who are actually part of academia. The fringe world likes to throw darts at academia but then uses the title academic when they want to sound more professional. This is similar to Schoch in that he is using his PhD to lend credibility even though his prior work doesn’t provide support for it.

Jim

1/19/2021 12:02:55 pm

" I am not sure what exactly field PhD in History of Ideas is in."

That's what I want to know, what the heck is a PhD in History of Ideas is.

Can anyone shed any light ?

Crash55

1/19/2021 08:23:13 pm

Jim,

I went looking at Penn State and can't find any reference to a History of Ideas major in the graduate school. I looked in philosophy, history, and English thinking it would be one of those. Maybe it was a degree they did away with or maybe it was the subject are of his thesis as opposed to his major. Sometimes people will give their PhD's by subject area instead of major. Though usually only if the major is readily apparent.

I also realized that I have indeed been spelling his name wrong. I kept spelling it Jacobs instead of Jacob. Oops.

Doc Rock

1/20/2021 10:12:09 am

There is a Journal of the History of Ideas published thru Penn State so it is a real thing. One of the California schools has a program in The History of Consciousness. These types of programs come and go. Maybe the one at Penn State went.

Crash55

1/20/2021 03:41:04 pm

Doc Rock,

Yes I found the journal as well and it appears to be rather old though still being published.

The degree may have been discontinued though it would be interesting to know what department it was under.

The Rooster

1/22/2021 05:21:06 pm

Thanks, Gentlemen.

Great to hear from 3 or 4 actual "Academics" trying to find their place in The World. I have been edified.

I pulled up short, on the long stick. Why? Hobbies. Weird ones. Like whittling, and music, America, and:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Writing_Project

So? Fine work. I can pull the trigger on 3 different MS/A degrees any time I want.

Certs are more critical.

❤️

Anthony G.

1/25/2021 10:30:12 pm

People get too hung up on a PhD. My 9th grade civics teacher had a PhD and was a former archaeologist. Apparently archeology doesn't pay the bills. Around here, unless you can cure something or cut on somebody your PhD's nothing more than Pizza Hut Delivery. You're going to need a second job to pay back your student loans. Doctor C. Not only taught ninth grade civics, he also flipped houses. It's how he afforded his Porsche that some students chose to vandalize on a daily basis.

Doc Rock

1/26/2021 10:04:02 am

Pizza Hut must offer its delivery people a damn nice salary, insurance, retirement and vacation package in your area if it beats out working a job that requires a Ph.D.

There are a wide range of fields where one can earn a Ph.D. and many different paths people can take with them with varying degrees of compensation. Location is another issue. I once interviewed for a position at Cal State Fullerton. Couldn't have even afforded a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood on that salary in that area. On the other hand I ended up spending my entire career living in other areas where even junior faculty were able to buy homes after a year or two on the job.

I don't think that most people enter Ph.D. programs with visions of a shiny new Porsche sitting in the driveway dancing in their heads anyway.

Crash55

1/26/2021 10:27:59 am

Anthony G.,

It depends upon the field STEM based PhDs pay well.

For archaeology I have heard it only pays if you can get a tenured faculty job. There are also a few private sector ones but few and far between.

As with any degree, the higher up you go the more likely you are to have to relocate to make money and some people aren't willing or able to do that

Crash55

1/26/2021 11:46:33 am

Just for comparison, I work for the DoD and have 27 years of service. I have made it to the GS15 level staying purely technical. The exact salary varies based on locality but the absolute max by statute is $172500.

Normally the only way to get higher and stay technical is to become an ST but those are few and far between and also are more technical advisor / overseer than actually doing research. There are 4 of those in my organization of 4500. They top out at $199300. From what I can tell you are expected to be on call 24/7.

Recently some labs have started to offer beyond GS15 positions under various names. For my lab they are called Senior Scientific Technical Managers. They can either be technical or managerial but even the technical ones appear to be largely oversight and planning as opposed to hands on work. There are 18 total authorized for my organization. They top out at $184k.

So yes you can make a decent living with a PhD but the real money comes when you move from the technical to the managerial no matter if you are public or private sector.

Doc rock

1/26/2021 12:12:11 pm

Crash,

I would assume those are 12 month contracts?

A PhD in anth with 27 productive years in should be at 100K at least. But that is on a 9 or 10 months contract where they are only really on the clock for about 8 months. With a full year paid sabbatical thrown in every 7 years. Teaching summers and overloads would add about another 20k. All rough estimates with many variables to consider.

Crash55

1/26/2021 01:02:20 pm

Doc Rock,

Those are annual salaries. All are full time permanent positions with full government benefits.

The best is the government retirement plan. I get to retire at 57.

Doc rock

1/26/2021 02:09:29 pm

Most university plans are set up so that one can retire at 59 if they want. But in my experience that is pretty rare. A lot of profs feel like they are just hitting their stride at that point.

A lot of people lose track of the value of the overall benefits package even if the salary is modest.

Crash55

1/26/2021 02:57:53 pm

Doc Rock,

Under the old plan people could retire at 55 if they had at least 20 years in. You got 2% of your pay per year but no social security. Maxed out at like 82% of pay

Under the current system you are eligible at 57 if have 20 years in. You get 1% per year plus social security make up till 62 (basically what you would get from social security at 62). There is also a 401k type plan where the Government matches you up to 5%. At 60 you need 10 years. At 62 you need 5 years and the percent goes up to 1.1%

The government HR website now tells you what your total compensation package is worth. Makes it easy to compare when head hunters call

The Rooster

1/31/2021 02:50:09 pm

Damn! That was very cool of you guys to be so transparent.

Thank you!

From the bottom of my Heart.

Just...wow!

❤️

Brian

1/17/2021 07:09:18 am

Everything is so mixed up these days, and cherry-picking makes strange bedfellows. So here's an article touting the old work of Gordon Childe to support jingoistic conclusions, somehow ignoring the obvious "Marxist archaeology" corpus of the man, to which most of them would have knee-jerk reactions of horror. Will they be mining Velikovsky next for evidence of the "racial trauma" caused by Democrats bringing Venus crashing into the moon? People of color are involved in a basically white-supremacist movement, people waving "thin blue line" flags beat cops - talk about cognitive dissonance!

Crash55

1/17/2021 10:53:41 am

Hopefully the advances in ancient DNA recovery will start to debunk some of this BS. One of the recent developments is that light pigmentation is a fairly recent development. Cheddar man was an early inhabitant of the British Isles and had dark to black skin

Anthony G.

1/25/2021 10:20:52 pm

Cherchen Man and Cherchen Woman used to be the poster children for Celtic people in China. Then their DNA came back Asian. Not another peep.

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