Editor,

The Department of Anthropology is pleased that you decided to cover our aborted search for a new colleague in Women’s Studies in Anthropology. However, we feel that the article by Peggy Liao in the April 6 edition of the paper ("Joint Professor Search is Aborted Due to Disagreement") requires some clarification. In particular, the article misrepresents the search criteria of the two departments involved. First, Ms. Liao neglected to mention that one of the criteria applied by the Women’s Studies Department was that the candidates have a research and teaching focus on Women of Color in the Americas. The pool of candidates potentially acceptable to the Women’s Studies Department was therefore significantly smaller than implied by Ms. Liao’s article. Second, the Department of Anthropology did not require candidates to "have abilities in all four of its major sub-fields: sociocultural, linguistic, archaeological, and physical." Our actual criterion was much more inclusive than this statement implies.

We required that candidates be able and willing to work within the four-field approach in Anthropology. This approach in Anthropology has historical roots almost as deep as the discipline itself, and remains a dominant (though not the only) paradigm in Anthropology today. A practitioner of the four-field approach is not necessarily well-trained in each of the four major sub-fields, but instead values research and teaching that attempt to integrate theory, results, and methods from sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeological anthropology, and physical anthropology. In the case of this search, that criterion meant that candidates needed to express enthusiasm for working within that approach — the approach that guides our departmental curriculum. It did not mean that candidates needed to have formal training, research experience, or teaching competence in more than one subfield. In fact, the two candidates that the anthropologists found acceptable from among the three finalists had no classwork or teaching competence in either archaeology or physical anthropology, though both expressed an eagerness to learn more about these subfields and to explore areas of teaching and research collaboration with the archaeologist and the physical anthropologist in our department.

We also take issue with Sahar Rooholamini’s statement that, "The disciplines are so diverse, you can’t expect collaboration." Women’s Studies is well represented in each of the four sub-fields of Anthropology, and Anthropology is well represented within Women’s Studies. Pomona College has had two different persons in the Women’s Studies/Anthropology position prior to this year. Scripps College has an anthropologist in a Women’s Studies faculty position, and at least three members of the Pitzer Anthropology faculty are also members of the Women’s Studies faculty. In addition, in the course of two searches to fill the Pomona Women’s Studies in Anthropology position in the past few years we have had applications from numerous candidates qualified as scholars in both Women’s Studies and in Anthropology. The difficulty is not that the two disciplines are so diverse. Rather the difficulty lies in the particular needs of the two departments involved. The areas of theoretical and methodological overlap between these sets of needs simply left too few potential candidates to make a successful search likely, though we note that this same search strategy was successful in hiring Dr. Nandini Gunewardena two years ago.

Sincerely,

Ralph Bolton

Mark Jenike

Lynn Thomas