Issues in Scholarly Communication is a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, for the Illinois community. Entries from 2001-2005 newsletter are available.
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Pressure Prompts Publisher to Punt
A publisher of nearly 200 scholarly journals has canceled publication of a book on same-sex desire in ancient times, citing complaints from a conservative Web site that one chapter in the book “could be interpreted as advocating adult and adolescent sexuality.” Haworth Press, Inc. announced that its Harrington Park Press imprint would not publish Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West. The book was scheduled to appear as a freestanding title and as a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality, which Haworth also publishes, in November. The book, which is edited by two researchers at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University and includes the work of scholars at the University of California at Los Angeles, City University of New York’s Hunter College, and the University of Texas at Austin, among others, is generally a history of the role and perception of homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome. But it also features a chapter, called “Pederasty: An Integration of Cross-Cultural, Cross-Species, and Empirical Data,” by Bruce Rind, an assistant professor of psychology at Temple University. Last week, WorldNetDaily, a Web site that describes itself as independent but that often takes up conservative causes, published an article drawing attention to an abstract of Rind’s article that appeared on Haworth’s Web site, which began this way: “Pederasty, or sexual relations between men and adolescent boys, is condemned in our society as an unqualified evil that maims and destroys. In ancient Greece, samurai Japan, and numerous other cultures, pederasty was seen as the noblest of human relations, conducive if not essential to nurturing the adolescent’s successful intellectual and physical maturation.” Inside Higher Ed News 9/27/05 http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/09/27/publish
Posted by P. Kaufman at September 27, 2005 3:40 PM
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