Farewell Lord Jeffrey Amherst: Debate over Amherst College's institutional anchorage in history (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last quarter century or more there has been continuous debate in American colleges and universities over the use of icons and mascots as identity markers and subjects of dramatized playing field appearances and of rouse songs. For the most part these icons and mascots have been essentialized American Indians. The Amherst case is unique. The icon, mascot and song subject is an historical figure, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the British general ultimately victorious in the French and Indian Wars of the mid‐18th century in America. Recently there has been considerable debate at Amherst College about General Lord Amherst as an appropriate icon because he is also associated with a failed Indian policy and the genocidal use of smallpox blankets against the Indians. He has long been in disrepute for these actions among anthropologists specializing in Native American studies and among historians of the 18th century in America. This article examines the historical reasons for the present debate and the principal differences at play.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".