“My Personal Ruin Passes Unnoticed”: Russell, Harvard, and the 1940 William James Lectureship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes the contentious debate among senior administrators of Harvard University regarding the choice of Russell as the 1940 William James Lecturer. In the aftermath of the City College of New York controversy, influential Harvard bureaucrats, alumni, and members of the general public pressured Harvard President James B. Conant to rescind Russell’s appointment. Utilizing the Russell Archives, Conant’s private papers and Corporation records held at the Harvard Archives, and Grenville Clark’s papers at Dartmouth College, the nature of the complex deliberations surrounding Russell’s appointment and his status as a controversial public figure can be ascertained. Ultimately, Harvard stood by Russell, who delivered the James Lectures in the autumn 1940 term without incident, an engagement that ended Russell’s formal involvement with Harvard extending back to the pre-World War 1 period.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".