$200 million gift creates rift at NYU
New York University triumphantly announced last week that it had received a $200 million gift to finance a new Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, designed as a haven for top-notch, cross-disciplinary scholarship “across geographic and cultural boundaries.”
But while celebrated in certain quarters at NYU, the mammoth gift has laid bare deep divisions among anthropologists, art historians and others who study antiquity at the university and elsewhere in academe, centered around fundamental questions about how best to study ancient worlds and thorny disputes between museums and scholars over whether collecting ancient objects encourages the looting of archaeological sites.
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But while celebrated in certain quarters at NYU, the mammoth gift has laid bare deep divisions among anthropologists, art historians and others who study antiquity at the university and elsewhere in academe, centered around fundamental questions about how best to study ancient worlds and thorny disputes between museums and scholars over whether collecting ancient objects encourages the looting of archaeological sites.