Stanford's Vendetta Against an Independent Mind

...For nearly forty years, our policy has been guided by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black's opinion that "neither a state nor the Federal Government" has the constitutional right to "pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another" and that, consequently, "no tax in any 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986...

...And our government needs the church because those humble enough to admit they are sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order Paul A. Rahe is a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs...

...Like the charges themselves, the relation-ship, if any, of the "disputed object" to Mosher's allegedly illegal conduct remains mysterious...

...Moreover, as Kennedy admits, the incident was totally unrelated to any of the allegations leading to his termination...

...0...

...That same library had also figured in her original statement...

...It is "little more than arrogance," he told a Washington audience, to believe that anyone can "gauge the intent of the Framers...

...The truth is," he told the assembled multitude, politics and morality are inseparable...

...Mary Mainland is a lawyer in Stanford, California...

...In only one instance can he show that Mosher lied with respect to an issue that is at all material...

...For example, she initially stated that she had to photograph documents for Mosher in the sunlight because the camera he was then using had no flash equipment...

...It does not, however, prove her underlying charge that he never bought the camera and instead used the funds for illegal purposes...

...For ex-ample, in 1979, Mosher wrote his faculty adviser that donation of a van to the commune in which he was staying would make officials more receptive to his requests for data, but, in 1981, he characterized the donation as a "gift of the heart...

...For one thing, its relevance to the charges is minimal...

...Kennedy explicitly states that the case against Mosher rested largely on evidence sup-plied by her, and that one of the charges "stands or falls" on her overall credibility...

...Buried at the very end of the letter is confirmation that the People's Republic of China did indeed bring direct pressure on the university in an effort to influence its decision...

...In a phone conversation on October 21, 1984, she changed her story, recalling that Mosher had used flash equipment to take pictures in a Chinese library they had visited...

...The camera was never the subject of any charges, so Mosher's failure to return it took on significance only when Kennedy proved, sometime in the late spring or early summer of 1985, that the receipt was false...

...In other words, Mosher was apparently required to disprove his ex-wife's allegations...

...For another, familiarity with her ex-husband's less than meticulous accounting practices—his advisers had to remind him to submit his accounts—could have enabled her to make a shrewd guess...

...Ironically, its effect is to deepen, rather than to allay, suspicions that the university's action was prompted by pressure from the Chinese government...

...According to Kennedy, "informal information surfaced" in the spring of 1981 that led the university to commence a formal investigation of Mosher in October of that year...

...consular official in Canton is essentially corroborated by the official, who also disputes Miss So's assertion that she was present...

...result of the incident was to force Mosher to curtail his trip and apologize to the Chinese...

...It did not, however, disclose the specific charges against him...

...In the book's epilogue, however, he discloses that six months after his aborted trip, when he had returned to Taiwan and published his offending article, he learned that the Ministry of Public Security in Peking was spreading allegations against him among visiting academic delegations...

...Kennedy even dredges up a 1977 incident in which, by falsely claiming to be an active naval officer with a "top-secret" clearance, and thus able to act as a courier of top-secret documents, Mosher, a former naval officer withonly a "secret" clearance, cadged a free flight on military transport from Travis Air Force Base in California to Japan...

...Despite its requests, and after first indicating that he would do so, Mosher has refused to turn the camera over to the university, asserting that it belongs to him, and in any event, has been in Taiwan, broken, since before the proceedings began...

...The Kennedy letter, in the end, is considerably more damaging to Stan-ford than to Mosher, because it reveals that more than two years after his termination the university was still searching for evidence against him...

...Citing an unidentified Stanford professor, But-terfield revealed that it was a truck...

...confronted with the evidence, he explained that he had lost the original receipt in the course of his travels, and without informing the university, substituted a duplicate reconstructed from memory to comply with accounting requirements...

...This month marks the bicentennial of Virginia's adoption of Thomas Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, and the problem of church and state is back in the news...

...to Taiwan, where he was doing research, at a time when he had no Stanford funding...

...As Kennedy concedes, the new evidence substantially undermines the university's case, by seriously discrediting its chief witness...

...As Mosher pointed out, she did not contact the university until after the divorce had become final...

...He also alleges that, in 1982, the Chinese government sent a document to Stan-ford claiming, among other things, that his trip had been taken without official permission, and hinting that, unless the university dealt with him severely, the scholarly exchange program would be cut back...

...She claimed, for example, that she and Mosher shopped in Hong Kong for "the disputed object" between January 17 and January 24,1980...

...The "letter" actually consists of two separate but interrelated documents: a formal letter in which Kennedy discusses the procedure and substance of the case, and an attached appendix in which he analyzes additional evidence submitted by Mosher during the course of the appeal...

...He does not, however, contend that it would normally have warranted any penalty beyond rejection of the dissertation...

...Despite the lofty rhetoric about the anthropology department's "obligation to the profession" to "certify" the compliance of its graduates with such "professional imperatives" as "sensitivity to others" and "unquestioned honesty," Kennedy's emphasis on Mosher's lack of candor clearly serves a much more basic function: to shore up the credibility of Mosher's chief accuser, his ex-wife Maggie So...

...But the letter provides an even more damaging insight into the case whose significance Kennedy seems not to appreciate...

...Despite assiduous efforts, which included hiring an investigator in Hong Kong, he managed to detect only one outright lie told by Mosher...

...we command no worship, we mandate no belief...

...In accounting for his grant expenditures, Mosher submitted a sales receipt for a Nikon camera and related equipment costing about $2,000 and purchased in Hong Kong in April 1980 with funds authorized for the purpose...

...These "conflicting stories," writes Kennedy, are "of concern in connection with your candor and the accuracy with which you report your activities...

...The penultimate paragraph reveals that, while the appeal was before him, Kennedy received a letter dated June 22, 1984 from a PRC official named Wang Ping, containing the following passage: During and after his stay in China, Mosher's behavior seriously damaged the cultural and scholastic exchange between China and the United States...

...The obvious implication is that, from the outset, the burden of proof was borne by Mosher, not by his accusers...

...We believe that you are just as concerned as we are...

...Kennedy alludes to the book in his letter, but does not deny this allegation, stating only that he found no evidence of threats to anyone involved in Mosher's termination...

...Yet if memory serves, the Mosher let-ter, more than a year later, is the first time Kennedy has made the communication public, and his sole comment is notably restrained: "This does sound like a threat and as such casts discredit on its author...

...This fall Justice William J. Brennan replied...

...Upon analysis, the evidence seems a good deal less than compelling...

...While damaging, it is only tangentially related to any of the charges: Its principal importance is that it apparently lends credence to Miss So...

...As depicted by Kennedy, Mosher is not exactly a monster of depravity, but he is so opportunistic, manipulative, and, above all, "lacking in candor," as to justify the anthropology department's refusal to "certify" him as an anthropologist...

...For the future normal and beneficial ex-change between our two countries, I trust that you will make a correct judgment, based on the facts, and properly handle this matter...

...Kennedy does not discuss the circumstances of the arrest, but Mosher's most recent book, Journey to the For-bidden Ching' states that it occurred during a motor trip he took to the interior of south China, after completion of his formal research in the Pearl River Delta...

...has signified, and all that a faculty "certifies" in awarding it, is its possessor's fulfillment of specified academic requirements...

...To put it bluntly, she is the sort of witness upon whom only the most desperate prosecutors would care to rely...

...we court corruption when we leave it bereft of belief...

...Kennedy admits that, as a result of the new evidence, he could no longer find her story "strongly persuasive...

...to survive...

...Furthermore, the discovery does not appreciably enhance the credibility of Miss So...

...There are inconsistencies between her initial written statement md statements made by her in subsequent phone conversations with university officials that further impair her credibility, even though, for the most part, they pertain to relatively minor matters...

...According to Mosher, she never did any photography for him, and his camera, a Canon, had flash equipment that he used to make slides indoors...

...The university could not rebut Mosher's denial, but it would appear from the letter that, in any event, such a gift would not have been illegal...

...The forgery, however, lends credence to Miss So's expressed belief that he submitted false receipts...

...Kennedy's letter to Mosher advising him of the discovery is not quoted, but Mosher's September 21 response as quoted gives no hint of the realization that it might be crucial to his credibility to produce it...

...Mosher's passport shows that he was not in Hong Kong during that period...

...Mosher, it may be recalled, was the graduate student whose anthropological research in rural China during 1979 and 1980 led to a best-selling book, Broken Earth...

...Had Kennedy simply denied the appeal without comment, the decision would probably have attracted relatively little attention...

...Although an academic I know quipped that it would decimate the nation's graduate schools, perhaps universities should require doctoral candidates to meet ethical, as well as scholarly, standards...

...Stanford denied this, claiming that Mosher was dismissed for illegal and seriously improper conduct unrelated to the article or to pressure from the PRC...

...We establish no religion in this country nor will we ever...

...According to Kennedy, the parties agree that disclosure of the charges would endanger innocent parties...

...Mosher's motives may have changed during the time he spent with the commune before he made the donation, but more importantly, they are irrelevant: Again, nothing suggests that the donation was illegal, and Kennedy is careful to state that there was no evidence the gift enabled Mosher to acquire secret documents or to secure unlawful access to documents...

...on the other hand, his failure to bring legal action will appear to lend credence to the aspersions cast on his character by the university, which was careful to stick to innuendo, and eschew outright misrepresentation...

...No smoking gun is likely to be found, but those who can remain convinced after reading Kennedy's letter that Mosher's termination was unrelated to Chinese pressure are likely purchasers for an East Coast bridge that periodically comes on the market...

...A 75-page letter that lacks the most pertinent information is like the ink cloud emitted by a squid, veiling its contours while signifying its presence...

...If so, non-disclosure seems warranted, but it necessarily precludes any evaluation of the merits of the university's case...

...They still can't: For all its length, the letter does not divulge the charges that were the grounds for the termination...

...A little less than a year later, Secretary of Education William J. Bennett lashed out at the Supreme Court...

...Nevertheless, his willingness to give the PRC the benefit of the doubt is in striking contrast to the determinedly judgmental attitude to Mosher displayed in the preceding pages...

...Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, served as head of the FDA under Jimmy Carter...

...Until a handwriting expert hired by the university discovered that the receipt was in Mosher's handwriting, he had insisted, most recently at a May 1985 meeting with Kennedy, that it was the original receipt...

...in it, she claimed that while engaged in photographing documents in the sunlight she turned to find Mosher breaking into the library to obtain access to documents...

...For Kennedy to characterize as "simply not credible" Mosher's claim that he thought it unnecessary to mention a "minor and closed" incident thus seems inexplicable—unless, that is, it had ramifications that Kennedy prefers not to go into...

...Vehemently denied by Mosher, this is only one of several allegations as to which there is only her word against his...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 17 truth, and to search for evidence to rehabilitate his star witness...

...There can be no more appropriate time for re-examining the words and deeds of the Founding Fathers and for determining whether the arguments made by our current President and the charges lodged by the leading figures within his Administration are just or not...

...Mosher's version of what transpired at a meeting with a U.S...

...We current justices read the Constitution in the only way we can: as twentieth-century Americans...

...In-stead, Kennedy rekindled the controversy by making public a 75-page letter to Mosher whose only apparent purpose was to gain popular support for the university's position by discrediting Mosher...

...Bennett even suggested that the court's decisions reflect "a hostility toward religion...

...a week after obtaining Mosher's admission he released his let-ter...

...So much for ethics in academia...

...As Kennedy presumably hoped, this fact has been more or less ignored in journalistic coverage of the decision...

...One can readily imagine his prompt and vigorous public protest had a similarly blatant intervention in the university's internal governance come from, say, the Reagan Administration or South Africa...

...By then, ac-cording to Mosher's testimony at his February 1983 termination hearing, it had been in Taiwan for at least two and a half years, and, in the interim, he would have had little incentive to retrieve it...

...In February 1983, Stanford's Department of Anthropology terminated his status as a graduate student, an action that Mosher charged was in-tended to dissuade the Chinese from imposing restrictions on other foreign 'See "Broken Faith: Steven Mosher, Stan-ford, and China," by Miriam London and Ta-ling Lee, in the February 1984 American Spectator...

...although he believed that much of it was true, he could not be "sufficiently certain of which parts are correct...

...Traditionally, all that a Ph.D...

...Within a week, Attorney General Edwin Meese III joined the assault, arguing that "strict neutrality between religion and irreligion would have struck the founding generation as somewhat bizarre...

...Mary Mainland STANFORD'S VENDETTA AGAINST AN INDEPENDENT MIND Steven Mosher: guilty until proven guilty...

...Kennedy does not contend that it does, but he strongly suggests that Mosher's failure to return the camera virtually compels the inference that he never had it...

...Most news stories highlighted Kennedy's accusation that Mosher lied to him during the course of the investigation, while Fox Butterfield, in an article that appeared on October 5 in the New York Times, focused on the identity of something referred to in the let-ter as "the disputed object...

...Prior to the release of Kennedy's let-ter, members of the general public could not determine whether it was the university or Mosher who was lying...

...It is similarly immaterial, if "lacking in candor," that Mosher failed to disclose that a woman who was paid for translations of his article later became his second wife, because the faculty committee considering the case concluded that Mosher could rightfully have received payment had he himself done the translating...

...Her determination to revenge herself on Mosher for divorcing her and marrying his research assistant is confirmed by a letter from her former apartment-mate who heard her make the threat, and who also stated that she knew Miss So to be less than truthful...

...The fact remains that, to date, they have not done so, as Kennedy's failure to disclose even one previous in-stance where a doctorate was denied on moral or ethical grounds tacitly admits...

...scholars in retaliation for his article...

...In any event, Kennedy gave him no opportunity to do so...

...Buried at the very end of the letter is confirmation that the PRC did in-deed bring direct pressure on the university in an effort to influence its decision...

...He states that the faculty committee considering the case found Miss So's evidence highly persuasive "when aggregated with" Mosher's "lack of candor" and the fact that, in the main, her evidence was controverted only by his denials...

...Yet Mosher's explanation for the duplicate receipt is credible, and Kennedy admits that some of the photo-graphs he submitted appear to have been taken with specialized equipment...

...On September 30, after the case had been before him for almost two years, Stanford University President Donald Kennedy finally rendered a decision upholding the termination of Steven Mosher from Stanford's doctoral pro-gram in anthropology...

...Mosher now lives in California...

...Several of her statements are controverted by in-dependent evidence...

...Paul A. Rahe CHURCH AND STATE Jefferson, Madison, and 200 Years of Religious Freedom...

...Mosher's substitution, without prior notice to the faculty, of a first draft of Broken Earth for the demographic comparison of two Taiwan communities that was originally to constitute his dissertation is excoriated by Kennedy as "an abuse of the academic relationship...

...Whether he succeeds is debatable—readers are likely to find Mosher more lacking in judgment than in ethics—but even more dubious is the claim that character defects constitute valid grounds for dismissal from a doctoral program...

...Two summers ago, on the morning after he had accepted the Republican nomination, Ronald Reagan delivered a controversial speech at an ecumenical prayer breakfast...

...It also led him to write an article that appeared in a Taiwan newspaper in May 1981, revealing that the stringent birth control policy of the People's Republic of China included coerced, late-term abortions...

...And as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related: We need religion as a guide...

...Kennedy can point to no pre-existing university or department rule or practice that would sanction denial of a doctorate for non-academic reasons...

...Apparently Mosher ex-pressed disbelief that the university would take her charges seriously, and from the appendix it is easy to see why...

...For the most part, the "evidence' is of such marginal significance as to cast more doubt on the judgment or motives of Kennedy in including it than on Mosher...

...But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings...

...Its inclusion in a letter purporting to deal with the termination reflects the zeal with which Kennedy seeks to demonstrate a pat-tern of unethical and manipulative conduct on Mosher's part...

...Obviously, if there were precedents for the Mosher case he would have cited them...

...What the university is trying to conceal becomes the salient issue...

...we need it because we are imperfect...

...A judge or juror, of course, is expected to report any tampering attempt immediately...

...By that time, however, Mosher had seen enough to know why the rural interior is "forbidden" to foreign travelers: Its desperate poverty revealed all too clearly that the PRC, like the Soviet government before it, has extracted funds for industrialization and urban development from a peasantry that, in large part, is virtually starving...

...It is impossible to disprove Kennedy's assertion that the decision was made despite, rather than because of, 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 what not only "sounds like" but clearly is a subtle but unmistakable threat...

...One cannot condone the deception, but its purpose was no more nefarious than to reduce the costs of travel from the U.S...

...Neither failure to return the camera norfalsification of accounts was among the charges levied against him...

...Mosher's travel permit was canceled, but he was not expelled from China...

...In order to uphold the termination, he had little choice but to ferret out Mosher's every transgression and halfThe evidence presented by Kennedy, however, falls far short of substantiating such a devastating assessment...

...Mosher's termination had been upheld at the two previous levels of the university's internal review process, and other burning issues had long since sup-planted it in the public spotlight...

...Whatever the charges against him entail, nothing suggests that they relate to Mosher's academic performance or that he violated accepted canons of scholar-ship by, say, fabricating research data...

...The letter indicates that she merely voiced the suspicion that he had submitted false receipts, rather than flatly asserting that he had done so...

...Neither Butterfield nor the letter, however, disclosed the significance of the object, which Mosher may or may not have given to a Chinese commune...

...But the only apparent 2 The Free Press, $17.95...

...Perhaps it was ill-advised of Mosher not to inform his faculty advisers, until asked, of a brief arrest by the Chinese after he had unwittingly entered a restricted area...

...Although he had received ' prior approval for the trip from Chinese officials in Canton, he was arrested in Kweichow province, far short of his intended destination, and told that the area was not yet open to foreigners...

...He termed "terrible" two recent court rulings—one that barred public schools from discreetly encouraging religious belief by setting time aside for silent prayer, and another that prohibited public schoolteachers from conducting remedial classes in parochial schools...

...Unfortunately, he and the university have been a little too obviously clever in confronting Mosher with an almost insoluble dilemma: A lawsuit that might eventually restore his good name and academic standing will also burden him with the onus of endangering others, for it will necessarily result in the charges becoming public...

...Nor does Kennedy help matters with his concluding comment that he hopes Mosher will accept the decision as "one arrived at with concern and good faith...