Jon Wiener's Historians in Trouble

...As in the Abraham case, a senior academic, James Lindgren of Northwestern Law School, discharged the first volley against Bellesiles...

...Perhaps most alarming is that Columbia was pressured into a special investigation in the first place, instead of insisting that standard grievance procedures be followed...

...The AHA argues that it lacks the resources to do independent investigations...

...Investigation showed that these claims were without any foundation, a conclusion that has been repeated in most investigations of charges that leftists on campus are suppressing the free speech of conservatives...

...FVEN IF NOT ALL of Wiener's cases fit the pattern, his conclusion remains indisI putable: that the fate of academic miscreants often depends on the power of those they offend and their determination to bully...

...An investigation found only one specific allegation of a professor's unprofessional conduct: that a student was allegedly asked to leave a classroom after arguing that Israel provides civilians with advance warning of attacks...

...If it set out to adjudicate accusations, it would have to provide the accused with due-process procedural rights...

...But he was unable to get a job, and Princeton University Press refused to publish a corrected version of his book...

...All charges of dishonesty on his part were shown to be false, and, equally important, the errors were not such as to strengthen his argument...

...Flawed as they are, universities and colleges have nevertheless operated as models and reminders of our political commitment to that freedom...

...Turner and Feldman and graduate students they dragooned spent hundreds of hours checking the footnotes and quotations...

...Wiener's point is not that some scholars have been persecuted or that the academy is too tough on human error...

...As head of the National Archives, he is in charge of keeping the historical record of what our government does...

...Certainly the Bellesiles case suggests that liberals as well as conservatives can be uncritical of research that says what they like to hear...

...At Columbia University, The David Project, a Boston-based organization, produced a film charging three professors with making pro-Israel students feel academically threatened...

...Conservative historians Henry Turner of Yale and Gerald Feldman of the University of California-Berkeley, angered by Abraham's argument, set out to destroy him—yes, that's right, not to argue against him but to end his academic career...

...Although it has no sanctions to apply, the AHA could, Wiener argues, publicize the findings of its investigations and thereby pressure universities and other institutions to take action...

...Lawrence Stone, the distinguished Princeton historian, commented that he'd "never seen a witch hunt like this . . ." Abraham had made numerous errors in his footnotes...

...policy in Iraq or criticize Israeli and U.S...

...On the contrary...

...However, no allegation of fraud against Bellesiles was substantiated, despite the marathon checking of every piece of data...

...In monitoring scholarship, especially where differences of opinion are strong, authorities must always lean to the side of freedom of expression...

...But it is stunning to learn that he did the same thing in 1999...

...Turner had been writing a defense of German business (German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, 1985) and was infuriated that the younger scholar had preemptively challenged him...

...It argued, in a Marxist vein, that German big business colluded in the ascent of the Nazi regime...

...The cold war, for example, dampened free inquiry and shut off whole subjects from scrutiny...

...Emory established an outside committee of three distinguished historians who found Bellesiles's work unprofessional and misleading, but did not agree that he was guilty of fraud...

...Although conservatives have often attacked intellectuals who say unpopular things, attacks on those who challenge U.S...

...The organized right wing is today reviving a McCarthyist strategy: to challenge dissent in higher education...

...WIENER WRITES about two cases involving harassment in which the culprits got off free or, worse, got rewarded...

...Equally instructive is the case of Edward Pearson, who studied the slave Denmark Vesey and the rebellion he allegedly plotted in 1821...

...He went to law school and now teaches law at the University of Miami...

...He argues that it was wrong for the outside committee that reviewed Bellesiles's case to have confined its inquiry to a narrow set of questions (limited to whether there was "intentional fabrication or falsification of research data" from probate records) put by Emory University...

...Similarly, Joseph Ellis, who claimed falsely to have fought in Vietnam...

...Wiener's book offers a vivid example...

...They are never immune to political conflict, nor should they be, but they can preserve and promote a culture of respect for free speech along with their commitment to scholarly accuracy and acknowledgment of intellectual debts...

...He was soon joined by Ronald Radosh, David Horowitz, and Harvey Klehr...

...policy as treachery and dissenters as traitors...

...Johnson argued that there was no Vesey conspiracy against slavery...

...Lawrence Stone again: "When you work in the archives, you're far from home . . . you're in a hurry, you're scribbling like crazy...

...Universities and colleges serve not only to educate and to produce new understandings of the world but also as sites of free expression...

...This is a clear violation of the fundamental ethical obligation of any scholar...

...He concludes that the outcomes are by no means always determined by the seriousness of the charges or the weight of the evidence or, for that matter, the reputations of the scholars accused...

...Disclosure: I have used the National Archives extensively in my own research...

...Wiener suggests that, by sticking to these questions, it abdicated responsibility for evaluating the context and overall severity of his misrepresentations...

...You're bound to make mistakes...

...but Vassiliev complains that he never saw Weinstein's manuscript before publication and afterward disagreed with some of its claims...

...Abraham's problem, Wiener argues, was not his Marxism but his clash with powerful senior historians and the failure of academic institutions to stand up to their bullying...

...Given these constraints, the AHA decided that publicity, along with university and/or publishers' sanctions, might be the best punishment for such offenses...

...Wiener cannot argue that this defense was wrong, as Cinel was never charged with a crime and there were no allegations that he behaved unprofessionally at CUNY...

...Yes, of course, universities have always been influenced by politics...

...There is very little indication that liberals have engaged in comparable offensives against conservative intellectuals...

...This access has long been limited by the practice of "classifying" documents deemed potentially damaging to national security, and historians frequently do us all the favor of contesting those classifications...

...For his book on Soviet espionage, The Haunted Wood, Weinstein paid $100,000 to some ex-KGB agents for exclusive access to KGB archives...

...Instead, what most determined the resolution of these disputes was the presence or absence of powerful outside interest groups...

...One fits his model: former feminist turned extreme conservative Elizabeth FoxGenovese faced more than a dozen complaints of harassment from co-workers and students in Emory's women's studies program...

...but the professor and several student eyewitnesses deny that it happened...

...and do all this while continuing its normal work of representing thousands of historians...

...Pearson treated summaries of Vesey's case as transcripts of a trial and committed hundreds of errors in citing this alleged transcript...

...Many of the cases reflect a serious assault on academic freedom, research integrity, and free speech even as they discipline some scholarly lapses...

...As if this were not bad enough, Weinstein cannot read Russian and depended on his co-author, Alexander Vassiliev, to translate...

...Pearson, who was quite sympathetic to Vesey, made errors that did indeed undermine his entire argument...

...At Harvard, Stephan Thernstrom charged that black students were harassing him and attempting to force him to toe a politically correct line...

...This record is a key source for writing history, but more important, the availability of these documents to the public is the guarantor of accountable government...

...They reveal not only scholarly misdeeds but also recent increases in threats to free debate and intellectual integrity...

...HISTORIANS IN TROUBLE: PLAGIARISM, FRAUD AND POLITICS IN THE IVORY TOWER by Jonathan Wiener New Press, 2005 260 pp $24.95 SCANDALS ABOUT historians have grabbed public attention lately, most of all the plagiarism by popular pundits Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen Ambrose...

...Her most recent book is The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, winner of both the Bancroft and the Beveridge prizes...

...The court, in secret, questioned witnesses of the prosecution's choosing, decided Vesey was guilty, and hanged him along with many others...

...I OW CONSIDER two scholars who were, by contrast, punished severely rather — than appointed to government office...

...Consider the case of anti-Bellesiles campaigner and gun lobbyist John Lott, whose 1998 More Guns, Less Crime argues that guns deter violence...

...Newt Gingrich has called for universities to fire faculty who are insufficiently patriotic...

...In this very readable book, Wiener takes us through the cases of twelve different historians...

...Emory declined to initiate an investigation, and Fox-Genovese still teaches there...

...and in the 1960s and 1970s, radical social movements demanded and won more diverse and inclusive curricula in American universities and even many high schools...

...In 1978, Weinstein published Perjury, a book that proved, he claimed, that Alger Hiss was guilty of espionage-related perjury in 1948...

...In other words, Wiener points out, he paid archivists to refuse access to others...

...Ironically, pro-gun conBOOKS servatives also criticize Emory's committee, for glossing over the full extent of Bellesiles's fraud...

...and Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, who admitted plagiarism, continued their careers with little cost...

...Hiss was convicted in 1950 in a case that boiled down to his word against that of his accuser, Whittaker Chambers...

...So he asked Weinstein if he could listen to the tapes of the interviews...

...In his defense, he sent himself hundreds of e-mails praising his work—from a fictitious "Mary DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 117 BOOKS Rosh" who turned out to be Lott himself...

...In addition, they consider themselves ethically obliged not to publicize, until proven, accusations that could tarnish a reputation...

...I don't believe any scholar . . . has impeccable footnotes...

...This scandal was ignored by the media that published his op-eds: three newspaper articles covered Lott's proven fraud as compared to sixtyone that carried stories on Bellesiles's inaccurate claims...

...Wiener reports that he omitted the not-guilty plea of five defendants and reversed the guilty plea of another to not guilty...

...choose "judges" and prosecutors...

...Wiener also criticizes the behavior of some university authorities in failing to stand up to political pressure, as in David Abraham's case...

...Conservatives are demanding that critical academic intellectuals be denied public forums and even fired...

...Weinstein agreed, but has stonewalled ever since...

...Unlike Abraham's, Bellesiles's inaccuracies did strengthen his argument...

...More serious charges, of fraudulent claims, dishonesty, and harassment, have received less publicity...

...The evidence Weinstein marshaled was unique: it consisted of new interviews that supported Chambers's claims...

...It stands out because it is the most overtly political, because the wrongdoing extends from 1978 to the present, and because Weinstein is currently the archivist of the United States...

...Abraham returned to a German archive and photocopied the document he had been accused of forging, but Turner refused BOOKS to retract the charge...

...This is, of course, part of what recommended him to the Bush administration...

...This time a very big gun stood behind them: the National Rifle Association...

...Journalists covering cases of scholarly malfeasance also have an obligation to consider the play of interests and pressures in the context—as they should do for any story...

...He is highlighting the extremely unequal treatment of offenders—their punishment determined not by the severity of their offense but by the power and politics of those they offend...

...Turner charged that Abraham had forged a document...

...Its campaign against Bellesiles was scurrilous and threatening, and Wiener believes that historians who examined the case were swayed by that campaign...

...Not since the cold war has there been such strong pressure to label dissent from U.S...

...A good recent summary of these principles was recently produced by the American Historical Association and can be found at www.historians.org/pubs/Free/Professional Standards.cfm) The very purpose of footnotes is to allow a reader to independently verify an author's claims...

...Wiener considers similar the case of Michael Bellesiles of Emory University, who in 2000 published a book (Arming America) challenging the widely held view that eighteenth-century Americans typically owned firearms...

...He contacted six of the interviewees and all six told him that they had been either "misquoted, misrepre16 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 sented, or misconstrued...

...The year-by-year story of Weinstein's refusal to offer any proof for his conclusion is upsetting...

...Most astonishing, another historian of race in the South, Michael P. Johnson, showed that Vesey never had a real trial at all...

...Abraham admitted and corrected his errors...

...Moreover, AHA leaders point out, they would be vulnerable to suits should they make public accusations, and legal costs would escalate...

...Academic scholars followed the coverage closely, and more than a few will admit to a smidgen of schadenfreude that such financially successful and celebrated writers were embarrassed...

...if you avoid offending them, you may be able to get away with a lot...

...But we cannot compare his record with that of other historians because there is no record that anyone had previously been subject to such scrutiny...

...The editor of the Nation, Victor Navasky, had his doubts...

...Bullying represents a frequent conservative strategy in these cases...

...Indeed, President Bush the First gave her the National Humanities Medal...

...and he wrote that one set of probate records was located in San Francisco when it was actually in Contra Costa County...

...Jonathan Wiener argues that powerful conservative interests silence academics they don't like and promote those they do and that the professional organizations, such as the American Historical Association, do not sufficiently defend intellectual integrity...

...He claimed at first to be using polls from Gallup, the Los Angeles Times, and Peter Hart Research Associates...

...But the negative aspects are far greater...

...These scandals may have had the one positive effect of making scholars even more careful with evidence and footnotes...

...Pearson accepted the truth of Johnson's critique, but he retains his job as chair of the history department at Franklin and Marshall College, although his book was withdrawn from publication...

...I dwell on this because Weinstein's worst offenses involve refusing to let people see historical sources that should be public...

...The most egregious case is that of Allen Weinstein...

...The stories he tells of allegations, defenses, media coverage, and outcomes rest on considerable research, and most are revisions of articles that originally appeared in the Nation and the late Lingua Franca...

...But the case of ex-Catholic priest Dino Cinel does not fit: defrocked in 1988 for making 160 hours of porn videos of himself having sex with teenage boys, he was then hired by the City University of New York...

...Turner and Feldman even tried, unsuccessfully, to get the University of Chicago to rescind Abraham's Ph.D...

...Wiener goes on to reproach the American Historical Association for rejecting the responsibility to enforce its ethical standards...

...Another disclosure: in her Marxist and feminist days, she published a spirited critique of those critics of my work who were condemning its politics without addressing its arguments and evi118 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 dence...

...These battles are important to all of us...

...But other thoughtful and fair-minded historians disagree with Wiener and consider Bellesiles's errors quantitatively and qualitatively greater...

...Feldman joined the fight by attacking Abraham's integrity and threatening to make a stink with every university administration whose history department considered hiring Abraham...

...David Abraham published The Collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1981...

...Lott is currently employed at the American Enterprise Institute...

...And the University of Chicago Press did not withdraw Lott's book...

...Bellesiles lost his job and the Bancroft Prize his book had won, and his publisher refused to put out a corrected version, withdrawing the book entirely...

...policy toward Palestine are multiplying...

...Wiener makes no claim to have surveyed or taken a fair sample of these allegations, but the stories he tells are sobering...

...Meanwhile, for historians the lesson may be, if you say something threatening to conservative interests, you should expect minute scrutiny of your work...

...The university and the union defended him when his history came to light, so he managed to hang on to his position for five years before being dismissed...

...The sources Pearson relied on were the prosecution's presentation of its case...

...He invented his "data" out of whole cloth...

...David Abraham, Michael Bellesiles, John Lott, Allen Weinstein, and Elizabeth FoxGenovese were, alternately, targeted or protected by conservative ideologues...

...Asked to produce those polls, he then claimed that he had conducted his own survey, yet never produced any evidence of this either...

...Wiener boils his errors down to two of significance: in a table of gun ownership, he had omitted without explanation the years 1774 and 1775, because he knew that colonial governments were then passing out guns to militia members in anticipation of war...

...Archivists should guarantee the protection and accessibility of these materials...

...His conclusions about Soviet espionage, therefore, can never be checked—until, I imagine, some Russians decide to violate their agreement with Weinstein...

...LINDA GORDON is professor of history at New York University...

...DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 119...

...He misdated and misattributed one document, mistranslated another, and made dozens of lesser mistakes...

...In the last twenty years, however, allegaDISSENT / Summer 2005 n I 15 BOOKS tions of academic malfeasance have taken on new patterns...

...Rather, there was a white conspiracy against blacks, and several leading slaveholders said so at the time...