Scrapbook
Scrapbook Up to Date in New York City Back in March, the Immigration and Naturalization Service made headlines when it was revealed that the INS had sent letters to a Florida flight school...
...As Iain Murray of the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), a non-partisan media watchdog group, points out, "the Justice Policy Institute is comparing apples and oranges...
...In fact, when you compare the numbers for college-age black males in prison versus those in college (and substitute the more accurate 2001 Census Bureau data, which show 815,000 black males enrolled in college, as compared with the 603,000 claimed by JPI), you find that black males aged 18-24 are 2.5 times more likely to be in college than in jail...
...They would make a final report by summer's end, the university promised...
...But now Emory has punted again, postponing the unpleasant work of punishing a blatantly dishonest colleague...
...On more than one occasion Emory faculty members privately complained to us that this was an unfair assessment...
...seems to be taking the long way around to passing judgment...
...College vs...
...The Philadelphia Inquirer reported recently that the head of the INS, James Ziglar, told President Bush that he'll soon be stepping down...
...It's sad but not surprising...
...It has now come to The Scrap-BOOK's attention that the website of the INS's New York City field office is similarly as fresh as yesterday's headlines...
...This proved to be another highly selective defense that failed to answer questions about Bellesiles's use of records whose existence couldn't be verified, irregular data that couldn't be duplicated, historical texts that had been misrepresented, and so on...
...Now that their school is paying Bellesiles another semester's salary for a job not done, we wonder if they still feel that way...
...Why should Emory...
...The Cowards of Academe, cont...
...He did so in a disingenuous and incomplete account published in an unrefereed newsletter...
...Last fall, the head of Emory's history department encouraged Bellesiles to address his critics' charges of falsified evidence and widespread error...
...Of the 19 hijackers, 15 turned out to have been issued valid travel, student, or business visas...
...Yet that's exactly what happened last week, when the Times's Fox But-terfield wrote up a new study from the Justice Policy Institute—"a Washington-based research and advocacy group that supports alternatives to incarceration"—claiming that "more black men are behind bars than are enrolled in colleges or universities...
...University officials then let it be known that they were waiting for an ostensibly definitive accounting from Bellesiles, to be published in the spring issue of the William and Mary Quarterly...
...After giving Bellesiles's book its imprimatur, Columbia University and the Bancroft judges never publicly admitted error...
...It's sadder still that the NAACP thinks more government spending on colleges would cause incarceration rates to drop...
...David Skinner's June 10 article in these pages ("The Cowards of Academe") noted that "Emory...
...It took us roughly 45 minutes and 10 transferred calls just to locate the public affairs office, which did not respond to our inquiries by press time...
...Butterfield also touts JPI's claim that the number of black men in prison has quintupled during the past 20 years, and that this ominously coincides with "the prison construction boom that began in 1980...
...Curious, then, that the INS homepage features a cityscape of New York with the Twin Towers still standing tall, as if nothing had ever happened...
...Emory University has announced a stay of execution for tenured history professor Michael Bellesiles, who is being placed on paid leave for the fall semester...
...Emory then took the step in February of announcing an internal investigation...
...Buried near the end of his article are figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics showing that the number of Americans of all races in prison has quadrupled since 1980...
...Prison Race relations in America certainly don't improve when the demagogic soundbites of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are given credibility by junk social science, and when such social science is swallowed whole by the New York Times...
...You can go to prison at any age, but are most likely to be in college between the ages of 18-24...
...That now looks generous, though not nearly as generous as Emory is being to Bellesiles...
...Trying to get an answer as to why they would leave this photograph as their greeting card, The Scrapbook has come to understand firsthand how the letters might have gotten lost in the bureaucratic shuffle...
...Meanwhile, director of the NAACP's Washington chapter predictably commented: "It is indeed a sad statement about our nation that it appears to be easier for governments to invest precious public dollars into the incarceration of African-American men than it is for them to invest in higher education...
...On it, they promise that their home page "brings you the latest and most accurate information available about the services we provide at the New York City District Office...
...This failed to clear Bellesiles's name, and a committee of outside academics was hired to look into the matter...
...On the subject of crime, perhaps such credulous rehashing of misleading press releases should be expected from the paper that was once dense enough to headline a Butterfield dispatch, "Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling...
...Bellesiles is the author of Arming America, an anti-gun history that was given the prestigious Bancroft prize in 2001 by Columbia University, even as it was coming under attack for several varieties of phoniness...
...As with everything else related to the INS, a model of inefficiency, we predict it won't be soon enough...
...Scrapbook Up to Date in New York City Back in March, the Immigration and Naturalization Service made headlines when it was revealed that the INS had sent letters to a Florida flight school indicating that Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi had been approved for student visas—visas they obviously wouldn't be needing unless it was to impress the 72 black-eyed virgins Allah had assigned them for flying passenger jets through the World Trade Center six months to the day before the letters were sent...
Vol. 7 • September 2002 • No. 48
