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From the General Secretary: Shoddy Scholarship
By Mary A. Burgan
Everyone agrees that this is the "Information Age." Teaching is no longer a social and cultural practice but big business. Universities are supposed to become "knowledge industries," education (for the new technology) is high on every politician's promise list, and the delivery of courses on the Internet still appeals to some investors. That may be why there is special esteem for those public figures whose possession of advanced degrees has given them a claim on public information and interpretation. But in all the hype of this new regime, there seems to be little understanding of scholarship—the discipline of knowledge. The apparatus may be there-the footnote, the bar graph, the quote from James Madison—but it can cloak egregious misuse of sources and evidence.
Take, for example, the case of Stephen Ambrose, a former college professor who turns out best-selling historical narratives. He now allows as how the "method" he has developed for his blockbusters has overlooked the need to put quotation marks around borrowed sentences and phrases, but he admits that he once followed those protocols of scholarship that require exquisite care in documenting sources completely and accurately. Ambrose's current rationalization would raise eyebrows in any graduate introduction to research methods.
Though it offers some of the most striking recent samples, history is not the only discipline in which scholarship has been put at risk. Sloppiness in the social sciences thrives on the battlefield of the culture wars. Take neoconservative commentator David Horowitz's recent poll on the political leanings of Ivy League faculty (funded by his "think tank," the Center for the Study of Popular Culture). Relying on the impression that any set of numbers must tell a truth of some kind, Horowitz confidently displays the results of a sample of 151 humanities and social science professors in Ivy League schools as representing the opinion of "the faculty" at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and so on. He presents the responses as a reliable base for sweeping generalizations. In short, the poll Horowitz has issued would get an F in any undergraduate sociology or statistics course.
And the F minus among all the recent examples of shoddy "scholarship" is the "report" by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) entitled Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It, by Jerry L. Martin and Anne D. Neal. In profound reliance on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, the ACTA report invokes sheer numbers as proof of academe's lack of loyalty post-September 11—claiming that a "vast" number of institutions have sponsored responses that were ambivalent in condemning the terrorist attacks. The compilers claim to have gathered over a hundred "reactions" and then go on to give 117 examples with footnotes. But a close reading of the text reveals a carnival of gross offenses against scholarship. Many of the examples were so taken out of context that ACTA soon issued an amended report that removed the names of the accused professors. Context is still savaged in the report, however. The most amazing example is the citation of soul-searching statements from a Quaker meeting at Haverford College as among the incidents of disloyalty.
Other citations mix newspaper reports of faculty pronouncements with random student comments and even with crowd chants; every shred of hesitance or opposition on a select group of campuses is dragged in to enforce the thesis that "higher education . . . did not understand." And ACTA counts each statement from a single event as a fresh, new occasion of disloyalty. In fact, of the "vast number" of examples, sixteen seem to derive from a panel at Brown, thirteen from North Carolina, seven from the City University of New York, and five from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; over a third of ACTA's examples are drawn from four gatherings!
These samples of shoddy scholarship traipse out the accoutrements of research to validate their findings and the authority of their authors. When the perpetrators are caught out, they deny their lapses by appealing to the righteousness of their aims. Ambrose claims that his books are widely accepted because they tell stories that sweep the reader along. And both Horowitz and ACTA have reforms to implement, so why should they be distracted by the details? The academic tradition that these pundits betray is not an empty requirement for quotation marks, footnotes, a long bibliography, reliable numbers, or objective polling. It rejects the proposition that a little distortion never hurt anyone. In preparing our students for the information age, we professors tell them that scholarship is difficult and slow-that knowledge without contemplation, criticism, skepticism, is a dangerous thing.
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