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Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases That Shook the Academy and Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower
Reviewed by Ellen Schrecker
Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases That Shook the Academy
Ron Robin. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.
Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower
Jon Wiener. New York: The New Press, 2004.
Everybody loves a scandal, at least if it doesn’t have serious consequences. A voyeuristic pleasure accompanies the spectacle of the mighty brought low by their own misdeeds. So it’s no surprise that recent revelations of plagiarism and other forms of fraud among well-known writers and academics have spawned their own mini-industry of analysis. An earlier day would no doubt have dealt with these cases as personal matters, perhaps a subject for psychologizing about why good scholars went bad. In today’s contentious world of academe, however, the scandals have taken on broader meanings—cultural, if you subscribe to Ron Robin’s interpretation, or political, if you buy into Jon Wiener’s.
Both authors deal with many of the same cases. In Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases That Shook the Academy, Robin describes the plagiarism of “celebrity historians” like Stephen Ambrose, Stephen Oates, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, the misuse of evidence by historian Michael Bellesiles, and the manufactured Vietnam experiences of Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Ellis. He also covers three controversies among anthropologists and the hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal on the postmodern-studies journal Social Text. In Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower, Wiener sticks to his own field of history, adding a few more stories of fraud and sloppy research to the ones Robin recounts as well as looking at some well-known scholars whose misdeeds seem to have gone unpunished.
Unanswered questions abound. We do not know, perhaps cannot know, whether the incidence of academic fraud has increased over the past few years. As Wiener cogently explains, we have no baseline for determining how often scholars have faked their footnotes or borrowed the language of others without attribution. It seems likely that the vast majority of such cases escape detection. After all, historians rarely go over their colleagues’ footnotes with the kind of intensity that his opponents in the gun lobby turned on Bellesiles’s account of firearms in the early American republic or that Yale historian Henry Turner, Jr., applied to the documentation of former Princeton history professor David Abraham’s treatment of the fall of the Weimar Republic. Unless—and this, according to Wiener, is a crucial “unless”—some group or individual with a special agenda is on the case, most rev- elations of wrongdoing surface when the author of the original text encounters its burgled version, as happened when investigative journalist Lynne McTaggart recognized her own material in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 1987 The Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds.
What does seem to be new is that these misdeeds are now front-page news and get blogged throughout the cyberworld. In some cases the culprits are already in the public eye, like Goodwin or Ambrose; in others, the people who expose these scholarly lapses are themselves media savvy, like the journalist Patrick Tierney, who castigated several leading anthropologists for mistreating the Yanomami people of Brazil . At the same time, as Wiener demonstrates, many of the most flagrant cases of plagiarism and professional misbehavior escape media attention and are concealed even from other people in the field. If Mount Holyoke historian Joseph Ellis had not won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his best-selling biographies, it is unlikely that the Boston Globe would have exposed how he lied to his students about participating in the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Similarly, Robin notes, anthropologist David Stoll’s contention that Guatemalan peasant activist Rigoberto Menchú falsified some of her autobiography would not have gotten much attention had Menchú not received a Nobel Prize and her memoir not figured in the culture wars over the canon at Stanford University in the early 1990s.
It may also be significant that many protagonists in the most notorious cases are not regular scholars. Instead, they are what Robin calls “hybrid historians,” authors like Oates, Ambrose, and Goodwin who write for a broader general audience and often dispense with the nuanced interpretations and multilayered perspectives that characterize academic scholarship. There is, however, nothing particularly new about popularly written history and biography—or about the charges that its practitioners are producing bad history. The scholarly world of the 1920s and 1930s was just as critical of the best-selling biographies by the now-forgotten Emil Ludwig as, according to Robin, it is of the “sentimental boosterism” of Oates and Ambrose. In any event, it is hard to establish specific connections between these authors’ hagiographic oversimplifications and their tendency to plagiarize from other scholars. As Robin points out, similar accusations of unattributed borrowing made against the prolific left-wing historian Philip Foner reveal that it is far more likely that the pressures inherent in these historians’ extraordinary literary productivity, rather than their pandering to popular tastes, led them to appropriate other people’s work. By the end of his life, Ambrose, for example, was churning out more than one book a year.
For Robin, these cases mirror the changing character of academe. Though he admits that their increased visibility certainly reflects the surrounding culture’s contentious style and obsession with fault finding, he does not consider them symptoms of some deeper malaise within the American university. Rather, they are the “necessary vital signs of a vibrant intellectual body delineating its rules and regulations through the creation of borders and margins.” As he sees it, the linguistic turn that swept through the academy destabilized both history and anthropology, undermining the intellectual and institutional foundations of those (and other) disciplines. Not only did this postmodern questioning of the “unitary standards of the scientific enterprise” deprive traditional practitioners of their predominance, but the new technology of the Internet with its “abundance of platforms and participants” diminished “the authority of conventional gatekeepers.” In an academic enterprise that is, thus, seemingly without direction, the scandals serve as a mechanism through which both the public, which seeks greater certainty, and the academic profession, which seeks to redefine its own standards, delineate the boundaries of American intellectual life.
Jon Wiener disagrees. Although he recognizes that some of these cases (in particular that of David Abraham, discussed below) stem, at least in part, from the tensions between traditional historians and more unconventional ones, he sees power as the key determinant. The travails of the former Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles are emblematic. Because his prize-winning book suggested that gun ownership was not widespread before the Civil War, Bellesiles encountered the wrath of the gun lobby. First amateur and then professional historians took him on, discovering in the process that the statistical evidence from probate records upon which some of his argument rested had been sloppily reproduced. Although Bellesiles admitted his errors and tried to rectify them, the panel of outside historians commissioned by Emory to assess his work found “evidence of falsification.” As a result, his publisher pulled the book from circulation, Columbia University revoked his Bancroft Prize, and Emory forced him to resign. While Robin views the case as that of a historian brought down by his desire for relevance, Wiener sees it as the result of a campaign by a powerful pressure group: “If he had published research showing that there were fewer books in early America than previously believed rather than fewer guns, he might be wrong, but he’d still be teaching at Emory.”
Obviously, Bellesiles should have been more conscientious in the archives, but as Wiener explains, he is hardly the only historian whose research methods have proved less than impeccable. But, because he offended a powerful right-wing interest group, his lapses cost him his career. Wiener notes that the same thing happened to David Abraham, a theoretically sophisticated neo-Marxist and careless footnoter hounded out of the historical profession by a senior historian who personally intervened to prevent three separate institutions from hiring him. In contrast, Wiener argues, scholars whose sloppy work is uncontroversial or more acceptable to the powers that be do not risk the kinds of sanctions Bellesiles and Abraham encountered. Franklin and Marshall historian Edward Pearson so completely botched his account of the trial of Denmark Vesey, the leader of a supposed slave revolt, that the book had to be withdrawn, but since there was no organized constituency concerned about Vesey’s reputation, Pearson escaped with only a mild reprimand from his institution. Similarly, despite indications that his gun-friendly findings are based on nonexistent research, the media has not pilloried economist John Lott. In some cases, scholars who abuse professional standards even get rewarded. One, Allen Weinstein, has actually become Archivist of the United States despite his reliance in his last book on the exclusive access to the KGB records obtained by his publisher for an undisclosed sum and his refusal to let other scholars view transcripts of interviews he conducted for an earlier book. Such behavior, which contravenes the standard practice of sharing sources and evidence with other historians, Wiener notes, is just as serious a violation of academic standards as the plagiarism and careless research of the cases he and Robin have traced.
Outrage suffuses Wiener’s narrative, not only against the unduly harsh treatment of Bellesiles and Abraham, but also against the ease with which plagiarists and other academic miscreants escape punishment. Despite the media’s alleged delight in exposing instances of academic misconduct, few of them ever become public. Litigation, or the threat of litigation, protects the wrongdoers. When Lynne McTaggart discovered how much of her work Doris Kearns Goodwin had plundered, she hired a lawyer. In return for a financial settlement, McTaggart agreed to maintain silence about the case. A similar arrangement, Wiener says, may well have kept Emory University from imposing a penalty on historian Elizabeth Fox Genovese for harassing a subordinate. With only a few exceptions, in almost every case of academic misconduct, the institutions involved—universities, presses, and professional organizations—have shied away from penalizing the culprits or publicizing their misdeeds. Until it decided a few years ago to stop investigating such matters, the American Historical Association’s Professional Division dealt with every case it investigated as a confidential matter. As a result, even when it confirmed a charge of plagiarism, the guilty party could continue his or her career and even, as in one egregious case of the 1980s, find a publisher for his plagiarized manuscript. An article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on December 17, 2004, describes a spate of similar occurrences, with the authors of the plundered texts powerless to exact justice.
So, what is to be done? Academic fraud is not a victimless crime. While Robin may be correct that the furor surrounding the recent cases is a reflection of the academic pro-fession’s intellectual flux, such an assessment begs the moral issues involved and the very real damage that dishonesty and unfairness inflict. That damage is not just to the individuals who are unfairly treated or whose work has been purloined. The academy as a whole has also been victimized. While we are all too aware of the violations of academic freedom and faculty autonomy that the AAUP so vigilantly tries to confront, we need to recognize the responsibility that such freedom brings. In particular, we need to assert that responsibility by establishing and then upholding standards of decency and integrity within our own community. If we don’t do that and don’t ensure that our own institutions and professional organizations enforce those standards, we are going to become increasingly vulnerable to attempts from outside the academy to clean house. Given the hostility to the academic profession currently abroad in the land, that is not something we want to promote.
Ellen Schrecker, the former editor of Academe, is professor of history at Yeshiva University.
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