Historians in Trouble:
Plagiarism, Politics, and Fraud in the Ivory Tower

Jon Wiener

New York: The New Press, 2005; ISBN: 1-56584-884-5; Pp. ix, 260 (index, notes)

Review © 2005 Branislav L. Slantchev

This book is a deeply flawed piece of sanctimonious rubbish that provides a good example of the worst a historian can do: engage in thesis-driven research. What is a "thesis-driven research"? That's a type of "research," where one has the conclusions, then picks the cases and interprets them in order to reach these conclusions. Needless to say, this sort of exercise cannot provide an adequate test of how sound the argument really is. To top it off, Mr Wiener often engages in logical gymnastics that result in a befuddling maze of internal contradictions. Before I provide the substance of my claims, two things are in order. First, a brief disclosure about me (the reviewer). Second, a brief overview of what the book purports to do. Then we go on to why it fails to deliver.

I am an academic myself, although not a historian: I teach political science at UC San Diego (which makes me a part of the system in which Mr Wiener teaches as well - he's at Irvine). Why does this matter? Because a lot of what Mr Wiener says has to do with the power of various external groups and the extent of their influence on both university administration, and, through that, on academics such as us. I think that some of my experience, although not nearly as extensive as Mr Wiener's, will probably have something to say about the academic environment and our vulnerability of outside pressures. I should caution readers, however, that the UC is a public system and as such we have much more protection here (under the 1st Amendment, for example) than my colleagues at private institutions (like Emory). Further, since I will be making a case against the slanted politics of the book, I have to say that I am somewhere to the right of Mr Wiener, probably closer to the center, if anything. In all truth, I am probably to the right of the vast majority of academics on matters of economics, although by non-academic standards that barely makes me a centrist. (In social, religious, and personal matters, I am as liberal as they come.)

Now, what is the book supposed to do? It seeks to present cases of historians who were accused of plagiarism, research fraud, classroom misconduct, or sexual harassment, and then ask why these people got in trouble, and what determined their fates when they did. As I am sure many are aware, historians have been in trouble recently. This is not the first time historians have gotten in trouble, but perhaps the amount of media exposure has been unique. I would guess that the best-known case are the charges of plagiarism against America's favorite historian Stephen Ambrose, who misappropriated several paragraphs from other people's books without putting them in quotes (but footnoting them, making the case a lot less clear-cut). The other two that may have reached many are the "gun cases," one involving the Emory historian Michael Bellesiles, and the other - the American Enterprise Institute scholar John Lott.

The book is divided in four parts. In the first two, the author separates the issues along the left-right dimension, and then presents three instances in which people were able to overcome the problems, at least in terms of their ability to continue with their careers (part I), followed by three cases where people's careers were destroyed in the process (part II). Then there's part III with two cases where people got off Scott-free apparently because the media failed to take interest in their stories. Part IV rounds up the evidence with several media spectacles that have nothing to do with left/right politics but still show the influence of the stance the media takes on the issue. The idea Mr Wiener must have had is reasonable: pick several cases where historians were charged with misconduct (obviously, the would have to involve different outcomes), then trace the influence of the various factors that are thought to have been causal. By careful selection of the cases (to ensure variation in what he wants to explain), Mr Wiener would have built a pretty strong case for his thesis.

All of this appears eminently sensible until one realizes that Mr Wiener's political agenda has forced a somewhat unnatural interpretation of the results. Let's begin the general conclusion the author draws on pp. 213-14:

"The real need over the longer term is to find ways to counter the excessive power of right-wing advocacy groups. On many issues today, the right adopts uncompromising tactics and a combative stance. Those who don't share their values, who are in the political center as well as on the left, often lack the single-minded zeal of activists on the right and have priorities in their lives other than fulfilling particular political agendas. Many are reluctant to speak out in an assertive voice. In the end, the power of the right turns out to be a problem not just for historians in trouble, but also for the rest of us."

Leaving aside the barely concealed contempt for people who do not share the author's political orientation (they don't have lives and are apparently motivated by nothing else other than imposing their fundamentalism on the rest of us, poor helpless souls, who can't even bring ourselves to speak out, both because we're much milder and compromising, and because we've got plenty of other more important things to do --- if, by the way, Mr Wiener is right, we don't have anything that is more important than countering the right), the conclusion simply does not follow from the examples he's presented in the rest of the book. First, right-wing groups had nothing to do with the plagiarism cases of Mr Ambrose and Mrs Goodwin, it was the liberal New York Times that helped Mr Ellis, and although Mr Wiener insinuates that the Catholic Church covered up Mr Cinel's checkered past, the professor's undoing had little to do with the right. In fact, the entire conclusion rests on the comparison between the behaviors of the pro-gun lobby in the cases of Mr Bellesiles and Mr Lott. That's right, for the other cases, even attempts to stretch them on the Procrustean bed of left-right politics leaves the readers scratching their heads in bewilderment. Hence, the validity on the conclusion rises and falls with that one comparison. Before noting why the comparison itself has problems, let's turn to some of the other cases to see why they don't fit the author's explanation.

One good place to start is Mrs Fox-Genovese at Emory. She was accused of sexual harassment but the university settled the case out of court. She was never formally investigated by the university, and she ended up receiving the National Humanities Medal in 2003. Ah, but according to Mr Wiener, she should have been punished for her transgressions, and should not have won that honor. This happens to illustrate Mr Wiener's largest failing: he's apparently forgotten that in this country the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty. That no court ever handled the cases is no impediment to Mr Wiener---obviously this archaic way of determining guilt cannot compare with the brilliantly incisive mind of one history professor who has no trouble separating the sheep from the goats on basis of rumor, innuendo, circumstantial evidence, and inferences based on guilt by association. So Emory University settles the harassment suit for an undisclosed sum. So? According to Mr Wiener, "dozens of prominent historians were prepared to testify against Fox-Genovese in court" (p.13), and the "plaintiff's attorneys were prepared to argue not only that Fox-Genovese treated her assistant with 'abuse,' 'verbal tirades,' and 'a loud, threatening and personally demeaning voice and manner' that was 'deliberate, willful and malicious'. They were also prepared to argue that Fox-Genovese had treated other people the same way... The witness list reportedly included some of the nation's leading historians" (pp.14-15). What does this amount to in terms of evidence? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Zip. Squat. All Mr Wiener has said is that the attorneys were prepared to make a case against the professor (they better had or else why pay them) and that they were going to ask many people to testify, some of whom may have been (note the word "reportedly") prominent historians. Does any of that establish guilt? Not unless you rely on a kangaroo court or a historian's opinion. At least Mr Wiener does acknowledge that the truth of the accusations "was never tested in court" (p. 20), but then goes on to say that this does not matter because "the record against [Fox-Genovese] is an extraordinary one."

The weird thing, of course, is that Emory never did attempt to discipline Fox-Genovese, and this does truly bother Mr Wiener because for the University, the evidence standard does not have to be as high as that for a court (that in itself is a problem, but let's roll with it for a while). Why this strange silence given that Emory has not been especially afraid to sanction its academics for questionable behavior (like suspending the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mr Garrow)? I don't know, and neither does Mr Wiener. Oh, he peddles an explanation, sort of. You see, Fox-Genovese apparently managed to reinvent herself as victim of political correctness run amok, and this endeared her to various conservative newspapers while her "book received passionate denunciations from feminist reviewers" (29). This "helped paved the way for her White House award" (30), which she received... seven years after the out-of-court settlement. And this somehow is supposed to explain why Emory never did anything. I can offer an alternative explanation that is just as plausible and mildly ludicrously conspiracy-laden: Emory (which was sued together with Fox-Genovese) surmised that letting the court decide the case would be bad for PR and for the University because it may set a precedent for court interference; so Emory settles to avoid that; they do not discipline Fox-Genovese because there's nothing to discipline her for. I don't know that it happened that way, and I don't care. The point is that Mr Wiener's argument is no better.

This predilection to presume the accused guilty whenever they do not fit his political stripe is quite evident in other cases, especially the one involving Mr Cinel and his sexual escapades in the French Quarter. What we know is this: the guy used to be a priest, and he used to indulge his gay streak quite a bit, often videotaping the acts, and sometimes the other participants look startlingly young. Now, the Church defrocked him when they found over 160 hours of X-rated tapes, and they turned over the evidence to the D.A., who decided not to prosecute Mr Cinel despite the rather strict anti-sodomy laws of Louisiana, at least not until after the story broke two years later. Then CUNY tried to fire him, and the process took years because he was hired in a tenured slot. Mr Wiener cites our UC rules that state that "professors can be fired for misconduct outside the university only after the 'commission of a criminal act... has led to conviction in a court of law," and then notes that "Cinel had not been convicted of anything" (155). All this is good, but here's the next paragraph: "If Cinel had never been convicted, he had been charged---with possession of child pornography---and probably would have been convicted a couple of years before the issue surfaced in New York---if there had not been a cover-up instigated by the Church and joined by the New Orleans district attorney." What? Excuse me?

Let's make sense of this. Mr Wiener proposes that Mr Cinel should have been treated as guilty only because he was charged with a crime! Note now the scare-tactic: this crime was possession child-pornography. Nobody in their right mind would bother to stand up for the rights of a child pornographer, correct? Wrong. At least I hope it's wrong. Because an accusation of possession is not the same as conviction. Now, one simple inference Mr Wiener could have made is that perhaps the D.A. did not have enough evidence to convict Cinel. Here, however, the historian offers two mutually contradictory assertions. First, the D.A. (who was a prominent supporter of the "country's fiercest antiporn laws", 156) was also a parishioner in Cinel's church, and the pastor had visited his home. Clearly (in Mr Wiener's book), this means collusion. Or maybe there was not enough on the tapes? Maybe of the two people who had come forward to claim that Cinel had used his religious position to get them to engage in sex with him, not one was under the age of consent? One had admitted that he was, in fact, seventeen at the time, so that would leave the other, who claimed to have been thirteen when Cinel began having sex with him. But there's no proof of that.

Not a problem for Mr Wiener: First, "in the videos... Cinel's partners look young" (163, emphasis in the original). I don't know just what this means: I cannot determine whether someone is sixteen or seventeen just by looking, and neither can Mr Wiener. Back in high-school I had friends who were fourteen but who looked over twenty. Second, since Mr Wiener probably realizes this line is not convincing, he sides with a local reporter who "suspected that the Church removed tapes involving very young teenagers, like the thirteen-year old" (163). OK, let's see what we've got here thus far: either the D.A. has evidence but suppressed it or he does not have it because the Church suppressed it. Either way, Cinel's guilty. Evidence for this? Mr Wiener's insightful conspiracy theory that cannot be falsified one way or the other. Note further that Mr Wiener manages to blame both the D.A. and the Church even though only one of them can be blamed: if the Church suppressed evidence, the D.A. cannot bring the matter to trial, and if the D.A. can do it, then the Church must have supplied the evidence. In other words, if the Church lied, there was nothing for the D.A. to cover up. This, of course, leaves us with a blatantly obvious mystery: why would the Church turn over some, but not all, evidence if it wanted a cover-up? Why not just keep quiet?

All of this is not meant to suggest that Mr Cinel was not guilty: for all I know he could have been. But Mr Wiener has absolutely no business running roughshod over the case with simplistic arguments like that, and then turn around and argue that CUNY should have fired Mr Cinel immediately as if his guilt was an established fact. Ah, and perhaps I should mention this: no right-wing groups exerting pressure on CUNY here!

It is tedious to go through the other cases but they all suffer from the same problem: Mr Wiener has his pet conclusion, and then he invents stories to fit it. The last example I want to give has to go with the pro-gun lobby and the cases of Mr Bellesiles and Mr Lott. Recall that Mr Bellesiles wrote a book in which he argued that the gun culture in America is a post-Civil War phenomenon, that guns were not all that important before the feds distributed them en masse for the war. Part of the argument rested on probate records whose summaries by Mr Bellesiles seemed to show that few people left guns to their heirs in their wills at a time where wills were supposedly pretty meticulous. This evidence was presented in the infamous Table 1 in the book. People took issue with Table 1 because it did not make clear how the data were aggregated and where the data really came from. When asked to substantiate and explain, Mr Bellesiles reported that his notes were destroyed by a flood at Emory. Eventually, after painful forced reconstruction by others, a new version of Table 1 was produced, with the evidence much weaker this time. However, Mr Wiener notes that even if Table 1 was entirely wrong, the thesis of the book would probably still hold up because of the preponderance of other evidence in it. That may be so (it's also extremely debatable as the extensive review by Mr Lindgren argues), but that's not the point, so let's be charitable and grant that this was the only problem. In the end, Mr Bellesiles resigned his job at Emory.

Mr Lott also wrote a book, this one arguing that gun possession reduces violent crime. One statistic in that book was that 98% of the time people use a gun defensively, they merely brandish the weapon to prevent an attack. It was not clear where this figure came from. When asked to substantiate it, Mr Lott claimed that it came from a survey that he had conducted, but when asked to produce evidence of the survey, he claimed that he had lost the data in a computer crash. Of course, losing the data explains not having the data. It does not explain not being able to produce a single piece of evidence that the survey itself was conducted. (By way of analogy, Mr Bellesiles also had problems proving that he had visited one of the archives where he was supposed to have done research.) In the end, Mr Lott conducted another survey and published the results on his website, making them available for all to see, use, and check. The results substantiated his claim, although they were not as strong as the original claim made them out to be. In the end, Mr Lott continues in his position at the AEI.

So, what is Mr Wiener's take on these two cases? Very simple: Mr Bellesiles wrote a book the NRA did not like, whereas Mr Lott wrote one that it did like. The NRA then brought to bear its formidable PR machine, and succeeded in forcing Emory to end Mr Bellesiles' career, whereas Mr Lott is still rewarded with high-profile publications in various newspapers. What, the heck? The two cases really appear quite similar, so it's useful to compare them. In both cases, an author was unable to establish the veracity of his claims, and in both cases there was some evidence that the results were either doctored (Bellesiles) or wholly invented (Lott). Contrary to what Mr Wiener would have you believe, doctoring is not a lesser offense than inventing, in both cases the authors are making up stuff that's supposed to be their evidence. It's true that Mr Bellesiles' explanation is less suspicious than Mr Lott's but that did not stop an investigative committee from concluding that Mr Bellesiles had, in fact, doctored evidence.

If both authors made up some of the data that went into their books, then how does Mr Wiener propose to resolve the problem in favor of his preferred victim? By arguing that "the probate records... are referred to only in a handful of paragraphs in a 400-page book, and Table 1 is cited in the text only a couple of times" (78). The idea is that even if he did falsify the data, Mr Bellesiles would still be correct in his overall thesis. Mr Wiener then repeats this "Table 1 only cited a couple of times" line of defense several times (p. 84, analogous claim on 87), then also says that the new edition of the book does correct it (as if that made the falsification OK), then also says that other people found the argument persuasive despite that problem.

Well, let's accept that defense and now turn to Mr Lott. As Mr Wiener notes, "Lott and his defenders argue that the 98 percent figure is not crucial to the argument in [his book]; it's true that the book contains many other more relevant statistics... [but] one must have 'faith in Lott's integrity' in order to accept the other statistical arguments he makes" (144). What? How come you need more faith here but not in the previous case? Why not proceed like we did with Mr Bellesiles: drop the pesky fake statistic, and then evaluate the rest of the argument on the basis of what remains? Mr Wiener does make a feeble attempt to do that. First, he notes that others were able to show that changes in the data and/or statistical procedure result in different conclusions. That may be so, anyone who's ever worked with regressions would know that. A lot of scholarly debate revolves around appropriate methods, and such. Unless Mr Lott knowingly falsified data or used inappropriate procedures that he knew would bias the results, he's not guilty of anything here. (I should note that the committee investigating Mr Bellesiles also found him guilty of using "substandard methodology.") Second, Mr Wiener notes that "new research suggests Lott's thesis in [his book] is wrong" (145). That may also be true, in fact, this is quite normal: better tools and better data can help us re-evaluate existing results. New results will supplant old ones, but without any prejudice about the researcher who obtained the old results. One of the interesting issues here is that Mr Lott has made his data available, so his results can be replicated by other scholars, which makes him much less vulnerable to attacks compared to someone who loses everything in a flood and never recovers any of it.

The upshot of all this? It's up to the reader to decide, but here's my take on it. Maybe NRA demanded lots of stupid things in the first case: Emory to fire Bellesiles, Vintage to withdraw his book, and Columbia to revoke the prize it had awarded. So what? Did any of them happen? Sure. But because of the NRA? In December, 2002 Columbia rescinded the Bancroft Prize "based on a review of an investigation of charges of scholarly misconduct against Professor Bellesiles by Emory University and other assessments by professional historians. They concluded that he had violated basic norms of scholarship and the high standards expected of Bancroft Prize winners." (Read the Emory Wheel account of the case. The Columbia decision is cited there. This long article has numerous links to various aspects of the controversy conveniently ignored by Mr Wiener. It also has stuff on Mr Wiener himself. It's worth noting that it contradicts many of the claims he makes in the book. It also makes it plainly clear that Mr Bellesiles' conclusions were challenged well beyond Table 1.) In January 2003, Knopf stopped selling his book, although a month later Soft Skull Press announced that it would issue a revised version "to ensure the American public can read books the Right does not like. It is imperative that we stand up to the NRA smear machine." But neither Columbia nor Knopf had folded under pressure from the NRA. Mr Bellesiles fell because professional historians found his scholarship defective, and, more importantly, enough people decided that he had falsified his results, which made him guilty of fraud rather than incompetence. You can read Mr Lindgren's account of the history of the case on the History News Network website. It's interesting just how many facts Mr Wiener chose to omit. After reading this account, one will be forgiven for drawing the exact opposite conclusion to Mr Wiener's: people who knew little about gun history or little about numbers received Mr Bellesiles' argument well, those knew either one or the other were suspicious from the first publication of the article with that thesis (well before the book). Knopf was enamored with the idea and offered a contract despite these reservations by professionals, and Columbia's prize committee chose to ignore them as well. That is, it looks a lot like a book promoting a gun control leftist agenda found a ready ear in publishers and prize committees despite problems with its methodology and use of historical evidence. Only when the flagrant errors were exposed by historians did these deign to correct their mistakes.

Bellesiles published a second edition of the book, and... resigned from Emory (perhaps because he feared Emory would demote him), he was most certainly not fired, regardless of what Mr Wiener insinuates in the book. And insinuate he does: "Bellesiles suffered the most serious punishment not because his offenses were the most serious, but because his opponents were the most powerful" (213). But there's no evidence that this was the case: the NRA accomplished precisely nothing in Mr Bellesiles' case. This does not stop Mr Wiener from pontificating on the issue: "What explains the fate of each? The charges in both cases were equally serious... The one great difference between the two cases is in the actions of the gun lobby. They mounted a massive campaign to destroy Bellesiles... But with Lott, the gun control lobby didn't mount any public campaign, didn't exert any pressure, didn't make any demands... Gun control advocates remained polite and reasonable, while the gun lobby shouted its demands" (148). If this passes for an argument in history, I should burn all the history books I own. (Fortunately, it seems Mr Wiener is safely in the minority here.)

This brings us back full circle: the right is bad and noisy even though they never seem to be able to accomplish much in ways of punishing the ones that go against them... except when these also happen to be guilty of professional misconduct and fraud. That sort of contradicts Mr Wiener's central claim that the powerful right-wing groups are behind all sorts of unsavory conspiracies and scandals on campus. I beg to differ. If this were true, the vast majority of academics would be rounded up and sent to re-education camps. The happy truth is that universities are pretty insulated from the right. The less happy news is that this is not true for the left. Contrary to what Mr Wiener would want one to believe, the influences from the left are much more pervasive on campus because they come from inside, from the professors themselves, and from administrations staffed by people drilled in political correctness. The damage this has done to the university environment in general and history in particular one can read about in books like The Shadow University or The Killing of History. For an even-handed account of the pernicious real influences of pressure groups from both sides of the spectrum, read The Language Police. And all of that without any conspiracies!

In the end, Historians in Trouble turns out to be a political manifesto. And as usual for these, it's pretty light on logic and evidence. At least it can make for an enteraining read... like a gossip column.

April 4, 2005