Engaging Prose, Disappointing Analyses

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

By Jon Wiener

New Press, 2005: 260 pages

Jon Wiener, Professor of History at the University of California at Irvine, a contributor to The Nation, and a radio host on KPFK in Los Angeles, examines, in varied detail, the difficulties that historians have recently faced with charges of plagiarism and scholarly misconduct. His book follows on the heels of two other recent books that have also examined this disturbing issue: Peter Charles Hoffer's Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud—American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (2004), which deals wholly with historians, and Ron Robin's Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases that Shook the Academy (2004), which contains one section covering historians.

Some of the historians at whom Wiener looks brought charges of plagiarism upon themselves through insufficient documentation of sources in best-selling books. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin, for example, plagiarized portions of her book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987) from another writer, then paid the wronged author to keep the theft secret. More notoriously, plagiarism was seemingly pervasive in several of the books of the late Stephen Ambrose, historical consultant for "Saving Private Ryan" and prolific World War II historian. Others, such as Michael Bellesiles and Joseph E. Ellis, were accused of fabrication. In Bellesiles' case, it was a combination of questionable quantitative data that supposedly supported his argument about the lack of a gun culture in early America, notes purportedly destroyed in a flood, and missing archival records. For Ellis, it was his claim to have participated in events of the Vietnam era, including fighting in Southeast Asia, when in fact he had been pursuing his graduate studies, then teaching, in the United States. These cases received the most attention in the media, but there were others, not all of which involved charges of plagiarism or fabrication. For example, noted women's historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese faced charges of sexual harassment and discrimination at Emory University, while Allen Weinstein, the current Archivist of the United States, was accused of purchasing access to documents for his exclusive use and withholding documents from other researchers.

In his introduction, Wiener poses the question that is central to this book: "Why do some cases [of scholarly dishonesty] become media events while others remain within the confines of scholarly settings?" The answer, according to him, is "power wielded by groups outside the history profession" (2). In particular, Wiener contends that politically conservative groups have "had much more power than the left to define the meaning and significance of charges of misconduct for the public" (6). Wiener also takes to task the nation's historical organizations, particularly the American Historical Association (AHA), for not doing more to investigate and offer judgments on these cases.

While engaging in its prose, Wiener's work is disappointing. In a couple of instances, he fails to disclose the names of acquaintances or colleagues who shared information or analysis pertinent to the discussion at hand. One would expect something more than unsubstantiated gossip about the amount of a court settlement in the Fox-Genovese case, which Wiener claims an "elected official of the Organization of American Historians" gave him (15). A more complete explanation from one of Wiener's unnamed "colleague[s]" about why s/he believed that Bellesiles' data was "not bad" also seemed necessary (79).

More importantly, the book is less than satisfactory because Wiener is unable to overcome his political biases. For example, in discussing the charges against Fox-Genovese, he contrasts her treatment with that of David Garrow, another Emory professor who was suspended after an investigation into charges that he had assaulted a university employee. Wiener questions why Emory chose to investigate Garrow and not Fox-Genovese; his conclusion, despite his own admission that "the evidence against her [Fox-Genovese] may not have been completely accurate," seems to be that she was a "conservative hero" (27, 28). By Wiener's logic, her opposition to "feminist political correctness at Emory," presumably including this episode, led President George W. Bush to give her the National Humanities Medal in 2003 (One of the other recipients that year was Edith Kurzweil, the final editor of the Partisan Review, which one would hardly call a bastion of staunch, red-state, Republican conservatism).

Wiener also posits that Michael Bellesiles "suffered the most serious punishment not because his offenses were the most serious, but because his opponents were the most powerful" (213). Bellesiles' only major sin apparently was an incomplete footnote, one in which he "failed to indicate how he carried out his research, and what his methods were" (74). The omission of that data would have done nothing to lessen the book's central argument about gun usage in early America, according to Wiener. The case against Bellesiles was more complicated than he presents, however, and to blame the National Rifle Association and the political Right for all of Bellesiles' problems overlooks the seriousness of his misdeeds. Yes, Bellesiles' work was politically charged, and there is little doubt that some of his fiercest critics had ideological axes to grind. Wiener's statement that the real "problem is that some historians whose offenses were more serious, and against whom the evidence was more damning, received little or no punishment," however, is too dismissive, too simplistic (73-74). It seems unlikely that Emory University (Bellesiles' employer, which investigated the accusations against him), Columbia University (which awarded Bellesiles' book the prestigious Bancroft Prize, then rescinded the prize), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (which had funded a fellowship that Bellesiles received, but removed its name from it as a result of the uproar) all succumbed to a right-wing conspiracy based on defending gun rights. Possible, but hard to believe.

In fact, Wiener's insistence on finding political conspiracies behind the pursuit of, or the failure to pursue, suspected cases of scholarly misconduct is not unique. Hoffer's Past Imperfect, while not as blatant, also suffers from a similar weakness. Hoffer partly blames recent historical trends for encouraging historians to become "consumer-driven" and giving in to the "anarchistic implications" of the "new" history (233), breaking down the "truth" of history. As he argues, new history tells Americans that "if the study of history is nothing more than make-believe, why bother condemning Ambrose and the others?" (234) There is more than a hint that Hoffer suspects that the political Left, rather than the Right, is behind the recent outbreak of these cases.

What Wiener (and Hoffer, too, for that matter) does a good job of is criticizing the AHA for its apparent abandonment of protecting academic integrity among historians. The AHA has made it clear in recent years that it cannot and will not police the profession when it comes to scholarly misconduct, leaving it up to institutions to investigate and hand down sanctions when needed. Wiener outlines that the AHA abandoned this responsibility because of concerns about confidentiality and the organization's inability to enforce sanctions against guilty parties, which falls, in its view, on the employing institutions. While both of these reasons are perhaps understandable, they seem unwise from a public relations standpoint, not to mention an ethical perspective. Many of us would be mortified if the American Medical Association refused to involve itself in ethical issues related to professional medicine; why do we seem so blasé, then, when the organization charged with protecting our memories does so?

It is unfortunate that Wiener succumbs to the allure of ideology in analyzing these examples. Blaming politicians for ignoring, covering up, or pursuing cases of scholarly misconduct really does not do much to lessen the after-effects of the culture wars of the 1990s. It would be more productive, perhaps, to scrutinize what in society generally, and in the historical profession specifically, encourages this type of behavior. Are these instances isolated, or are they indicative of a larger societal problem? If they are emblematic, are graduate programs doing enough to train future historians in the proper ethics of the profession so that we avoid the need for accusations and investigations appearing in the media? Wiener is convinced that he has the answer to the problem, but it seems clear that his will not be the last word on the subject.

Mark R. Cheathem, Assistant Professor of History at Southern New Hampshire University, is the editor of the Center for Academic Integrity's Integrity Update newsletter.

Publication date: 21 July 2006