BELLESILES UPDATE: The Chronicle of Higher Education has more on the doings at Emory. The story requires a subscription, but here’s an excerpt:
“Obviously the report is highly negative,” said Jerome Sternstein, a professor emeritus of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Mr. Bellesiles “is anxious to keep [the report] under wraps,” he said. “If the report said that the charges of fraud were unfounded, they would have released it immediately, and he would have insisted that they do so.”
Emory announced in April that it would release the report when the investigation, by an independent committee of distinguished scholars, was completed. But the report remains confidential, even though the investigation was finished in July. The university now says it will release the results at the end of the appeals process, which Provost Hunter told the student newspaper would be “soon.”
Along with other members of the university’s faculty, David J. Garrow, a law professor, reiterated the assumption that the report finds fault with Mr. Bellesiles’s research. He also said that many university faculty members are disappointed by Mr. Bellesiles and how he handled the accusations.
“If there is faculty support for him on campus, I am unaware of it,” said Mr. Garrow. “My personal impression is that whatever the scale or scope of the documentary problems in the book, his ever-changing and seemingly inconsistent responses magnified the scope of the problem several-fold.”
Another faculty member, who declined to be identified, said that “it’s a mystery as to why he handled this controversy in such an abysmal way.”
It’s been interesting to see the initial circle-the-wagons support for Bellesiles melt away. The initial impulse was understandable (if, on the part of historians, marked by a certain unjustified snobbishness toward legal academics). Everybody makes mistakes, any work of scholarship — especially one at book-length — contains errors, and anyone can imagine someone picking over his/her record to find those errors and combining them into an unfair assault.
But while that could happen to anyone, it isn’t what happened to Bellesiles. And now that people have recognized that fact, his support has vanished. I think the likelihood that Emory will paper this over is now virtually nil.
Some people have been comparing the Bellesiles case to this Bell Labs fraud case (which incidentally was first reported by a blogger — not me, as I got email on it but didn’t know if I could trust the source). But the Bell Labs investigation actually did go on for a while, and Bell Labs researchers don’t have tenure.
UPDATE: Here’a a story from the Daily Princetonian about an assistant professor of physics at Princeton who was instrumental in uncovering the Bell Labs fraud.
That’s an impressive thing to do, and especially gutsy in someone so junior. The conventional wisdom is that fraud sometimes goes unnoticed because it’s not career-enhancing for academics to debunk other academics’ work. That’s true, I think — you only have to look at NWU Law Professor James Lindgren, who has taken a fair amount of abuse for his work in uncovering Bellesiles’ fabrications, to see that in action. (And who has invested time and energy in that work instead of in the scholarship he otherwise would have been working on).
I hope that the same thing won’t happen here. While people tut-tut about the problem in general, they’re still quick to look askance at those who actually uncover fraud. Yet when fraud is left unaddressed, the reputation of academia suffers.