BELLESILES UPDATE: The Emory Wheel (which is doing a lot better job of covering this than the New York Times) has a long story on Bellesiles’ resignation with numerous quotes from historians. There’s also an editorial in The Wheel that concludes:
If Bellesiles did find the environment at Emory hostile, he has only himself to blame. Throughout the controversy, Bellesiles repeatedly made conflicting and misleading claims to the media, as well as to those who openly criticized him. His defenses and evidence were consistently erratic, and only furthered the skepticism of those following the case.
He also claims the scope of the committee’s investigation was too narrow, and that his main thesis still holds true despite the errors found in a minor part of his research.
By making this claim, Bellesiles is skirting the real issue. It doesn’t matter now if the argument in Arming America is valid — it matters that he has lied numerous times in defending his book. It’s unfortunate that Bellesiles, who is a talented, brilliant writer and scholar, will have his reputation marred by his evasive statements.
Emory has no reason to apologize to Bellesiles. Should a similar situation arise in the future, Emory should consider acting more quickly in response to public outcry, but not at the expense of fairness and accuracy.
The investigation, and Bellesiles’ subsequent resignation, should be a reminder to the Emory community that academic research is, above all, about searching for the absolute truth. That’s what our professors teach students every day. We should expect the same from them.
Well said.
UPDATE: Tightly Wound blames critical theory:
Now back to Bellesiles. He’s guilty, and I’m not trying to exculpate him, but to me it seems like he was just continuing to do what he was trained to do by the system–look at a subject, determine the conclusion you want to reach, and manipulate the data accordingly. After all, he was just “opening the facts up to new interpretation and exploration.” And it would have worked, too, if not for those pesky kids at the NRA! His politics were correct, thus no one reviewing his work looked at his research, source material, or thought processes. But here’s the kicker: the fact that he continues to insist that he’s going to keep researching probate materials when half of the ones he said he looked at DON’T EVEN EXIST! Bellesiles has completely surpassed me and my fellow students in shaping reality to his own ends. In the current academic envrionment, Mr. Bellesiles gets a gold star.
Read the whole post. I wasn’t familiar with this blog before, but its slogan “Making fun of academics — because it’s easy!” should give you an idea of its focus. Also Jacob T. Levy (noted in the post below, too — he’s on a roll!) suggests that the committee that Emory brought in to investigate Bellesiles can hardly be called tools of the NRA.