Bellesiles is Gone--The Problem Lingers

In "Shanghai Express," Marlene Dietrich, as Lily, reflects that "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily." So it is with scholarly misconduct: Michael Bellesiles didn't make his name by himself. Supported by generous subsidies over recent years, he wrote a work well calculated to appeal to a special audience defined by a particular cluster of beliefs. Now he and Emory University have parted at last, with no admission of guilt from him, and no clarification of the terms of separation from them. We don't know, and are not likely to know, whether there was a financial settlement. Though not quite the happy ending granted to Lily, it is far more than he deserved with or without a settlement.

Many months ago, a seasoned former academic administrator predicted just such an outcome to me. At first I didn't believe there could be any possibility of a financial settlement after such egregious misconduct. She explained: complicity. Bellesiles didn't just happen: he ripened as he rose through the whole academic system, through graduate study at UC Irvine and teaching in a junior position at UCLA before being hired at Emory as an associate professor, and finally promoted to full professor there. He was supported all along by his peer reviewers, it seems, until volunteers dug out and published enough damning evidence about his recent book to make a new official review unavoidable. Steady pressure from outsiders clearly played a significant and probably decisive role in bringing this case to its conclusion. Clayton Cramer, James Lindgren, David Mehegan, Melissa Seckora, Jerome Sternstein, Kimberley Strassel, Joyce Lee Malcolm and the volunteer archivists of the Contra Costa County Historical Society, among many others, deserve to share a better prize than the Bancroft for their hard and effective work in setting this matter right. In a war, whether shooting or writing, never underestimate the militia.

Unfortunately, it seems that many senior academics still don't understand that what has happened has happened in some measure to them. They are tainted by this failure to use their antique guild procedures strictly, fairly, and above all, promptly; in this they failed all of us. They don't seem to grasp how easily it could happen again.

The main obstacle to dealing forthrightly with gross academic misconduct is the reflexive reaction that any disciplinary measure at all will forever destroy academic freedom, which is fully enjoyed only by tenured faculty, by the way. But this defense of academic freedom may simply mask the worship of academic privilege, that is, a remarkably complete freedom from accountability. The exercise of this privilege to commit scholarly fraud -- rewarded by prizes, royalties, fellowships -- is hard to distinguish from theft by deception. Most fraud, after all, is committed for gain. The long line of Bellesiles's enablers will not be made to pay. His first victims have paid already: they were the scholars whose honest work was not rewarded with the very positions and funds that went to him, and the professional influence that went with them. And all the rest of us are victims too. The book is still sitting on thousands of library and bookstore shelves, waiting to deceive unwary readers for decades to come. The reviewers are ready for another front-page assignment. The editor at Knopf is still in place, doubtless hoping to publish another bombshell soon. There is little cause for rejoicing in this outcome until the system is forced to change. Until then, the moral of this story will remain 'tell them what they want to hear; lie as much as you dare; cash the checks.' Doesn't it sound like the nightly news?

Peer review is supposed to be an adequate protection against fraud, inaccuracy, and other scholarly shortcomings, that being its main reason for existing. There have been studies of how it really works. They do not make encouraging reading. Even if the built-in temptations for reviewers could be taken out of it, the official peer review system can't possibly work as it needs to within the microscopically subdivided academic research system of today: often there are no true peers to be found. In practice, peer review is a compost that nourishes cronyism, conformism, and other abuses. Bellesiles was reviewed at least twice by Emory: once at hiring, and once for promotion, that time after his 1996 article, a preview of the book to follow, had appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. He passed all of those reviews. By now, the selection and performance of the referees for Bellesiles' 1996 paper and for Arming America by Knopf, and of the panelists for the Bancroft Prize award, can also be seen to have worked out rather poorly, after all, just like the personnel actions at Emory. These are all examples of normal peer review, which is in effect a system of social promotion. Of course there are no official admissions of fault, few individual retractions, not even many excuses. And above all, there are no consequences for the many panelists.

The usually unspoken understanding among academics is, first of all, that it's none of your business, and second, that nobody can afford to check thousands of references and facts in a couple of weeks just as an exercise in academic piety, so hardly anyone does. When there's trouble, as in the Bellesiles case, senior members of the discipline first rally around the 'victim' of attacks from outsiders, under the banner of academic freedom, until this begins to seem embarrassing or even risky. Then the buck is passed to the home department. Time passes, and then more time. More time than any procedural guidelines allow. There may be a settlement someday, but its terms will be confidential.

Recent scandals among American historians, including revelations of habitual plagiarism and general sloppiness, underscore an urgent need for a better process than peer review in its current form. One possibility would be to take advantage of the pool of retired senior experts in each field by establishing blind panels of reviewers, from which an editor would be assigned a few to review each submission. Maintaining such panels would even give disciplinary associations something useful to do. The reviewers could be paid an adequate sum upon delivery, as editorial consultants. The ones who never found fault, and those who found nothing else, could be dropped from panels; the rest could make themselves useful and earn some money. The costs should be borne by the authors, who are usually the only real beneficiaries of the academic cycle of publication for promotion. Another approach, actually a more honest one, I think, would be simply to drop the pretext of peer review altogether, to stop invoking its protection, and to let the reader beware, as beware one must in any case. That would be much like the reality of the current system, in which the editor has almost complete control of the outcome anyhow.

Finally, there is a view, often expressed over the course of the Bellesiles affair, that only 'scholars' are able to evaluate 'scholarly' publications. This belief is closely related to the peer review fantasy. In the Bellesiles case, both early and quite late, some asserted that only scholars' comments on his work were relevant, and that only the Emory department could evaluate his fitness, and that all this would take as much time as it takes. But in this case, anyone concerned with the politics of gun control and gun rights could and did come to a conclusion about what Bellesiles was doing and why. Some amateurs and professionals outside the academic profession of American history are truly experts on one or more of the topics addressed in that book, and are thus better qualified than many a tenured American historian who lacks that special expertise to pass judgement on Arming America. Bellesiles' work is out there, available to the public; so are many sources he claims to have used. Anyone can compare what the sources actually say with what the work says they say, and come to an informed conclusion about its accuracy. In academic practice, I repeat, this is what any careful scholar does, of necessity. It is exceedingly disingenuous to claim that only people holding a certain credential can do this kind of checking. What has been demonstrated beyond question by this case, after all, is that these credentials or the lack of them meant nothing. If all this is hard for you to swallow, gentle reader, look within yourself and ask why.