Where Do We Go From Here?
Our critics tell us that Martin Luther King's question, asking directions which depend, in part, on where one is, has lately become an important one for historians.
I had not meant to write a word on professional ethics and practice until I
read a headline, "The Cowards of Academe," in the Weekly Standard.
It followed by four days a similar attack on the integrity of our profession
in the Wall Street Journal. Undoubtedly, academe has its cowards. I've
known several and may have been one myself at one time or other. It is a form
in which our humanity appears. Yet, the journalists' attack on the Bancroft
Prize committee, the American Historical Association, the Newberry Library and
Emory University over Michael Bellesiles's Arming America seemed to me
well off-target. I wrote a short essay, "Journalists Are Rushing to Judgment
about Michael Bellesiles," for History
News Network. My argument was a self-evident defense of academic practice
and due process, I thought. Yet, the title for the piece won the gun lobby's
attention and, like Mr. Jefferson, I learned that not everyone saw my truths
as self-evident.1
The result astonishes me yet. In two weeks of entrenched warfare, I met charge
after charge from my critics. Sometimes the tactics were personal, as in the
heading of a new thread which read: "Academic Misconduct and Ralph Luker."
It was an old canard about timing the release of the King Project's findings
of plagiarism in King's dissertation, as if I had been responsible for controlling
it. Repeatedly, I tried to call a cease-fire, at my best with humor. When an
ally, Cecelia Justice, countered a point by one of my favorite critics, Thomas
Gunn, I declared that Justice prevailed in Justice v. Gunn and thanked goodness
for due process. Gunn was amused, asked where was the due process and continued
firing. The essay on the Weekly Standard's and the Wall Street Journal's
criticism of academe, said HNN's History
Grapevine, produced more replies "than any other article on the website,
indeed, maybe more than had been made to all the other articles on the website
combined." They "actually stretch across the page like ocean waves
caught at high tide on a stormy night."
In the end, we shook hands and laughed at the e-trenches we had dug. Early
on, I told friends that the quality of the debate was not high, ranging somewhere
between a dreary faculty meeting and the Jerry Springer Show. Yet, in its course,
my critics won my respect with spirited, often well-informed argument. They
held Bellesiles, other professional historians and me firmly in their gun sights
and fired very pointedly: "your peer review process has failed repeatedly
for years and we don't trust your due process." I thought I owed it to
new friends in the gun lobby to report back to old friends in the history profession.
The battle was, after all, just a skirmish in a larger encounter. We have all
read about Joseph Ellis, Stephen
Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin,
and Michael Bellesiles. The cases
of Paul Buhle
and Edward A. Pearson have had less public attention.2
I addressed an open e-mail to two dozen American historians, most of them prominent
in the field, asking what, if anything, could be learned from these cases. The
list of historians was deliberately ecumenical, including some people who have
not spoken to each other in years. I speak to several of them and they to me
only episodically. The issues seemed too important to be addressed by political
preference or shunned by personal pique. Some of my colleagues communicated
privately rather than to the whole group. The small sample of results limits
the significance of generalizations, but given the option of anonymity the larger
pattern was interesting. In general, political stance and personal differences
were of no consequence. Generation was everything.
Historians of my generation really saw no problem at all. These cases were exceptional
and exceptional in several directions. These were either "celebrity historians"
who are unlike the rest of us or breeches of trust, functions of carelessness
or some singular personality quirk. Contrarily, one was a celebrity historian
who we should defend because he had for years been doing successfully what all
of us should be doing. Given the limitations of time and dispersed archives,
our peer review processes and our due processes work exceedingly well and our
book exhibits display our enormous productivity. I was uncomfortable with those
conclusions and their internal tensions. Were the celebrities our celebrities
or not? Had the celebrities been doing what we should be doing? Oh, really?
And don't those book exhibits democratically display deeply flawed and immaculate
texts without distinction? Shouldn't they? Who knows which is which? Why don't
we know? If we did, so what?
I was more encouraged by candid responses from a younger, yet already prominent
group of historians. These cases did have some things to teach us, they thought,
even as they disagreed about exactly what they were. These historians also took
seriously a parallel question about the cases' implications for teaching even
younger historians and students. I liked the flair and candor of a young Ivy
League historian's first point: Historians should not tell "big, whopping
lies." That seems like a good place to begin. She followed with three practical
suggestions: that committees of the OAH should formulate guidelines on the use
of research assistants and develop guidelines on research and the use of evidence
which could be disseminated to graduate students; and, finally, recognizing
that even the most conscientious effort is occasionally flawed, one should correct
known errors in print as quickly as possible.
Further discussion suggested that two current influences require rethinking
our professional ethics and practice. First, how do we appropriate and limit
post-modernism's insight that all evidence is socially constructed? It surely
means that it can be construed in a variety of ways. It surely does not mean
evidence can be fabricated. How do we teach that without denying a legitimate
role to the historical imagination? The other factor is the new technology.
To put it bluntly, our peer review processes waved Arming America on to a Bancroft
Prize and, with breathtaking speed, a lawyer/sociologist used archival sources,
cd roms and a published primary and secondary literature which peer review ignored
to force us to recognize that "there's a problem here." Given my professional
biases, what greater humiliation can there be than to be told that by a lawyer/sociologist?
In the short run, this problem may be of greater concern to the quantifiers
among us, but my generation is comfortable with the notion of dispersed archives
and the future sweeps us into its presence. Our students know or can readily
claim that their computers and cd roms reach into archives in many parts of
the country, if not yet the world.
"Trust, but verify" is good advice, even if Ronald Reagan did say
it. There is reassurance in these results. The place where we are is embarrassed
by some of our colleagues, but there are younger historians among us who are
discussing "where do we go from here?"