The first came in an attack on the standards and accuracy employed by the Miller Center’s Presidential Recordings Project offered by Sheldon Stern. Stern is a longtime critic of the project, who previously had written on the topic in The Atlantic.

I was part of the Miller Center’s project for several years (working on LBJ tapes), and just finished a book based on those tapes on the 1964 presidential election. I still remain astonished at the resources that the Center devotes to ensuring accurate transcripts—even though this has delayed the release of transcripts that, even if 99% accurate, would be of enormous value to historians of the 1960s and 1970s.

What most struck me about Stern’s critique came in his comment that the Kennedy tapes authors too often used [unclear] when they were not sure of what a voice said, rather than offering an educated guess, “especially when they make sense in historical context.” Such an approach, I’m afraid, is exactly what scholars working with the tapes—and the Kennedy and Nixon tapes, unlike those of LBJ, are often exceedingly difficult to make out—need to avoid. Nine times out of ten, I would guess, Stern’s approach would yield the correct transcript. But the tenth time, Stern would place in a policymaker’s mouth a word or phrase that reflects our current interpretation of “historical context” where, in fact, the policymaker said something quite different. It seems to me that in transcribing, the mantra should be “better safe than sorry.”

The second article that caught my eye came from the OAH, where the Historians Against the War (HAW) passed a resolution to establish a committee that would investigate reports of repression among historians. The associated petition listed eight types of “repression,” including: “restrictions of research and surveillance of library use under the USAPATRIOT Act”; “reports of teachers, especially in high schools and community colleges, reprimanded or confronted with suspension or non-renewal for allowing students in their classrooms to express opposition to the occupation of Iraq”; “Systematic denunciation of historians who have criticized government policy by Campus Watch, No Indoctrination, Students for Academic Freedom, and other groups”; “Dismissals and refusals to employ faculty members allegedly on the basis of their views on foreign policy”; “Restriction of historians' access to government records, and new limits to enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act.”

The petition was coupled with another HAW petition denouncing the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive war.

I didn’t attend the OAH this year, and so will defer to my colleague Derek Catsam for more details on what type of discussion, if any, this resolution produced. The final item in this list strikes me as a serious item of concern for the OAH, especially since the Bush administration’s record on releasing documents has been abominable. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how passing this particular resolution will help the profession on the document-release question, since administration officials now can make the claim that the leading professional organization of American historians has linked its call for more liberal release of documents with an attack on Bush’s foreign policy.

As to the other issues raised in the resolution, while I support the repeal of the Patriot Act, one look through the caseload of an organization such as FIRE demonstrates that the chief threat to academic freedom and free speech on the campus today doesn’t come from right-wing ultra-patriots. And I for one have personal experience on the question of"dismissals and refusals to employ faculty members allegedly on the basis of their views on foreign policy," though not of the type that seems to concern HAW. I’ve yet to learn of any instance when such a dismissal or attempted dismissal occurred because of a faculty member’s criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Perhaps such a dismissal occurred at a place like Duke, and I just overlooked it: I certainly can imagine how afraid a faculty critic of the war in Iraq would be to speak out in a History Department like Duke’s where every professor who is a registered voter is a Democrat.

Now that the OAH has passed its resolution, I’ll be very, very interested to see what evidence the investigatory commission brings forth. I’m not holding my breath waiting for its report.