Meanwhile, at Penn State-Altoona, Erin O’Connor has reported on how the administration now seems to be launching a smear campaign against Professor Nona Gerard. (My Cliopatria colleague Ralph Luker has recently written about the Gerard case here.) The campus administration has countered in a form-lette response: “You should also know that when five members of the University community who heard over 40 hours of testimony in what was a quasi-legal proceeding would vote unanimously that the faculty member was guilty of grave misconduct, there is not just smoke but a lot of fire.”

In his blog, Brian Leiter has observed that this response is what one would have expected from an administration faced with such an apparently indefensible position. (Leiter adds that the statement itself is deceptive, because the vote to dismiss Gerard was only 3-2, with 2 of the 3 votes coming from administrators.) Altoona is, essentially, asking the outside world to believe that its administrators elected, for reasons unknown, to ensure that the least damaging charges against Gerard made it into the public arena, but that, because of their commitment to the “integrity” of the university’s judicial process, chose to keep secret the most serious of those allegations. Not exactly the most credible claim.

The National Book Circle Critics Awards were handed out in New York on Thursday evening. They went to two of my favorite candidates. Edward P. Jones's The Known World took the prize in fiction; and Paul Hendrickson's Sons of Mississippi won for non-fiction.

Liberty & Power's David Beito hasn't sent me a cigar yet, but he's a new grandfather. One of his former students, Reid McKee, did some guestblogging over at L & P. Now, McKee has launched his own new group blog, Moteworthy. Check it out.

Finally, this personal note: I've been out of the classroom for a couple of years and had almost forgotten how draining it is. Two hour-long workshops yesterday with CoreKnowledge K-12 teachers and I was thoroughly wiped out. So, here's a tip of the hat to the multi-tasking Cliopatriarchs (and other academic bloggers, too) who advise, blog, committee-serve, publish, teach, and hold administrators at bay all at once.

Doing these workshops set me to thinking about the fairly large divide between the professorate and K-12 faculty. There was a time when it wasn't so. A faculty member at Louisville's Male High School was deferentially called"Prof Smith" in our local church there and the University of Louisville's David Maurer was well known to us in high school because his wife, Barbara, ruled the Latin roost at Fern Creek High School. The woman was a genius of a teacher and knew just where the boundaries were. When last I talked to her by telephone on a brief flight through Louisville, I called Mrs. Maurer. Many years had passed and she didn't altogether even remember me, but I wanted to pay tribute to her stern authority as a teacher. She cut me off."Oh, I was a bitch," she said.

In the meantime, I had done student teaching as an undergraduate at Duke. I was assigned to an eighth grade class in a white junior high school and ended up even leading girls p. e. I hadn't the faintest idea what to do with that. But I was also participating in civil rights demonstrations in downtown Durham. After my picture appeared on local television, one of my students was found drawing a picture of me in his notebook."Nigger lover," it said under the drawing. I wasn't allowed to teach the unit on African history that I had planned for that semester. My teaching supervisor threatened to withdraw me from student teaching. The threat was a serious one because had I not successfully completed student teaching, I would have lost credit for all of the other courses I had taken that semester. A whole semester's work lost and graduation delayed. I survived by not getting arrested until my student teaching was completed and all requirements for graduation met.

It's all so ironic. Engagement in the civil rights movement is now valued. As I told a friend several years ago,"I'm a bloody relic." He wasn't too impressed with that, but I'm also a scholar of the movement and knowledge of it is" core knowledge." I hope Mrs. Maurer would be proud of me. I only wish the supervisors of my student teaching could be with us tomorrow.

I happened on an interesting show on tv last night, by way of that dreaded vice of idly flicking through some channels without any particular goal in mind. I thought it was Nova, but upon going to the Nova page to find a link and being unable to, discovered that it was something called Secrets of the Dead. Not a very alluring title. Sounds like something on one of those odd channels, one of those channels full of cop chases and other lurid items. But in fact it was quite good, and I ended up watching though I had thought I was going to wander off again after a few minutes. It was about the 1918 flu. There were some mildly irritating aspects, such as unnecessary re-enactments to supplement the archival photos and film, but that's a small point.

The most interesting part, to me at least, was toward the end, when questions of evidence and how to think about them and what to decide came to the fore, and we were presented with two scientists, both apparently quite reasonable and sensible, drawing rather different conclusions from the same evidence. Nothing remarkable in that, it happens all the time, and that's why it's so interesting. It was a very good little lesson in how both science and history actually work, there on our tv screens.

One researcher, an Oxford virologist (whose name I've forgotten), had and has an idea that the flu originated earlier and elsewhere than the generally-believed spring of 1918 in US military camps. So he searched the literature, and found a contemporary article in the Lancet by several military doctors about a virulent respiratory outbreak in a military camp in Etaples, in northern France. The doctors said it was not quite like ordinary bronchitis nor like ordinary pneumonia; they called it 'purulent bronchitis.' It was frequently fatal, and it produced the same 'heliotrope cyanosis' that the 1918 flu did. The Oxford virologist looked for three enabling conditions for a flu like the 1918 strain: pigs, live birds that humans have contact with, and crowded conditions; he found all three.

But that's all the evidence there is. He and others have been looking in permafrost for genetic material that would clinch it, but so far they have not found any. And that's where the two different takes come in. The Oxford virologist is convinced that the Etaples outbreak was the origin of the 1918 flu. But part of his argument for why he thinks so and we should think so too was a little bit odd (and, so, interesting as part of as it were epistemological psychology). He said something like 'How can we just ignore the findings of the doctors who wrote the Lancet article, who risked their lives to do the research? We can't just say they were wrong, we can't just dismiss them.' That's an odd thing to say because it's not necessary to say they were wrong, surely, and even if it were that would not be an argument! Obviously enough.

The virologist then went on to say that the preponderance of the evidence was in favour of the Etaples idea; that it wasn't proven, but the evidence was heavily in favour. His colleague Jeffrey Taubenberger, a molecular pathologist, put it quite differently. He simply said we don't have the evidence, and that's that.

Clearly the two are considering different kinds of things to be evidence, and it's also somewhat clear that the virologist is letting himself persuade himself. That he's taking what one might call circumstantial evidence to be firmer than it really is, and not being tentative enough. And that in itself is quite interesting. The difference between the two is a nice illustration of what lab technicians, journalists, detectives, historians, molecular pathologists and virologists do every day, all over the planet. Figuring things out.

Europeans rank the 'scientific" content of these fields --

1. Physics

2. Medicine

3. Biology

4. Astronomy

5. Psychology

6. Astrology

7. Economics

8. History

Here's a link to the pdf version -- the sad, sad chart is on page 27. I wonder what a comparable ranking in America would reveal?

Derek Catsam is from New Hampshire and, bear with us, he is a Red Sox fan. Williams College and Catsam agree that he ill-spent his youth there, majoring in history and political science, captaining its championship track and field team, and singing in the Williams Octet, an a cappella group. He continues to sing with a DC group, Fair Game. Derek did graduate work at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, Rhodes University in South Africa, and Ohio University in American and South African history. Catsam is a fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, finishing a book on the Freedom Rides for Louisiana State University Press. An associate editor of Safundi: The Journal of South African & American Comparative Studies, Derek is well known at HNN both for his fine articles and spirited engagements on the comment boards. He places himself somewhere to"the left of the New Republic but to the right of the Nation". Being a historian does not save him from illusions: he believes the Red Sox will do it this year and joins Cliopatria"to set that &*#%$@ Luker straight on a few matters." Do, someone, buy the poor man a webpage. We have no netlink for him.

Fortunately, Michael Tinkler will maintain some sense of balance at Cliopatria. Better known on the net as the Cranky Professor, Tinkler teaches Art History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. He is, however, a man of the South, a native of Tennessee, and graduate in Classics from Rice University. Unwittingly, he absorbed wisdom by walking past Atlanta's Luker estate 10 or 12 times a week while pursuing his doctorate at Emory University. Tinkler's teaching and research interests are in ancient and medieval art history, Islamic art and architecture, and women and art in the middle ages. And, shh, the Cranky One is said to be a" conservative."