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Academic Empires: Questions that I raised about the Kelley-Hawkins revelation and Henry Louis Gates's scholarship took me to other reports on the net about it. Here is Craig Offman's "The Making of Henry Louis Gates, CEO," Salon, 16 June 1999. Offman writes about the creation of Encarta Africana, the CD Rom encyclopedia. "... while the Africana debut has seen no dearth of press coverage, the story of its painful gestation has never been told," Offman says,

And it is a tale so fabulous -- including accusations of plagiarism, controversies over affirmative action, charges of academic royals oppressing scholarly serfs, Microsoft bottom-line mania, worker revolt and a Rashomon-like tangle of competing truths -- that one might even call it a creation myth for the contemporary university.

A word to the wise: unless you aim at subaltern status, avoid getting lost in it.

Antislavery Scripts: Caleb McDaniel is back from a brief hiatus at Mode for Caleb and continues his series of "Antislavery Scripts." Largely provoked by the publication of Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Battle to Free an Empire's Slaves, McDaniel's "Scripts," Part I, Part II, and Part III struggle with understanding how to account for the emergence of a radical Anglo-American reform movement in a world in which slavery was virtually ubiquitous and how to account for the ubiquity of claims to its legacy among current political movements. It's more complicated, he suggests, than a Whiggish hagiography and teleology.

Challenging Horowitz: When my colleague, Jonathan Dresner, challenged one of David Horowitz's tales of "leftist repression of patriotic speech" in the classroom, I notified Horowitz's staff at Front Page Rag. He is free to reply on Cliopatria's comment boards, as he occasionally does on HNN's mainpage. He's can also reply at Front Page Rag or his own blog. If he doesn't reply, I'm assuming that he knows he got caught betting on a losing horse.

Churchill: After a story in the Rocky Mountain News that, in addition to all the other accusations, Ward Churchill has been accused of plagiarism by a scholar and of threatening retaliation against the accuser, his attorney seems amenable to a more modest buyout offer from the University of Colorado, if the University agrees not to release a report of negative findings from its internal review. A settlement would foreclose the possibility of additional expensive internal and external processes that could drag on for years. While the Rocky Mountain News and Governor Bill Owens have publicly opposed a settlement, he says that the decision is up to the University's Board of Regents and any settlement is likely to loose another firestorm of public criticism.
Update: The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News are reporting that discussions of a negotiated settlement of Churchill's case have stalled as a result of the allegations of plagiarism and threat of retribution. The News story includes some parallel passages. Thanks to KC Johnson for the tip.

Edwardian England in Motion: Last night, ABC's "Nightline" gave us a foretaste of what we'll see in the remarkable recovery of 800 rolls of early nitrate film, the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection. Here, black and white stills of Edwardian England take on life and motion. Between 1900 and 1913, Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon toured the north of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, filming crowds of people wherever they went. The films seemed to have been made for people to watch themselves in action and yet there is also a sense of what lies ahead for them: a monied working class at leisure at the seaside and in sports, the prevalence of advertising in daily life, the chaos of varied forms of transportation virtually demanding some regulation, etc. Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple, and Patrick Russell have edited a collection of essays, The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film. Sponsored by the British Film Institute and the BBC, The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon is available on DVD. How could you not want to see the first film ever made of Manchester United?

History Carnival #4: History Carnival #4 will be up on or about Tuesday 15 March at Blogenspiel. Send your nominations or self-nominations of the best posts you've seen between 1 and 15 March to another_damned_medievalist AT hotmail DOT com. Help ‘er out. It's not as if she has nothing else to do; and, if you don't, she's free to feature something you wish you'd deleted.

The Lecture: The discussion of Scott McLemee's "The Lecturer's Tale" at Inside Higher Ed continues at Harry Brighouse's "Lecturing is Dead?" at Crooked Timber; and, in turn, my colleague, Hugo Schwyzer's "The Luddite Within" gets cited at Inside Higher Ed.

Posted on Saturday, March 12, 2005 at 2:11 AM | Comments (19) | Return

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