Fool Me Once…
Stanford Professor of Law Jim Lindgren over at The Volokh Conspiracy is raising some important questions about academic and journalistic ethics.
He’s talking about a recent piece by historian, author and college professor Michael Bellesiles in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In “Teaching Military History in a Time of War,” Bellesiles tells the story of one of his students and the student’s brother–an American soldier in Iraq. Over the course of the semester, the student–given the pseudonym Ernesto– tells Bellesiles that his brother– who in the essay is called Javier–has been shot by a sniper. After undergoing horrific and lengthy suffering, Javier died.
Though the essay has an anti-war tone, Bellesiles– in his own words– comes across as a sympathetic and caring teacher.
Lindgren did some fact-checking and could find nothing to verify Bellesiles’ chronicle of events:
ICasualties shows 31 fatalities in Iraq during the period of Bellesiles’s course, 8 of which were from hostile attacks. One of these 8 hostile attacks was from a mortar (not sniper bullets), and 5 of these 8 hostile attacks were IED attacks (4 of these 5 IED attack deaths came on Sept. 8, too soon to fit Bellesiles’s narrative in any event).
That leaves two Iraqi War deaths by hostile small arms fire during his course, one on Nov. 4 and another on Nov. 22. The newspaper accounts of both deaths do indicate a sniper as the killer, but both deaths are reported as occurring on the same day as the soldiers were shot, so they cannot be the source of Bellesiles’s tale of a wounded soldier languishing for weeks, at one point perhaps too injured to be flown to Germany. Neither soldier had recently enlisted (Jan. 2008 and 2002 respectively), though the hero who died on Nov. 4, 2009 had been deployed to Iraq earlier that fall. The Nov. 4 decedent was from New Mexico and (according to his obituaries) left no surviving brothers, only sisters. Similarly, the Nov. 22 decedent was from Georgia and left no surviving brothers, only a sister.
If one were to assume that Bellesiles’s story is false about the cause of death, but otherwise true, I still could find no Iraqi War deaths that occurred during his fall 2009 course that lingered for more than a brief time after being injured. I read through every DoD casualty report from last fall for both Iraq and Afghanistan and none from Iraq indicated a significant lapse of time from injury to death. I also read newspaper accounts for almost all fatalities during this period and none from Iraq indicated a significant lapse of time from injury to death. Thus, from the reports I read, I saw no evidence that could corroborate that Bellesiles’s account as substantially true.
Neither could Dutton Peabody at Big Journalism.
A friend who used to be in the Army is also a mite suspicious about the account of Javier’s service. The Hartford Courant keeps careful track of Connecticut casualties: three Connecticut men died from battle during the autumn semester when Bellesiles was teaching the course: one was a sergeant, which Javier, a recent enlistee, was not; one was a captain, which Javier was even less. The third was not Army, but a Marine, and, like the other two men, died (from an IED, not a sniper round like Javier) in Afghanistan, not Iraq. He did, though, have an infant son back in Connecticut named Javier.
Just for the sake of argument, and positing that “this past semester” is the recently ended spring semester, there has been only one fatality so far this year, reported on April 4th as recently killed. Lance Corporal Tyler Griffin was a Marine, not Army. And killed by an IED, not a shot to the head. And in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Nor was he an immigrant, as Javier is described. (“We discussed [his] reasons for enlisting, which mostly focused on a sense of gratitude to a country that had given their family refuge.”) And there is no sign of a brother in the Courant obituary.
There’s a very good reason why these folks are trying to verify Bellesiles’ story. There’s no proof as of right now that he’s making stuff up in this Chronicle piece, but he’s been caught writing fabricated history before. In Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, a book that was published to great acclaim and that won the prestigious Bancroft Prize, Bellesiles purported to show that guns and the gun culture was not– as we’d all pretty much previously believed– historically part of American culture. Good news for the anti-Second Amendment crowd. As it turned out, though, the data for Bellesiles’ argument did not exist. The Bancroft prize was withdrawn (something that had never happened before) and Bellesiles lost his job at Emory University.
Lindgren wrote about the scandal in The Yale Law Journal:
The book and the scandal it generated are hard to understand. How could Bellesiles count guns in about a hundred Providence [Rhode Island] wills that never existed, count guns in San Francisco County inventories that were apparently destroyed in 1906, report national means that are mathematically impossible, change the condition of guns in a way that fits his thesis, misreport the counts of guns in censuses or militia reports, have over a 60% error rate in finding guns in Vermont estates, and have a 100% error rate in finding homicide cases in the Plymouth records he cites? We may never know the truth of why or how Arming America made such basic errors, but make them it did.
As scholars, we must content ourselves with correcting errors and searching for the realities of gun ownership, use, and social meaning. Beyond that, we might try to figure out how to avoid a repetition of this unfortunate episode.
And that’s the question being asked: Has this “unfortunate episode” been repeated in the most recent Chronicle essay?
What makes all this especially troubling is the question is raises about The Chronicle of Higher Education. That’s because, as Peabody reports:
Ten years ago, Mr. Bellesiles’ woes over his Arming America were triggered partly by another article of his, “Exploding the Myth of an Armed America” — in the Sept. 29, 2000, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Given the Bellesiles scandal, you’d think that the Chronicle editors would do the fact-checking that Lindgren has attempted. Maybe they have. If they have, Lindgren says, they should make that clear:
This leads to concerns about the Chronicle of Higher Education. Serious questions have now been raised whether the Chronicle of Higher Education has published claims from Michael Bellesiles that can’t be substantiated. This is unfortunate, as it undermines the Chronicle’s credibility and reputation. Liz McMillen, the editor of the Chronicle Review, therefore ought to check Bellesiles’s story. Fortunately, that’s easy to do. She merely has to contact Bellesiles, find out the real name of Javier (either a first or last name would probably do), examine Bellesiles’s syllabus to establish the timeline, and interview his Marine teaching assistant. With Javier’s real name, it should be extremely easy to verify the date and cause of his injury, his place of treatment, and his date of death. She need not publish Javier’s real name any more than Bellesiles did when he published his story about Javier; indeed, her inquiry would be less intrusive than Bellesiles’s original publication of his story in the Chronicle.
If the Chronicle were to do its duty and report its findings honestly, then we would know whether the story is true. If Bellesiles substantially made up his story to advance his career, then I would expect him to refuse to give Javier’s name to even a friendly editor from the Chronicle. Fortunately, the Chronicle should at least be able to review his syllabus and interview his teaching assistant. At the end of the day, the Chronicle should publish its findings or report that it was unable to verify Bellesiles’s story as true.
Update:
Brian Lamb’s Booknotes interview with historian Peter Charles Hoffer about his book Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin is here.
[...] discussed it before here and here and here. Categorized under: Education, Ethics, Higher Ed. Tagged with: Ethics, Higher [...]
[...] discussed it here and here. Categorized under: Ethics, Higher Ed. Tagged with: Bellesiles, Ethics, Higher [...]
[...] Scott McLemee—essayist, critic and blogger at Inside Higher Ed—takes a look at the publisher’s statement for historian Michael Bellesiles’ forthcoming book 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently. (We recently talked about the Michael Bellesiles scandal here.) [...]