October 25, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:So Michael Bellesiles has resigned,
So Michael Bellesiles has resigned, and it's hard to read the findings of the investigating committee without feeling a wave of compassion. If you've ever read academic reviews, this finding is the professorial equivalent of running around the quad shrieking "He's a big, fat liar!"
This was the right result. The review process worked, although obviously much, much less quickly than it should have -- the finding goes out of it's way to spank the journal where Bellesiles work on guns was first published, asking why no editor had thought to ask that Bellesiles supply the basic information needed to understand his tables. This is the professorial equivalent of giving them the fish eye and saying, "So, you guys just publish anything any idiot hands you? Or aren't you bright enough to read the little numbers in the boxes?"
It's instructive, though, that it took too much publicity to get the right result. Happy as we are that the integrity of the profession of history has been upheld, it's troubling that absent publicity, it probably would have taken 20 years or more for the record to be set straight. During that time, Bellesiles' work would have been incorporated into court cases, public policy, and the minds of millions of people . . . damage that would probably continue long after professional historians knew the work to be false. This tendency is apparent in almost every profession, particularly cloistered ones like academia, medicine, and police work, where practicioners tend to feel that it is "us" against "them", and when one of our own screws up, it's better to circle the wagons and protect him than risk one of "them" finding out that we aren't perfect. This should be a wake-up call to academics everywhere -- but of course, it won't be.
It's also instructive that Bellesiles thought he could get away with it. A friend has a theory that Bellesiles, like the guy at Bell Labs, wasn't in it for self-aggrandizement, exactly, but is just a compulsive liar. He got such a high from putting one over that he simply couldn't stop, even though the longer he went on, the more likely it was that he would be discovered. Another friend, an academic, thinks it more probable that Bellesiles really believed that he could get away with it. And of course if he had, the rewards were astronomical. Being the TV historian for gun issues . . . the lecture circuit. . . the prestigious prizes . . . [here I interject the opinion of an anonymous emailer, a graduate student in history, that the most embarassing thing about all of this is the famous historians trying to save face by claiming that the book was a towering work that would have gotten the Bancroft even without the probate records, indeed even had the subject not been so controversial: "the rest of the book, at least the parts that aren't misrepresented, is a trivial recount of explosive new facts that have been well known to professional historians for a hundred years"] . . . and indeed, it's hard to ignore the fact that Bellesiles became very famous for contradicting commonly accepted views of historical gun rights, even before his data was challenged. It seems likely that he picked his topic with that end in mind -- it's hard to imagine the New York Times devoting that much space to a shattering new interpretation of, say, early 19th century tariff laws.
So one can say he tried to lie his way to fame and fortune, and got a much-deserved comeuppance. And yet, I feel sorry for him. Just as I feel sorry for Monica Lewinsky and everyone else who sought fame and fortune, and found it in very public humiliation. We've all had the feeling, I imagine, of not being quite able to make it. We've all been tempted to push the envelope, go out on a limb, do something maybe not quite right just to put ourselves over the top. Thank God we didn't. We found a job or a field where we were more qualified, or we learned to compensate, or we accepted that we weren't ever going to win the Nobel Prize. But is it really so hard to imagine yourself taking that first step -- making up a couple entries in a table, maybe, to make your case look a little better? And when no one caught it, to make up a little more, so your case was really dazzling? And when people responded by showering you with praise for your results, is it hard to imagine how intense the pressure must have been to keep serving them up? People on HNN have been jumping all over a history professor for suggesting that this is a tragedy for Bellesiles -- that the peer review system served him as badly as it served us -- but really, couldn't we have saved ourselves a lot of grief by catching this the first time? Bellesiles might have been spanked and sent back to do better research, instead of rewarded in a way that demanded he produce ever more outlandish results. And how hard is it to imagine the hell he has been living in over the past few years, desperately lying to cover his previous lies, breathing a little easier as the questions receded for a time. . . but then the noose inevitably closing in? He didn't behave well, and he doesn't deserve mercy. But when we see a man destroy himself by inches, I hope we can muster up some compassion. His life is effectively over. He will never work again in his chosen field. He will never publish again. He stands revealed to everyone whose opinion ever mattered to him as a liar and a fraud. Frankly, I find it hard to imagine what he will do, since professors rarely have a lot of money, and their skills are somewhat rarified. Most of the professors I've worked for couldn't even type or file well enough to work in an office.
We shouldn't gloat, and we shouldn't say that Clayton Cramer and James Lindgren "won". It wasn't a contest. I think Volokh is right: they deserve our thanks for helping to set the record straight, not our congratulations.
Update Erin O'Connor makes an important point about the general condition of research in academia. As Instapundit points out, peer review is good for picking out problems with methodology -- but true frauds just fake the data. Hard science does a lot better at this -- generate interesting results, and you'll be deluged with requests to see the data so that other scientists can replicate it. It's time for the humanities to adopt the same standards, giving points for replicating results as well as generating them.
I also don't find it particularly likely, as some have accused, that Bellesiles was out to destroy the gun rights movement. He certainly wasn't fazed by the idea that his work would do them harm; indeed, it may have tickled him. But I don't think he would risk spiking his career this way for a political conviction he didn't seem to hold that strongly. I think he did it to get famous, not to advance his political agenda. Obviously, the better way to get famous was to pick something controversial, and I'll even venture to add, take the liberal side so the New York Times will give you good press. But it's a little extreme to think that he did this just to get the NRA.
Posted by Jane Galt at October 25, 2002 6:27 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links