The Books of My Life: Historians in Trouble

 

In his Historians in Trouble: Plagiarsm, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivy Tower (New York: New Press, 2005), historian Jon Wiener takes us on an entertaining, enlightening, and depressing journey through the dark side of academia, specifically the history profession, and contemporary American intellectual culture, and the impact of the wider American culture war since the 1960s on both. Wiener, drawing on essays he wrote largely for the Nation over the years, gives us a picture of the problematic relationship between graduate students, faculty members, and star or celebrity professors (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's almost master and slave relationship with those under her). He tales the tale of the potential dangers associated with archival work, the problematic use of sources, and the problems of footnoting, by some intellectuals in the academic profession and outside of it (Allen Weinstein, Michael Bellesiles, David Abraham, Mike Davis, Edward Pearson, and James Lott). He explores the problem of plagiarism in academic and intellectual culture (Doris Kearns Goodwyn and Stephen Ambrose). He takes us into the world of lying and exaggeration in the academy and intellectual culture (Joseph Ellis and Stephen Thernstrom).

Along the way, Wiener asks why some academics have escaped punishment and shame (the academic and intellectual scarlet A) while others have been humiliated and been banished from the academy (the black O). He finds the answer in political culture, interest group politics, and the contemporary American culture war. Fox-Genovese, Weinstein,  Lott, and Thernstrom, Wiener argues, largely escaped any punishment for their sexual harassment, questionable acquisition of and use of data, archival and quantitative, and exaggerations of political correctness, and were rewarded for it, at least in the case of Fox-Genovese, Weinstein, and Lott, by political appointments from a right wing president and, in the case of Lott, a job at a right wing think tank. Others, because of their perceived left wing or liberal politics and theoretical approaches, however, as Wiener notes, were hounded out of academia by interest groups that disagreed with them, in the case of Bellesiles, by academics whose work they challenged, as in the case of Abraham, or run out of Los Angeles by boosterist interests, like Mike Davis, who got a job teaching at SUNY Stony Brook. Still others, like Joseph Ellis, who lied about being in Vietnam and involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement upon his return, was punished by the college at which he worked, Mount Holyoke, but was soon back teaching and writing reviews for the prestigious New York Times, because, Wiener argues, there was no powerful interest group that went after Ellis in the way that the right wing gun lobby went after Bellesiles.

Wiener's book is an interesting and easy read for anyone interested in the academy, ideology, politics, and culture wars. I recommend this documented TMZish excursion through the wonderful world of American academe and intellectual culture. Anyone who has been a graduate student, particularly a graduate student in history, will recognise the world Wiener describes.