The Chronicle of Higher Education, in the course of a long profile about disgraced professor Michael Bellesiles, has this to say about his latest whopper:
Then, after I interviewed him, Mr. Bellesiles published an essay in The Chronicle Review. In the piece, which seemed innocuous enough, he writes about a student in his military-history class at Central Connecticut State whose brother was killed in Iraq. The essay is about how real life intrudes on the classroom, how teachers must be sensitive to what’s going on in the lives of their students.
One of his old critics, James Lindgren, then wrote a post on the group blog The Volokh Conspiracy. Mr. Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern University, had searched through the records of military deaths and couldn’t find one that matched the description in Mr. Bellesiles’s essay. Other bloggers piled on, including Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit, and Megan McArdle, of The Atlantic. The title of one post, “Is Bellesiles At It Again?,” conveys the tenor of the response.
Like Mr. Lindgren, I couldn’t find any military records that matched the details in the essay. I contacted the teaching assistant for the class, who confirmed Mr. Bellesiles’s version of events, saying that the student had seemed distressed and had told him that his brother was killed in either Iraq or Afghanistan. I had a brief conversation with the student, who told me the brother’s name and said he was in the Army. I then spoke with an Army official, who searched a database containing the names of all service members killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The name didn’t come up.
In an e-mail exchange I then had with the student, he admitted that he had lied about some of the details he told Mr. Bellesiles, the teaching assistant, and, later, me. It wasn’t his brother but rather a friend who had died in Afghanistan. He explained the situation in more detail, but I’m going to keep those details private. Exposing him doesn’t seem right, even if his credibility is questionable.
So even though it appears clear that Mr. Bellesiles wasn’t lying, as some alleged online, what happened can only further damage his standing as a scholar. Why didn’t he verify the student’s story? Shouldn’t a historian, particularly one teaching a military-history course, be more careful? Is this additional evidence of Mr. Bellesiles’s casual relationship with facts?
Maybe. Then again, it never occurred to Mr. Bellesiles or the teaching assistant that the student might be lying. He was a good student who seemed genuinely distressed. Why grill a grief-stricken undergraduate? Who makes up a story like that anyway?
Regardless, the details of this minor uproar will eventually fade, leaving the impression that, once again, Mr. Bellesiles got it wrong.
Well, of course, for whatever reason he did get it wrong. And the Chronicle allowed him to publish what we now know was at least a semi-fabricated story.
But so what? According to the New York Times, it’s high time we rehabbed Bellesiles. After all, it’s all about the narrative:
His book “1877: America’s Year of Living Violently,” which will be published next week, is an attempted comeback for Mr. Bellesiles, who has languished in a kind of academic no-man’s land for the past decade after a scandal surrounding his previous book cut short what looked to be a promising career. “I’d like to think that anyone reading it would give it a fair chance,” he said of his latest work…
Mr. Bellesiles and his supporters have maintained that the uproar was politically motivated and his mistakes minor. In promotional material for “1877,” Mr. Bellesiles’s current publisher, the nonprofit New Press, described him as returning to writing after becoming “the target of an infamous ‘swiftboating’ campaign by the National Rifle Association.”
That characterization of Mr. Bellesiles, who has been teaching history part time at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain while working two other part-time jobs, did precisely what he had hoped to avoid: revive the controversy about “Arming America.” Then, in June, an article he wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education about teaching students military history during wartime stoked further discussion of Mr. Bellesiles’s credibility. In it he mentioned a student who told him a brother had been killed in Iraq — a claim that turned out to be false. The Chronicle, which investigated the incident after readers raised questions, said the student confessed he had lied to Mr. Bellesiles.
“It broke my heart,” Mr. Bellesiles said. “I always trusted my students.”
Right: blame it on the student — that’s the kind of professor Mike Bellesiles is!
The rehabilitation of Michael Bellesiles, courtesy of the Democrat-Media Complex: right on schedule.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.