--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Gar Lipow wrote:
>
> >If you are wrong, and he is in fact
> >fired, then your essay will have helped ensure that
> a tenured academic
> >with unpopular opinions was fired for those
> opinions - regardless of
> >the truth or falsity of your essay.
>
> Yup. Churchill isn't known primarily as a scholar,
> but as a political
> figure. He's not in trouble for fucking up a
> footnote - as Jon Wiener
> shows in his book Historians in Trouble (I'll be
> posting the radio
> show with my interview with Wiener in a day or two),
> rightwingers can
> screw up massively and suffer no consequences, but a
> leftwinger can
> get fired over relatively minor errors.
Some people here may remember the David Abtaham incident. This must have been 20 years ago. Abraham was a lefty untenured German historian at Princeton who wrote a book on Hitler's rise to power and the role of big business in this story. He angered some right wingers, including a Yale historian who had written a book in the area, they magnified some fairly insignificant errors in his footnotes into a big megilla, and not only got him fired from Princeton but (John Weiner wrote a piece on this in the Nation) systematically blacklisted from academe. HE went to law school, became a law prof at the U of Miami LS. Last I heard of him was when he was a contestant/participant in a radio talk show in Madison, WI -- nothing political. His errors were (Weiners howed) mo more egregious than the Yale prof who did him in. And unlike Churchill, Abraham was a real scholar.
Finding
> errors in Churchill's
> scholarship is, in the current context, assisting in
> a politically
> motivated persecution.
>
> I am glad Thomas Brown joined the list to explain
> his motives. He's
> removed any doubt about where he stands.
>
> Doug
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