I should know better than to respond to ad hominem posts, because it always spawns more, but let me select out the meat here:
First, you don't understand the timeline. Churchill's fabrication of the Mandan genocide was outed last September in an essay in Commentary, which was reprinted on the History News Network web site. My only contribution was to flesh out some of the evidence. LaVelle's exegesis of Churchill's plagiarism and fabrication is on his web page. The press would have found this story whether I existed or not.
Second, your suggestion that it's strategically correct to withhold information simply to gain a political advantage reveals that you and I live on different ethical planets. I think this strategy is elitist and ethically untenable. And to justify concealing information in order to advance a free speech agenda, you would have to twist yourself into a moral pretzel.
>I am surprised it isn't obvious to you but then most people have a hell of
>a difficult time
>realizing their mistakes and an even greater time publicly admitting them.
I think you're mistaken if you believe there's a right outcome and a wrong outcome in this mess. If Churchill stays, the academy is delegitimized by his presence. If he goes, academic freedom is diminished. Either way, the academy loses.
I think firing Churchill will lead to the lesser of two evils here, because the right in Colorado will be mollified, temporarily, I hope. And he deserves firing, so no great loss. On the other hand, if he stays, they are going to take out their frustration on the state university system, which could be a much worse assault on tenure. I say throw the sharks the rotten meat and hope they're satiated. It needed tossing anyway.
Doug Henwood wrote:
>In Wiener's account, the major prob was that [Bellisles] omitted two years
>in
>his history table, because they were the years during which the
>revolutionaries were given weapons, and would be misleading about the
>level of gun ownership. If he'd disclosed this in a note, it would've
>been ok. I don't know - I'm just passing this along,.
That's like saying all that Jack the Ripper did was pick up a hooker. Really, it's a serious misrepresentation of what Bellisles did.
>>Have you read Hoffer's recent book on historians in trouble? It's
>>more scholarly and less politically-motivated than Wiener's.
>
>No, but hey - some of us don't have a prob with "politically motivated."
Wiener's politicized thesis is not the problem. It's that his politics led him to misrepresent Bellisles's offenses, and also to misrepresent one of Bellisles's major critics. Shades of this thread lately, eh?