On Thu May 18 09:32:09 PDT 2006, andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> writes:
>
> My wife's a former editor, years ago ran a small press
> at the University of Michigan. They practically - in
> some cases actually -- rewrote books the press
> published. This practice, this profession, has
> virtually vanished -- little as editors got paid, it
> was too much. Major university presses like (I have
> heard) Oxford require authors to submit camera ready
> copy, no editing at all. As Doug says, the referees
> might catch an error in their recommendations, but a
> two or five page referee report is not an editing job.
>
>
> Interestingly I had had more editing done in journals
> -- not fact-checking, although some journals
> (including law journals) will check your quotes --
> than I hear of in book publishing. There is still fact
> checking in a few places -- as Doug says, where
> litigation might be an issue, and in a few magazines
> lie the New Yorker and National Geographic. (My sister
> used be a fact checker for National Geo.)
>
> But, basically, no one looks over the author's
> shoulder nowadays -- correction comes post fact in
> reviews and critiques by other scholars as well as,
> occasionally, through proceedings like this. In the
> circumstances, any rigorous examination will find a
> fair number of errors and some things that might look
> like plagiarism.
>
> 15 years or so ago a Princeton historian named David
> Abraham was crucified for essentially minor errors in
> a book he wrote on big business and the rise of
> Hitler; he's now in legal academia; his book is
> discredited though it is in fact quite good, and a
> second edition (not published by Princeton) has been
> issued correcting the factual mistakes. He was a
> leftist scholar the victim of a systematic war by
> right winger professors from Yale and elsewhere. John
> Wiener has a good discussion of this somewhere.
That would be in his *Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower*, (New Press, 2005 ). There is an interesting review of that book in the Summer 2005 issue of Dissent by Linda Gordon. See: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=229
Also see: http://hnn.us/articles/9216.html http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05so/05sobr.htm
Wiener's point is that there exists in the academy double standards concerning the treatment of accusations of plagiarism or other forms of academic misconduct. When the scholars accused are leftists, they are much more likely to be severely sanctioned than in cases where the scholars in question are rightists (and so can look to the conservative establishment to back them up) or if the scholars are celebrity academics who can expect to be at most, lightly sanctioned by their institutions.
Thus, in the case of Harvard Law School in recent years, there have been several cases of professors there being accused of committing plagiarism. Thus, noted consitutional scholar and Supreme Court aspiree, Larry Tribe, was forced to admit that portions of his book, *God Save this Honorable Court*, incoporated material without proper attribution from an earlier work, *Justices and Presidents*, a 1974 work by Henry J. Abraham. www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/09/28/tribe_admits_not_crediting_ author/
And previous to Tribe, Professor Charles Ogletree had admitted to having copied material in his book *All Deliberate Speed* from Yale Professor Jack M. Balkin’s 2001 collection of essays, *What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said*. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=503341 www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/09/28/tribe_admits_not_crediting_ author/
Reportedly, both professors were sanctioned by Harvard but it was never made quite clear what those sanctions entailed or what effect, if any, they had on the careers of these two men.
And of course there is also the case of Alan Dershowitz. Alex Cockburn and Norman Finkelstein showed that Dershowitz in the writing of his book, *The Case for Israel* lifted numerous citations and footnotes from the earlier book, *From Time Immemorial* by Joan Peters. One can argue whether strictly speaking this was plagiarism or not. But the best that could be said for it was that is showed Dershowitz guilty of very sloppy scholarship. As far as I can tell, he has never been sanctioned for this. And indeed, Harvard seems to have never acknowledged that there might be a problem here.
>
> More recently there was that Emory historian whose
> name I forget whose National-Book-Award or Bancroft
> Prize (or both) winning treatise on guns in early
> America and the meaning of the 2d Amendment was ripped
> apart; his awards were stripped from him, and I
> believe he was force to resign his tenured
> professorship, his career, like Abraham's destroyed..
> The errors were trivial and possible plagiarism was
> buried in some footnotes, inessential to the argument,
> and actually credibly explained by an argument from
> carelessness.
>
> I doubt that most scholars' work would escape a
> careful and intense examination unscathed, Doug's
> included. Which is all the more reason for leftist to
> be super careful. The standards are higher for us --
> no point in bitching an moaning about it. Remember
> what Chuck said about the ruling ideas of the epoch.
> Also remember what Tommy (Hobbes) said about if it was
> in any man's interest with respect to power or money
> to deny that the interior angles of a triangle add up
> to 360 degrees (or some similar geometric truth), he
> would deny it.
>
> Where Churchill falls into this I cannot say. Unlike
> the case with the other two guys I have not read the
> books or careful debate about the scholarly problems.
> The stuff I have read on the list makes it look Not
> Good for Churchill, worse than carelessness. It may
> be unfair that he was prosecuted in this connection
> because of an irrelevant and stupid remark in a
> totally different context, but if a scholar is going
> to be inflammatory he also better be, like Norman
> Finkelstein, scrupulously and rigorously accurate.
> I'd hesitate to hold Churchill up as a poster boy for
> persecution until we know more, and if he fucked up or
> worse, I think we should not make excuses for him. It
> makes us look like e don't care about integrity or
> truth. But as I say, I reserve judgment pending
> further information.
>
> jks
>