Whether any error is due to sloppiness or deliberate misrepresentation is often difficult to decide. One can't assume either without investigation, and investigation may not prove guilt or innocence conclusively in some cases either.
Being better than average is no protection against a politically motivated investigation, since what the average rate of errors is doesn't get taken into account in such a case.
The bottom line is that a university should NOT initiate a special investigation of an individual scholar in response to pressures from politicians, political pundits, etc. Albert Ramirez, chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado, is correct imho: <http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4729492,00.html>.
Attempts at keeping high scholarly standards should be made, instead, in routine academic work: e.g., how university presses edit books and articles; how hiring, tenuring, and promotion committees look at candidates' work; and so on. Don't skimp money* and hire goddamn fact-checkers! If The New Yorker has a fact-checking department, so should all university presses.
> What do you suppose is Doug's error rate? Liza's? Jim
> D's? (Every citation I have looked up from any of
> these writers has been right.)
I haven't checked Doug's or Jim D's**. After all, I'm not an economist, so I would not be the best person to check it either. Nor have I tracked all of Liza's articles.
I have spotted one error in Liza's reporting on the Palestinian solidarity movement, and I mentioned it here because it concerned a student group at the Ohio State University: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2002/2002-June/013784.html>.
I also posted here the group's faculty advisor Joseph Levine's letter on that error: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2002/2002-November/027381.html>.
I have not held that against Liza's overall work, however, which I hold in very high regard; nor has she held my question against me. That sort of feedback from leftists -- not a top-down investigation responding to political pressures from the Right -- should be the means through which leftists should correct our own work.
* Investigations like Ward Churchill's ain't cheap either: "The majority of the cost - $101,434 - went to private lawyers who were paid $350 per hour for legal advice. Another $33,463 covered salaries for faculty members who worked on the inquiry during the summer" (at <http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4727456,00.html>).
** Mutatis mutandis, Jim might be found to have made things up out of thin air: after all, he discusses such things as the "law of value" as discovered by Karl Marx, which a majority in his profession believe doesn't exist! :-> -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>