A Pretty Lie

Give Clemson Professor Jonathan Beecher Field credit. He wants to know why plagiarism doesn’t matter. He works hard to explain to his students that plagiarism is a serious infraction, and his job is harder now that Joe Biden is on the Democratic ticket.

The kind of wholesale plagiarism Biden evidently committed, copying chunks of a law review article into a paper with his name on it, suggests an inclination toward the kind of malfeasance present in the Kinnock incident. In every class I teach, I spend time talking about citation, and why it is so important for scholarship. As part of this conversation, I emphasize that acknowledging sources is a condition of membership in the community of scholars: if scholars do not acknowledge sources, they do not belong in this community.

So far, so good. But then Field reprises the case of Michael Bellesiles and his book Arming America.

By way of illustration, I have sometimes shared the Emory University report on the conduct of former history professor Michael Bellesiles, who undermined a provocative and compelling argument about gun ownership in early America with gross violations of scholarly norms for citation. The report demonstrated serious concerns about his scholarship and led to his resignation. If Bellesiles had chosen a less contentious subject, he would not have had legions of NRA supporters going through his footnotes, and he might well still hold his tenured position at a prestigious university. However, he presented his research in sloppy and dishonest fashion, and he lost his job.

Thank God for the ever-vigilant NRA. Field veers off course here, insisting that Bellesiles had a “compelling argument” marred only by faulty citations, as though the gun nuts discredited Bellesiles on a mere technicality. George Will said this about the incident in Newsweek:

Bellesiles’s thesis is startling. It is that guns were not widely owned, or reliable enough to be important, at the time the Second Amendment was written. The implication is that the amendment should be read to protect only the collective rights of states, not the rights of individuals. The book pleased partisans of a cause popular in the liberal political culture of academia–gun control. Reviews were rapturous: “exhaustive research,” “intellectual rigor,” “inescapable policy implications,” “the NRA’s worst nightmare.”

Then people noticed inconsistencies, and

When Bellesiles’s evasive response led to more tugging on the threads of his argument, it unraveled. The unraveling revealed a pattern of gross misstatements of facts and unfounded conclusions. His errors are so consistently convenient for his thesis, it is difficult to believe that the explanation is mere sloppiness or incompetence. It looks like fraud.

Others reached the same conclusion:

Garry Wills, who had enthusiastically reviewed Arming America for the New York Times, later said, “I was took. The book is a fraud.” He also told an interviewer for C-SPAN that Bellesiles “claimed to have consulted archives he didn’t and he misrepresented those archives,” lamenting that Bellesiles did not have to do it, since he had good evidence for many of his claims.

This last bit is sophistry. Having evidence for some of the claims in a book doesn’t make a very good book, and it’s fair to conclude that Bellesiles would not have manufactured fraudulent data if his argument could be supported without it. But Field and Wills continue to defend the result of fraudulent research because they find the argument appealing. Fields concludes:

Bellesiles cheated, and he lost his job because of it, and in spite of an argument that continues to make sense.

How can the argument make sense if the data supporting it are fraudulent? Bellesiles’ conclusion is fruit of the poisonous tree.

A plagiarist takes credit for someone else’s work – misrepresenting the source. Bellesiles, however, did his own fabricating. His conclusion was therefore as tainted as the data supporting it. It was a lie, but a pretty lie that gun control advocates wanted to believe.

Field condemns the methods but lauds the result. I suspect he will present a more compelling case against academic dishonesty if he finds an illustration without that glaring inconsistency.