[Discussion] (no subject)

[Paksoy, Hb]

CHE
Wednesday, August 7, 2002

A glance at the summer 2002 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review:
Evaluating the historians -- with and without Ph.D.'s 
Michael Nelson, a professor of political science at Rhodes College, examines
the recent spate of controversies involving six best-selling historical
writers (some who are academics and some who are not) and concludes that
academic historians "have gotten off track."

Academic historians such as Stephen E. Ambrose, Joseph J. Ellis, Doris
Kearns Goodwin, and Edmund Morris have recently been accused of sins ranging
from plagiarism to outright fabrication, while popular historians such as
Michael Beschloss and David McCullough -- both without a graduate degree in
history -- have been unfairly scorned by academics who view their work as
superficial and not intellectually rigorous, Mr. Nelson writes. The
criticisms of Mr. Beschloss and Mr. McCullough are "for no good reason at
all," he writes. Rather, they reflect the insularity of academe and
professors' shameful snobbery and disdain toward those who "lack the
requisite guild card," he writes.

Ironically, it's the academic scholars who seem to have a lot to learn about
good scholarship, Mr. Nelson writes. "Seeing and telling the truth as best
one can is the highest scholarly calling," he writes. But "Ambrose and
Goodwin betrayed that calling by stealing the work of others and passing it
off as their own. Ellis and Morris betrayed it by making things up and
portraying those things as true. Academic critics of Beschloss and
McCullough betray it whenever they cloak turfmanship, envy, and ideological
disdain in the garb of scholarly criticism," he concludes.

This article is not available online, but information about the journal can
be found at http://www.virginia.edu/vqr/