I always wondered what happened to Michael Bellesiles.

[Remmah2]

http://chronicle.com/article/Michael-Bellesiles-Takes/123751/

A bit dated but he's out there still kicking.

(Excerpt)
"Let's say you spend a dozen years researching a book. It's the first in a planned trilogy, the historical opus you consider your life's work. The book is published to gushing reviews ("stunning," "brilliant," a "tour de force") and becomes a national best seller. You win a big prize. You are living every scholar's dream.

Then it starts to crumble. Troubling flaws are found in your acclaimed work. At first you dismiss your critics as cranks, but as the evidence piles up, you struggle to defend yourself. Your admirers desert you. Your publisher drops you. Your big prize is withdrawn, and you're pressured to leave the faculty job you love. For a moment, you had everything, and then—just like that—it all goes away, plus some."

[slackmaster]

1. K&R

:kick:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/who-do-i-have-to-blow-to-win-the-bancroft-prize-in,10755/

[Tuesday Afternoon]

2. interesting comment from the article

He also wishes, he tells me, that he'd studied statistics. That is the closest he comes to admitting that what happened with Arming America was, at least in part, his fault.

k&r

[Lurks Often]

3. Trying to work up sympathy for him

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still trying
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Nope, no sympathy here. At best he was incompetent at researching and verifying his facts, both in his first book and in his article about the student in his class. He is supposed to be a historian, which means you verify and document your sources. At worst is he is a liar, who makes things up to suit his political viewpoint and then tries to market his work as history and non-fiction.

[petronius]

4. As I understand it, the 'student story' article was about dealing sensitively with

students who come to class conflicted by personal issues (specifically, war related), a topic that every faculty member should be thinking about. The student who told him the story was in turmoil, but lied about the reason - that doesn't change anything about Bellesiles' conclusions/reactions, and there's no real reason for a professor to fact-check the student in that situation.

So I do have sympathy for him on that one; no other professor would have been scrutinized or criticized over that article the way he was, because of his past transgressions...

(It is ironic and a bit amusing, of course, that he fell into the trap of accepting eye-witness accounts that he mentioned at the beginning of that column.)

[SteveM]

5. The saddest thing to come from the Bellesiles affair is academia's response...

It is one thing to write a poor work and pass it off as academically sound; it is another for the book to sail right through so-called peer-review, even when objection and warning were already bubbling to the surface. Like MSM, academia has embraced a studied gun prohibitionist attitude, conflating culture war with a thing, status or behavior, and accepting most any study which comes down the pike as long as it comports with this anti-gun disposition. Evidently, letters-to-editors and he said/they said were to suffice for "intellectual rigor" and a sense of fairness, but it was not the vigorous criticism which should have ensued with this book.

Historians should have learned what most anyone learned years ago when studying the Second Amendment: Until the last very few decades there has been surprisingly little scholarship done on the subject. An open field for an ambitious scholar, yes, but getting there firstest with the mostest doesn't equate with rigorous analysis and documentation. Evidently, it did with many in academia.

[We_Have_A_Problem]

6. Personally....

...i never gave a damn what happened to him. He's a worthless lying piece of shit who attempted to pass off bullshit as fact and got caught. Fuck him. Hope he lives out the rest of his pathetic existence in utter obscurity.