Will dying-a-painful-academic-death historian Michael Bellesiles take the gun control movement down with him? Considering how heavily the gun control lobby relies on Arming America's highly dubious information about early American piece-packing practices, it looks like the answer could be a resounding yes. Don Williams explains in detail on the History News Network. So much for peer review.

Bellesiles' is an example of thesis-driven "scholarship" whose distortions and omissions of fact were never caught because a) peer review in the non-sciences is often more a game of partisan matchmaking than evenhanded assessment (i.e., in the soft-serve world of the humanities, where a work's putative "quality" is often inseparable from its politics, friendly editors often try to place manuscripts with reviewers who will be "receptive" to them, and reviewers often base their assessment of a manuscript on how well it accords with their own beliefs about what is or ought to be true); b) peer review in the non-sciences is at its very best built like Swiss cheese (i.e., even the most even-handed reviewer may not be qualified to assess how a manuscript handles its materials, and whether it deals fairly with the archive from which those materials are drawn); c) b begets, necessitates, and perpetuates a.

The Bellesiles case is a nasty one, not least because it is pretty clear at this point that the man is just plain lying about how he did his research, and about what sorts of records he kept. Glenn Reynolds has kept close track as problems with Bellesiles' book, and with his story about how he wrote his book, come to light. As has The Weekly Standard. And now, thanks to the blogosphere, there is some pretty damning stuff coming to light from the aptly named Cranky Professor. But my point here is not so much about Bellesiles' ethics, or scholarship, or lack thereof; nor about what his discreditation (it should be a word, so I'm using it like it is one) will mean for pending gun control legislation. Emory will take care of the one; the courts will take care of the other; and I have little to add in the way of commentary to either.

What concerns me more, here, is the scholarly pattern that Bellesiles' book exemplifies and to some degree exposes: the grossly unethical manipulation of "evidence" to accord with one's views. To take just one parallel case, Christina Hoff Sommers has discovered similar patterns of scholarly abuse in a great deal of feminist cultural criticism (most notably in Carol Gilligan's refusal to make her research materials available to the public, but also in the mass mishandling and even misreporting by feminists of statistics on rape, domestic violence, eating disorders, and the wage gap). In an academic climate where politicized scholarship is increasingly the norm, the rewards for confirming a politically desirable stance with one's selective "research" are as great as the deterrents are negligible. As Christina Hoff Sommers' work shows, you can totally debunk individual scholars and even whole movements, and have no real effect on the credibility--and funding--each enjoys. Gilligan is sitting pretty at NYU, and is as famous and influential as ever. Campus women's centers and women's studies programs thrive, despite the often questionable ideology and even more questionable information with which they justify themselves.

If your politics are good enough, you can even get caught lying about your own past and not suffer any real professional damage. Edward Said has been caught fabricating the details of his childhood to make him look more properly like an oppressed Palestinian. But that doesn't affect his status as the god of postcolonial theory. Betty Friedan lied about her background in The Feminine Mystique, omitting to mention her twenty-five year history as a marxist journalist in order to make herself look more properly like a victim of the patriarchy. But no matter: she will always be the grand old dame of the women's movement. Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography was a hoax, but she is still hailed as a goddess of resistance, she is still the exemplary image of the downtrodden mestiza-cum-revolutionary, and she still has her Nobel Prize. So attached are feminists and postcolonialists to the mythography surrounding their academic heroes that they have repeatedly and knowingly chosen consoling lies over hard truths. The damage to scholarship, to the integrity of the professoriate, and to the credibility of the academic left is profound.

Bellesiles is attracting media attention in part because he appears to be an anomaly--despite the recent flap about historian-plagiarists, we still tend to believe that most scholarship is, well, scholarly. We like to believe that when errors occur, they are understandable errors of human oversight, not rank, intentional manipulations of data (hence both Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns-Goodwin's rationales for why their plagiarisms were not plagiarisms). Looked at in the context I have sketched above, however, Bellesiles' case appears to be an anomaly of an entirely different order. The oddity in his case is not that he falsified his data, or even that he got caught. The oddity is that it looks as though he might actually have to pay for what he did.