As Emory professor Michael Bellesiles goes down the tubes, cyber-schadenfreude is running high. But it's important to keep some perspective on what his case means within the larger context of academe.

The tendency throughout the Bellesiles investigation has been to represent him as a sneaking, lying cheat, a historian who deliberately and wilfully falsified his data in order to make it accord with his thesis. More specifically, the tendency has been to vilify Bellesiles as a leftist ideologue whose political commitments led him to produce fraudulently revisionist history. Bellesiles' Arming America, the argument goes, was written in the service of the anti-gun lobby. In "showing" that most antebellum Americans did not own guns, Bellesiles both shattered the conventional wisdom that gun ownership has always been a central component of American culture and produced documentation that would support the efforts of anti-gun lobbyists to argue that the Second Amendment did not refer, in letter or spirit, to individual private citizens. Bellesiles did not do much to counter such accusations when he met them with lies about his research methods and invented reasons--among them the proverbial flood!--why he could not produce copies of his research notes. But even so, the picture here is distorted.

I'm not about to defend Michael Bellesiles. He blew it when he manipulated data in the service of his argument. He got caught. And then, instead of fessing up to his mistakes, he blew it again by crying foul and covering up. He has resigned now, and that is as it should be. But there is a bigger, messier picture here, one that is unhelpfully obscured by the truly obsessive focus that one dead-in-the-water academic has attracted. That picture is, to borrow Randall Jarrell's phrase, a picture of an institution.

Without excusing Bellesiles, I want to emphasize that what went on with him--and what went wrong with him--is more symptomatic of contemporary academic culture than not. Bellesiles is very much to blame. But he is also very much a product of an extraordinarily lax scholarly system, one that does not reliably train its members in either proper research technique or scholarly ethics; one that openly rewards "research" that conforms to the "progressive" agenda of a disproportionately leftwing academy; one that makes it very hard for scholars who do not toe the progressive party line to get degrees, jobs, book contracts, and tenure; one that would rather scapegoat individuals than examine--and change--its own self-serving structure.

There were peer reviewers who did not do their job when Bellesiles first began publishing his work on early American gun ownership, and there were the editors who chose them. There were editors who ignored the attempts of scholars such as Clayton Cramer to alert them to problems with Bellesiles' work and there were publishing houses that did not see past the chance to make a buck and a splash. There were prize committees that decorated Bellesiles with top professional honors.

I cannot speak for the quality of Bellesiles' training, nor do I know any more than anyone else about where in his work methodological carelessness cedes to blatant falsification. But I do know something about what graduate education in the humanities looks like, and I know something, too, about how low on the list of scholarly priorities such non-flashy things as thorough documentation and judicious restraint are. Until we start interrogating our systems of peer review, our patterns of professional reward, and the professional training we do, or don't do, in our Ph.D. programs, we have not yet begun to address the issues the Bellesiles case raises.