A few days ago Kausfiles reported the LA Times' comparison of Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time and the sources she "allegedly" filched from. You can see my spin here. This week, Alex Beam of the Boston Globe reports Nussbaum and Ropes & Gray are at it again:
The LA Times article is ''junk journalism,'' Nussbaum says. ''Any time you put passages together side by side, yes, the inference will come forward that because the passages resemble one another there must be something wrong with the scholarship.'' Nussbaum adds that Ropes & Gray ''looked at every single footnote without exception and then went to every source to see if the footnote was correct, proper, and met the highest standards of scholarship. We gave `No Ordinary Time' a clean bill of health, and we stand by that.''
I think one of the major problems here is that Ropes & Gray doesn't quite understand we're concerned about the stuff that's not footnoted or placed properly in quotation marks. Don't those guys have anyone that was on Law Review??
(see also Kausfiles)
"I think one of the major problems here is that Ropes & Gray doesn't quite understand we're concerned about the stuff that's not footnoted or placed properly in quotation marks."
Oh they do, indeed, and are spinning madly. Especially by saying the checked out the footnotes, they are pre-emptively distancing themselves form the Bellesisles fiasco, in which I eagerly await the start of semester at Emory to see what they (and the "Wheel") say...
But even if guilty of plagiarism, do not expect the book to be marked "read with caution", let alone stripped from the shelves. While browsing through write-ups on "Arming America", I came across -
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Bellesiles continues to have supporters. Yet their defense sometimes seems more of a left-handed compliment. Paul Finkleman, a law professor at the University of Tulsa, says Bellesiles' book remains an important contribution, despite its critics.
"In the end," Finkleman said, "I don't think it matters if he cooked the data."
Sound vaguely familiar? -
In re Bellesisles, what is the current status of Rigoberta Menchu, whose Nobel Prize was for a non-fiction autobiography later shown to be almost entirely fictive? - "Professors ... are outraged — not with Menchu for making things up, but with anthropologist David Stoll for exposing her fraud." -
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:zMiAIIN-PT4C:www.boundless.org/1999/departments/isms/a0000074.html+%22Rigoberta+Menchu%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 "Some of this may be the defensiveness of those in shock. But still it raises the question of how universities, supposedly dedicated to truth and critical thinking, can continue to teach a book that is full of falsehoods. For now, Rigoberta’s academic fan club resorts to what may be termed the Tawana Brawley defense, named after the New York teenager who faked a racially motivated rape. The lawyers and civil rights activists who defended Brawley said it didn’t matter that she had concocted her tale, because a racist society causes such desperation. As legal scholar Patricia Williams put it, 'No matter who did it to her, and even if she did it to herself, Tawana Brawley has been the victim of some unspeakable violation.'” Dinesh D’Souza
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Posted by: John Anderson on August 19, 2002 04:33 AM
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