Michael Bellesiles Resigns from Emory Faculty

Emory now considers the investigation of allegations of research misconduct against Professor Bellesiles in connection with his book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture to be concluded and resolved.

Translation: "Please make it go away!!"

Professor Michael "The dog ate my research" Bellesiles is now looking for employment. Anyone knowing of a position for an author to write light fiction could probably contact the good Professor through Emory's personnel department.

"The report casts aspersion on my integrity as a scholar based on three paragraphs and a table in a six hundred-page book. It seems to me that raising uncertainties that question the credibility of an entire book without considering the book as a whole is just plain unfair."

Translation: "It's just not fair to question my integrity just because I fabricated a teeny-tiny major part of my evidence."

Soon to be a DNC speechwriter, no doubt.

Thanks for this.

Two observations:

(1) I know Professor Hanna Gray quite well. I took several classes she taught and even did an independent study with her. While she is broadly liberal in her politics, she is not liberal in her attitude toward truth.

She is a model of integrity in her own research and was very exacting with students regarding proper research techniques.

A better, more dispassionate, more disinterested, more well-qualified academic could not have been chosen.

(2) In reading Bellesiles response, I see that he is still the craven weasel he has always been. He still claims that his fictitious conveniently missing "destroyed notes" would exonerate him. He denies that the commission did their work properly. He takes no responsibility for his lies.

He should never work again - and we should follow his subsequent career closely.

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The report's conclusion is scathing, even as it tries to be moderate and restrained. Belles-liar's statement is pathetic mush.

Wow...and just last week a prof from UC Irvine wrote in The Nation that Bellesiles would only get demoted.

This is complete vindication for Cramer, Lindgren, Reynolds and many others who called Bellesiles on his fraud and got only vituperation from him in return.

Here's a link (pdf) to Bellesiles' heavily sef-serving response.

More importantly, the report only looked at very limited parts of the book, and those are the parts they cast aspersions on.

The report itself, if I read academic-speak as well as I did 30 years ago, is absolutely devastating. A graduate student who turned in work that flawed would have been tossed out in my time, and would never have been able to get into another graduate program of any kind. He should never work as a scholar again.

Cramer (whose work I have read in detail) nailed this creep (and he was only a Masters student at the time). Emory only asked for a very LIMITED review compared to what Cramer (and others have) dug up. If you went through the details Bellesiles had other MAJOR problems. The American Historical Review reviewers got to the heart of the problem with his book - probate records are a terrible proxy for gun ownership.

In summary, we find on Questions 1 and 2, that despite serious failures of and carelessness in the gathering and presentation of archival records and the use of quantitative analysis, we cannot speak of intentional fabrication or falsification. On Question 3, we find that the strained character of Professor Bellesiles’ explanation raises questions about his veracity with respect to his account of having consulted probate records in San Francisco County. On Question 4, dealing with the construction of the vital Table One, we find evidence of falsification. And on Question 5, which raises the standard of professional historical scholarship, we find that Professor Bellesiles falls short on all three counts.

That's probably as close as we're ever gonna get to seeing a member of the academy call another a lyin' POS.

Don't say much for the academy, does it?

It's about damn time.

Now he, Janet Cook, Steve Glass and Mike Barnicle can all get a house at the beach and write for "The West Wing".

Excerpt:

Our Conclusions, responding to each of the five questions in our charge, are as follows:

As to Questions 1 and 2, we cannot judge the issue of intentionality. We do not believe it possible to state conclusively that Professor Bellesiles engaged in "intentional fabrication or falsification of research data" given the evidence at our disposal. But we are seriously troubled by Professor Bellesiles' scholarly conduct in most of the contexts to which the first two questions refer.

Question 1. Did Professor Bellesiles engage in "intentional fabrication or falsification of research data" in connection with probate records from Rutland County, Vermont?

Our conclusion is that Bellesisles' account of the Vermont probate records contain extensive errors in part because they were not in fact collected with the purpose of counting guns. A chronology of his scholarship, confirmed in our interview, helps to illuminate this issue. The origins of the Vermont material help to explain the discrepancies between his accounting of the inventories and those of others. It seems obvious that when Professor Bellesiles collected this data, he was only incidentally interested in the question of gun data. His data sheets have categories for many other things, but not for guns, which come in only as he happens to note them, sometimes in the margins of other entries. He did not make verbatim transcriptions, which also accounts for discrepancies between his notes and those of others. Unfortunately, this seemingly randomly gathered information later took on a life of its own. He appears carelessly to have assumed that his counts were complete, and moved forward with a larger project on the basis of this unsystematic research that appears to have involved dipping into rather than seriously sampling the records. While this certainly constitutes sloppy scholarship, it does not prove a deliberate attempt to mislead, however misleading the result.

Professor Lindgren also provided the committee with the Vermont probate data he and his assistant Justin Heather have collected. Although this information does reveal deficiencies in Professor Bellesiles' own counts from Vermont, we do not believe the evidence is as damning as Professor Lindgren has claimed. A careful examination of his spread sheets in relation to the Vermont names listed on Professor Bellesiles' website makes clear that he and Bellesiles worked with overlapping but somewhat different record sets. [AA 00681-AAO0697; MB 00419-22]

Question 2. Did Professor Bellesiles engage in "intentional fabrication or falsification of research data" in connection with probate records from Providence, Rhode Island?

Our conclusion is that Professor Bellesiles' work on the Providence, Rhode Island records does not raise serious problems of fabrication or falsification of research data. The errors in the first edition of Arming America appear to be a consequence of his conflation of wills and inventories, his imprecision in the use of technical terms and his exaggeration of data. For example, he failed to note that some of the decedents were female because of his habit of using first initials rather than full names. When these errors were identified, he immediately corrected them.

Question 3. Did Professor Bellesiles engage in "intentional fabrication or falsification of research data" in connection with probate records from the San Francisco Bay area?

Our conclusion is that we cannot prove that Professor Bellesiles simply invented his California research, but neither do we have confidence that the Contra Costa inventories resolve the problem. The discovery of the Contra Costa data appears to have been fortuitous, and there is some question as to whether he could have read these documents at the time he claims to have done so.

Question 4. Did Professor Bellesiles engage in "intentional fabrication or falsification of research data" in connection with probate records supporting the figures in Table One to his book, "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture"?

With respect to this question, unfamiliarity with quantitative methods or plain incompetence could explain some of the known deficiencies in the construction of Table One, such as the author's failure to include numbers of cases or explain the strange breakdown of data. For example, when asked for specific information about his geographic categories, he told the committee that he had included Ohio in the "Northern coast" and counted all data from Worcester County, Massachusetts as "urban.")

But in one respect, the failure to clearly identify his sources, does move into the realm of "falsification," which would constitute a violation of the Emory "Policies." The construction of this Table implies a consistent, comprehensive, and intelligible method of gathering data. The reality seems quite the opposite. In fact, Professor Bellesiles told the Committee that because of criticism from other scholars, he himself had begun to doubt the quality of his probate research well before he published it in the Journal of American History. [Interview, p.35-6 AA 00764-764; MB 00448]]

The most egregious misrepresentation has to do with his handling of the more than 900 cases reported by Alice Hanson Jones. When critics pointed out that Jones' data disagreed with his, Bellesiles responded by explaining that he did NOT include Jones's data in his computations because her inventories, taken during the build-up to the American revolution, showed a disproportionately high number of guns! Here is a clear admission of misrepresentation, since the label on column one in Table One clearly says " l765-1790." If Professor Bellesiles silently excluded data from the years 1774-1776, as he asserts, precisely because they failed to show low numbers of guns, he has willingly misrepresented the evidence. This, compounded with all the other inconsistencies in his description of his method and sources and the fact that neither he nor anyone else has been able to replicate any part of his data, suggest that there is a real discrepancy between the research Professor Bellesiles did and his presentation of that research in Table One.

Question 5. Did professor Bellesiles engage in "other serious deviations 'from accepted practices in carrying out or reporting results from research"' with respect to probate records or militia census records by:

(a) Failing to carefully document his findings;

(b) Failing to make available to others his sources, evidence, and data; or

(c) Misrepresenting evidence or the sources of evidence."

We have reached the conclusion with reference to clauses "a" through "c," that Professor Bellesiles contravened these professional norms, both as expressed in the Committee charge and in the American Historical Association's definition of scholarly "integrity ," which includes "an awareness of one's own bias and a readiness to follow sound method and analysis wherever they may lead," "disclosure of all significant qualifications of one's arguments," careful documentation of findings and the responsibility to "thereafter be prepared to make available to others their sources, evidence, and data," and the injunction that "historians must not misrepresent evidence or the sources of evidence."

We have interviewed Professor Bellesiles and found him both cooperative and respectful of this process. Yet the best that can be said of his work with the probate and militia records is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work. Every aspect of his work in the probate records is deeply flawed. Even allowing for the loss of some of his research materials, he appears not to have been systematic in selecting repositories or collections of probate records for examination and his recording methods were at best primitive and altogether unsystematic. Bellesiles seems to have been utterly unaware of the importance of the possibility of the replication of his research. Subsequent to the allegations of research misconduct, his responses have been prolix, confusing, evasive and occasionally contradictory . We are surprised and troubled that Bellesiles has not availed himself of the opportunities he has had since the notice of this investigation to examine, identify and share his remaining research materials. Even at this point, it is not clear that he fully understands the magnitude of his own probate research shortcomings.

The Committee's investigation has been seriously hampered by the absence or unavailability of Professor Bellesiles' critical and apparently lost research records and by the failures of memory and careful record keeping which Professor Bellesiles himself describes. Given his conflicting statements and accounts, it has been difficult to establish where and how Professor Bellesiles conducted his research into the probate records he cites: for example, what was read in microfilm and where and in what volume, what archives, in some cases, were actually visited and what they contained In addition to this, we note his subsequent failure to be fully forthcoming, and the implausibility of some of his defenses -- a prime example is that of the "hacking" of his website; another is his disavowal of the e-mails of Aug. 30 and Sept. 19,2000 to Professor Lindgren which present a version of the location and reading of records substantially in conflict with Professor Bellesiles' current account. Taking all this into account, we are led to conclude that, under Question 5, Professor Bellesiles did engage in "serious deviations from accepted practices in carrying out [and] reporting results from research." As to these matters, comprehending points (a) - (c) under Question 5, his scholarly integrity is seriously in question.

In summary , we find on Questions 1 and 2, that despite serious failures of and carelessness in the gathering and presentation of archival records and the use of quantitative analysis, we cannot speak of intentional fabrication or falsification. On Question 3, we find that the strained character of Professor Bellesiles' explanation raises questions about his veracity with respect to his account of having consulted probate records in San Francisco County. On Question 4, dealing with the construction of the vital Table One, we find evidence of falsification. And on Question 5, which raises the standard of professional historical scholarship, we find that Professor Bellesiles falls short on all three counts.

An additional question: Will the weasel socialists at Columbia University revoke his Bancroft Prize for History?

Hardly. Aren't they the guys who said something like, even if what he wrote was untrue...it needed to be said? Has any achievement award ever been taken back from one of these leftist fakes?

Thanks for posting this. The collective-right advocates are in serious trouble.

Bellesiles better go to law school. Law firms are willing to hire people who will energetically lie for the cause.

Or, he will replace Sarah Brady at HCI or whatever they are calling themselves these days. A proven track record of lies and fabrications will be a resume enhancer over there.

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In reading Bellesiles response, I see that he is still the craven weasel he has always been.

Unfortunately, the whole field of academic American history has become a lying profession. And the cancer has spread through most of the humanities. Bellesiles just was so brazen on a hot-button subject that he got caught.

This should be headlines on NYT and WP and all other self serving liberal publications that praised this author and his book. Hope Fox reports this tonight. This is big news and should be reported by all those papers that help prop this liar up. At least the truth has had a victory and maybe there is some honor among liberals. Somebody tell Brady about this.

Oct. 25: Michael Bellesiles Resigns from Emory Faculty