Posted on 10/26/2002 7:08:18 AM PDT by FreedomPoster
An Emory University history professor has resigned after an outside academic panel issued a report condemning his research for a book that went to the heart of the national controversy over gun control.
Emory officials said Friday that Michael Bellesiles' resignation is effective Dec. 31. They also released for the first time Friday the panel's 40-page report, dated July 10, and a statement from Bellesiles disputing the panel's findings.
Bellesiles, who said he had enjoyed his 14 years at Emory, continued that he "cannot continue to teach in what I feel is a hostile environment."
He said he will, instead, focus on his next book.
Bellesiles wrote "Arming America: Origins of a National Gun Culture," an award-winning book that claimed early Americans did not possess or use firearms nearly as much as is popularly believed. The book, published in 2000, won the 2001 Bancroft Prize, the highest prize in the field of American history.
Bellesiles contended that because guns were too expensive and hard to maintain, they did not become widespread among the American population until after the Civil War. Critics, including gun rights advocates and scholars, accused him of bias and sloppy research.
Officials at Emory appointed an outside panel of scholars this spring to investigate the charges surrounding the book. Bellesiles has been on paid leave from Emory throughout the fall semester.
The report said panelists could not determine whether Bellesiles falsified probate records from various locations around the country, as some critics have charged. But the panel did conclude that Bellesiles falsified a table detailing gun ownership because he omitted, without telling readers, gun counts in 1774-76.
Bellesiles acknowledged omitting the information, but only for 1774-75, because he said those counts were unnaturally high. Colonial governments were handing out firearms to militias in anticipation of the Revolutionary War, he said.
The report also said Bellesiles seriously deviated from accepted research practices.
"He is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work," concluded the report, written by professors Stanley Katz of Princeton University, Hanna Gray of the University of Chicago and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard University.
Bellesiles said the panel's focus was too narrow, attacking "my integrity as a scholar based on three paragraphs and a table in a 600-page book," he said. "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."
He also said the report's conclusions were wrong.
"I have never fabricated evidence of any kind nor knowingly evaded my responsibilities as a scholar," Bellesiles said.
For the full report from the panel and Bellesiles' response, go to www.emory.edu/central/NEWS/index.shtml.
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