Down under, Aussie historians are circling the wagons and trying to figure out how to counteract the menace posed by Keith Windschuttle, whose book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,

[strikes] at the heart of the accepted view of Australian colonial history in the past 30 years - that the settler society had engaged in a pattern of conquest, dispossession and killing of the indigenous inhabitants. The facts, he said, did not stack up.
The Sydney-based writer, among other things, questioned the references used by academic historian Lyndall Ryan to justify her claims that the British massacred large numbers of Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land in the early 1800s. Her footnotes supporting the claims did not do so, he wrote. He also took on Henry Reynolds, the venerable historian of the Left, whose depiction of a brutal British conquest of Tasmania had been the accepted norm.

Reynolds's work on the concept of terra nullius -- that the British seized Aboriginal land based on a policy that it was owned by no one -- developed such currency that it is believed to have influenced critical High Court judgments on land rights, including the Mabo decision. The thrust of Windschuttle's thesis was that political correctness had triumphed over historical fact.

At the recent conference, Ryan made some effort, though ultimately unsuccessful, to avoid media coverage for a talk she gave entitled How the Print Media Marketed Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Implications for Academic Historians.

She said the media had taken up Windschuttle as representing the real history of colonists' relations with Aborigines, grabbing the view that Australians had been hoodwinked by the academic left-wing historians' version. "I don't think the media owns free speech," Ryan said. She had also been shocked, she said, that Stuart Macintyre, the influential left-leaning University of Melbourne historian, had appeared to criticise her over footnote inaccuracies.

She did admit to five footnote errors, but said the primary sources verified her thesis and "the simple fact is that footnote errors do occur".

Fake, but accurate??? While we are all human, Dr. Ryan, it is a cardinal sin to allow an important work to go out with deeply misleading citations and footnotes. The scholarly apparatus of citations and footnotes are central to doctoral-level scholarship -- so much so that in my own doctoral studies, an entire term-long seminar is centered on the existing literature and the citation and keyword classification schemes that are important parts of that apparatus.

Ryan was not alone in promoting the Windschuttle-media conspiracy. The AHA president, David Carment, said the The Australian had deliberately timed the publication of its review of Windschuttle's work for the summer of 2002. During holidays more academics were on leave, Carment said, and "less able to defend themselves," and it was "a time when people were reading newspapers". (In fact, newspaper circulations fall away over summer holidays.)

It might be time, Carment said, for the association to "defend its people on the basis of their professional integrity" while not taking sides in the debate.

Carment also raised, though he did not fully support, the concept put forward by West Australian historian Cathie Clement for a code of ethics that would gag historians from criticising the integrity of their peers in public. Several in the audience said everyone had to be ready to counter-attack when Windschuttle came out with his next book.

Richard Waterhouse from the University of Sydney, said academics took Windschuttle too seriously. "Sometimes we have tended to treat him as an intellectual equal," Waterhouse said, adding that sarcasm might be more appropriate. (Windschuttle earned a first-class honours degree in history from the University of Sydney in the 1960s, lectured in the subject, earned a masters in politics and left Macquarie University in 1992 when he set up a publishing house.)

Not everyone there was prepared to circle the wagons, however.

There were a couple of muted mutterings from the audience about how it would be necessary to learn media skills, and not attempt to look like academics defending their own cabal. But nobody at the session publicly asked the key question which was in some of their minds: was the academic historians' fear of Windschuttle and newspaper opinion pages absolutely paranoid?

Greg Melleuish, from the University of Wollongong, says he is intimidated by the pack mentality of the Newcastle meeting. "I was quite astonished," he says. "It was like 'let's get a group of people together to ambush Windschuttle'. I think they feel under threat and that's why they concoct these conspiracy theories."
....
The question is why academic historians are so concerned about the impact of Windschuttle.

Macintyre, while he does not accept Windschuttle's suggestion of a fabrication, does warn that mistakes can have a broader effect.

"There is an understandable public concern about the accuracy of historians' work," he says. At the same time, Macintyre maintains, Windschuttle fits with a conservative agenda to lift a burden of national shame from Australian shoulders over the Aboriginal issue.

Macintyre told the conference the history wars fitted in with broader "political dimensions" of the Howard Government's "abandonment of reconciliation, denial of the stolen generations, its retreat from multiculturalism and creation of a refugee crisis".

"Windschuttle was the first conservative intellectual to base his case on substantial historical research," he says.

Windschuttle says this is precisely why the academic community is still so scared of him. "There is a whole generation who have invested not just their academic capital but also their political capital in the Henry Reynolds view," he says. And, says Windschuttle, he has made Australian history interesting again for high school students who are more likely to go on to study it in universities.

Meanwhile, back in the States, several data-faking scandals from recent years still reverberate among acdemic historians. Professor Michael Bellesiles resigned his post at Emory after it was shown that his study debunking gun ownership in the colonial and revolutionary period cited original historical records that do not exist. Events in that case sound familiar today:

The announcement was released along with the long-awaited results of an Investigative Committee's inquiry into allegations of scholarly fraud against Bellesiles.

The Committee, headed by Stanley Katz, a professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University (N.J.), concluded that Bellesiles was guilty of both substandard research methodology and of willfully misrepresenting specific evidence in Arming America.

The scope of the Committee was limited to five questions that revolved around probate records in Vermont, Rhode Island and San Francisco, as well as one particular table of data. Finally, the Committee was asked if Bellesiles committed "other serious deviations "from accepted practices in carrying out or reporting results from research.'"

Bellesiles disputed the Committee's findings in his statement, claiming he has followed all pertinent scholarly guidelines and corrected all errors of fact known to him.

...

The University took the unusual step of releasing the results of the Committee's report, an action Paul said was necessitated by the "intense scholarly interest" in the matter. Not released, however, were the supporting documents in the case.

Paul said in the University's statement the Committee's report was "authoritative" and upheld stringent scholarly requirements in conducting such academic investigations. The case, Paul said, was concluded.

Arming America, which addresses the history of gun culture in America, posited that guns were not nearly as prevalent throughout American history than previously thought. Praised for its innovative use of probate materials as evidence, the book was awarded Columbia University's (N.Y.) Bancroft Prize.

Shortly after its release, several researchers, including law professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University (Ill.), alleged Bellesiles falsified evidence to support his thesis. The allegations eventually forced Emory's hand into conducting both an internal inquiry and the appointing of the external Investigative Committee.

Another historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, plagiarized extensively in several of her books, including her Pulitzer Prize–winning No Ordinary Time. Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Ellis, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke, fabricated an entire Vietnam service story for himself and claimed that DNA proves Thomas Jefferson fathered a child by his slave Sally Heming, a claim that Accuracy in Media says is unproven.

In these latter cases, the academic community took steps to investigate the alleged frauds, albeit sometimes only after intense pressure from critics. All three of these historians resigned or were otherwise sanctioned as the standards of the profession were upheld.

The boundaries between objective scholarship and political agenda have grown overly porous, it would seem. The good news is that many in these professions care about the integrity of their disciplines and have reacted by enforcing standards of proof based on accurate and legitimate data and of well-founded reasoning from that data.

It will be interesting to see if CBS will take similar action re: Rathergate.