The Chronicle: 7/20/2001: Why Are Academics Ducking the Ellis Case?

From the issue dated July 20, 2001

Why Are Academics Ducking the Ellis Case?

By ELLIOTT J. GORN

I've had lots of conversations about Joseph J. Ellis with colleagues this summer, and there's been something a little odd about these discussions.

Ellis, for those who missed the story, is a historian at Mount Holyoke College, a gifted teacher and senior professor whose books on the American colonial era won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. But last month, The Boston Globe disclosed that Ellis had fabricated some of his own personal history. More precisely, while teaching about the 1960's, he claimed to have been a civil-rights worker in Mississippi, to have served as a platoon leader in Vietnam, and to have joined the antiwar movement when he returned home.

Not true. Ellis never served in Vietnam, and his ties to both the civil-rights and the antiwar movements are dubious. Shortly after the Globe story appeared, he apologized to his students and colleagues for distorting his past.

Newspapers and magazines quickly picked up the story, and op-ed pieces and letters to the editor flew thick and fast. Vietnam veterans were outraged by Ellis's charade, as were, I imagine, those who had worked in places like Selma and Biloxi. Mount Holyoke's administration at first expressed unqualified support for Ellis, then qualified it.

But what about faculty members, and historians in particular? Maybe the summer dulls our senses. Who, after all, wants to think about teaching and conflicts over classroom ethics during these precious months when we try to recharge our intellectual batteries and do our research? For whatever reason, I detect a lot of evasion in conversations on this issue. Yes, academics are interested in the case, and they are certainly happy to gossip over it. But I have heard more embarrassed tittering than strong opinions as to what all this means for our profession.

I must admit that the story failed to engage me at first. But after I read the initial reports, one remark kept running through my mind. Were Ellis's actions, an unidentified historian was quoted as asking, so unusual? Have we not all lied at times -- for professional advancement, or even for grubbier gain?

Certainly, lying about the past -- both one's own and the country's -- has become part of the national culture. During the lives of Ellis's students, U.S. presidents have routinely lied -- about abuses of domestic surveillance, about their war records, about illegal covert engagements overseas, about their own problems with substance abuse and marital infidelity. Under the guise of spin control in politics and public relations in business, university-trained spokesmen have transformed untruths and half-truths into pleasant fabrications. Institutions of higher learning themselves have not been immune. Show me a university-relations office dedicated to open and accurate reporting on date rape or the growing use of adjunct faculty members, and I'll show you an office looking for a new head.

Still, the question of whether we have all lied disturbs me. The more I think about it, the more my answer is no -- at least so far as deliberate lying in the classroom is concerned.

Every teacher knows that some complex issues need to be oversimplified so that students can grasp them. More, we all remember times at the lectern when we confidently held forth on a subject even as we second-guessed ourselves -- our inner voices (too often forgotten by the end of the lecture hour) asking, "Are you sure of that?" Professors may strike exaggerated poses and take extreme rhetorical positions for the sake of making a point, stirring controversy, or highlighting an issue. Good teaching requires more than just giving information; there must be spontaneity, contingency, drama.

That's part of the reason, I think, why many of the professors I've spoken with feel sympathy for Ellis: They're afraid they may not be so different. That strikes me as wrongheaded.

Even in our postmodern age, we draw distinctions between how we remember, convey, or interpret facts and the facts themselves. One was either in Vietnam or not, in Mississippi or not. To lie to our students about ourselves, regardless of motive, is to patronize them, to not trust them, to fail them utterly by putting our own needs -- for approval, for popularity, for control over the classroom -- over their rightful claim to honesty. Teachers who make mistakes still deserve trust; teachers who knowingly deceive students do not.

That is not to say that personal revelations have no place in teaching. When I get to Vietnam in my U.S.-history survey classes, I tell my students that I believed the war was wrong when I started college in 1969, and that I had decided I would not fight overseas. But I also tell them that I had a nice, comfortable college deferment, which kept me from testing my courage; that most Americans were not so privileged; and that I cannot say for sure what I would have done had I not been so lucky. Mostly, I tell my students that I tried to avoid thinking about my day of reckoning (it never came). I do all of that to illustrate not only how difficult personal decisions can be in the context of great public events, but also to show how sometimes no decision is a decision, because my college deferment meant that someone else would go to Vietnam. Real moral courage, in other words, is tougher than it looks.

I have focused on teaching here, but I'm concerned, too, with how Ellis's scholarship comes into this discussion. Did his tendency to make up stories in class, people ask, extend to his writing? Ellis's success as a scholar makes the problem a titillating one, but the issue strikes me as another evasion. If, on closer inspection, his publications turn out to be less solid than they first appeared -- indeed, if there are real questions about their veracity -- is it only then that his fellow professors will become upset? Conversely, if Ellis's books are found to be scrupulously researched, will we dismiss the whole affair as a mere June storm before our quiet and well-earned summer? Either way, the message seems to be that lying to students is less blameworthy than lying in print; that publications are our gods.

Perhaps I make too much of the Ellis case, but I fear that it reveals a great deal about our profession, and the picture is a disturbing one. To treat lying in the classroom as less than a severe breach of trust not only bespeaks moral fuzziness, but also implies a loss of purpose in what we do. Let the spin doctors be merely convincing; leave it to the public-relations profession to manufacture pleasing falsehoods. The classroom may not be the place where we uncover "Truth," but it is where teachers and students seek truths.

Beyond the ethical issues lies a serious challenge to the historian's craft, for the foundation of our narratives, the bedrock of our interpretations, are the facts we uncover in primary documents. Put another way, it is not only our skill at interpreting historical sources, but also our integrity in presenting them -- with all of their contradictions and complexity -- that authorizes us to bear witness to the past. It erodes the ability of all historians to speak with authority if some of us play fast and loose with facts while the rest of us make no comment about it.

For all of these reasons, I am perplexed by the lack of outrage over the Ellis case. Admittedly, situations like this must be handled with care by the college involved. No one should rush to judgment. Still, much is at stake: How the public perceives college faculties; our definition of proper professional conduct; the limits of freedom in the classroom; how we define our mission as faculty members; our claim to speak and write about the past with legitimacy. Professional groups like the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians should take a fresh look at the issue of breaches of classroom ethics and ask at what point censuring, even de-tenuring become appropriate options. And the public needs to hear us voicing our concerns.

Elliott J. Gorn is a professor of history at Purdue University. His most recent book is Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (Hill and Wang, 2001).