Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases That Shook the Academy (review)

The general public's fascination with real-life melodrama should not come as a surprise to most. The actions and behaviors of politicians and celebrities alike are persistently dissected by the media and American public. The academic community has not been spared, and in recent years members of the professoriate have come under increased public scrutiny.

Amid shrinking budgets, rising tuition costs, and decreasing state support for higher education, colleges and universities are facing calls for accountability now more than ever. In addition numerous academic misdeeds such as those involving Lawrence Tribe, the Harvard University law professor who admitted plagiarizing passages from Henry Abraham's 1974 book Justices and Presidents, have made their way into the general public through various media outlets. To be sure, some question whether the academy has gone astray.

Scandals involving members of the professoriate are not new to the academy, yet they appear more rampant than ever before. In Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases that Shook the Academy, Ron Robin, a Professor of History and Communication Studies and Dean of Students at the University of Haifa, examines recent academic scandals that are linked by a common set of circumstances. Each case involves wrongdoing by a prominent member of the professoriate, and the forum for deliberation quickly moves outside the purview of the academic community into public arenas such as newspapers, television, and the internet. In presenting each case, Robin argues that, although recent academic transgressions appear to be more serious and pervasive than in the past, the major difference lies neither with their prevalence nor severity, but with their visibility. In this 277-page volume divided into an introduction and eight chapters, Robin examines seven recent scandals, six of which took place after 1995.

Within the introduction, the author summarizes each case and contends that, taken as a whole, the incidents underscore a broader debate regarding the role higher education plays in larger society, i.e. the public role of the intellectual, applied versus theoretical research, hard sciences versus social sciences, etc. The remainder of the book is divided into three sections.

Part 1 contrasts recent and past academic offenses within the field of history including the case of Stephen Oates (who was accused of plagiarizing "snippets and phrases" in his biography of Abraham Lincoln) with that of lesser known historian Phillip Foner. Robin attempts to show that, although the charges leveled against Phillip Foner in the early 1970s were much more serious than those against Oates, the Foner incident has long been forgotten while the Oates case continues to live on; the author attributes this longevity to Oates's status as a "celebrity" scholar. Other incidents included are the events surrounding Michael Bellesiles's Arming America and the fictitious tales of Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Ellis.

Part 2 describes incidents within the field of anthropology, including Derek Freeman's accusations that Margaret Mead's groundbreaking study of Samoan culture and its effect on adolescents was fictitious and a hoax. Freeman questioned Mead's methods and conclusions, stating that her portrayal of Samoan youth culture as stress-free and sexually promiscuous was erroneous, while Freeman's critics questioned his motives. In the end, the controversy surrounding Mead's work "detrimentally affected the Samoans' self-image and the framing of their culture in the public eye." The political ramifications regarding David Stoll's criticism of the autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchu also are explored.

Lastly, Part 3 examines the hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist who submitted an article for a special edition of the cultural studies journal Social Text in an attempt to show that critics of the "hard" sciences "were ignorant of the field that they pretended to critique." Ultimately, the incident reveals the ongoing rift among scholars from different disciplines regarding postmodernist thought.

Through a careful analysis of each case the author attempts to demonstrate that the "rise in gratuitous acrimony, irrelevant...