Emory University Professor Michael Bellesiles resigned from his position last month after an investigative committee of three historians said his book, "Arming America: Origins of a National Gun Culture," treaded on the turf of fraud.
Called "the N.R.A.'s worst nightmare" by reviewer Michael Zuckerman of the University of Pennsylvania, "Arming America" claims guns were not as common during the founding of the United States as previously thought. To the dismay of gun rights advocates, Bellesiles argues that the right to bear arms in the Second Amendment refers only to a collective rather than individual right.
But the committee, which included professors Hanna Gray of the University of Chicago, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard University and Princeton's Stanley Katz — revealed in a 40-page report that the foundations of Bellesiles' argument rested on misrepresented or nonexistent evidence.
"No one has been able to replicate Professor Bellesiles' results for the places or dates he lists," the committee wrote in its report. "[Bellesiles is] guilty of unprofessional and misleading work."
University professor John Fleming said he was so intrigued by the scandal that he ordered the book online — and loved it.
"It wasn't that people said it was phony, it was that they thought it was terrific," Fleming said of the controversy that sparked the investigation. "So they started looking for the primary source material and couldn't find it."
Katz said that he and the other committee members agreed not to discuss the report on Bellesiles itself, but he believes that, though the controversy is important, it does not suggest a trend of fraud in scholarship on a larger scale.
"I don't think it should be taken as a sign that the sky is falling," Katz said. "It's a specific and unusual case."
Bellesiles is not the only award-winning scholar to be accused of plagiarism this year. In January, popular historian Stephen Ambrose's book "The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany" was found to contain several undocumented passages from a work on the same subject by University of Pennsylvania history professor Thomas Childers, The Daily Standard reported in January.
Soon after, Pulitzer-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin resigned from the Pulitzer committee after admitting to have copied passages from other authors for her 1987 bestseller "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys."
Fleming attributes these instances of fraud to "gross carelessness" on the part of the authors.
"People photocopy things and write down notes, some actually forget that they're making direct quotes," Fleming said. "Genuinely scholarly fraud is uncommon but people get by fairly often."
But the underlying factor in this pattern of plagiarism, Fleming said, is "rampant careerism."
"There's an enforced need to publish prematurely and too quickly," said Fleming. "It's very, very dangerous to the scholar involved."
As an adviser to the Honor Committee, Fleming said he sees parallels between the pressures the scholars face and those of University undergraduates. Whereas historians rush to publish original, informative books to further their careers, students are under pressure to impress graduate schools and potential employers.
"[These] are circumstances that lead people to commit academic fraud," Fleming said.
"Someone a few years ago had someone else do their thesis," said Fleming. "It's a great moral failure, but also a moral failure of the institution."
While fraud is tempting for both students and authors trying to further their careers, Fleming believes that academic integrity is most vital to scholarship.
"The one thing we have as intellectuals is integrity," Fleming said. "Without integrity, I'm not sure there's much left."
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