Ethical History

I was stunned at the blatant lack of ethics, morals, and trustworthiness of the historians and professors we read about in "Historians in Trouble". The extent to which some of them abused their powerful positions, misquoted or misrepresented documents or facts, as well as flat out lying or covering things up was utterly appalling. Our entire academic careers the failures and consequences of cheating and plagiarizing has been bludgeoned and threatened by what would happen if we did not follow the rules. The AHA defines plagiarism as, “the expropriation of another author’s work, and the presentation of it as one’s own." Citations are not hard, especially with the one click process the new Word program uses. It takes some serious lack of morals or an incredible amount of laziness not to cite your sources. A mistake or two may be understandable, we are human after all, but the gross amount of quotes not cited or completely made up by the author is completely unconscionable and wrong. If these individuals were still in college they'd be failing classes and possibly even expelled, yet some found places in the Bush administration or maintained their faculty position. The lack of punishment for these gross misconducts and betrayals is worse than the betrayal themselves. People who read monographs generally believe what they are reading and take it for granted that the author did the proper research and knows what he is talking about; it does not generally cross your mind that hey this individual may have made this up, or skewed the facts. The Statement on Standards makes it clear that historians do not make things up, yet that seems to be the very case for Weinstein who most likely made up large portions of his book. To begin with he was taking notes on someone else's translation of the documents because he could not read Russian, second he paid off the KGB to NOT allow anyone else to see the records he used, as well as the tapes which dispute whether he misquoted interviewees have never been released. Weinstein obviously is hiding something major, like no basis for his book, and thesis, yet he was still put in charge of the National Archives by the Second Bush Administration. The lack of punishment and self-policing the AHA and historians are witnessing is pathetic.