{"id":51360,"date":"2024-03-28T01:00:57","date_gmt":"2024-03-28T05:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=51360"},"modified":"2024-03-27T09:44:27","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T13:44:27","slug":"qotd-honest-scholarship-and-whatever-passes-for-scholarship-these-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/03\/28\/qotd-honest-scholarship-and-whatever-passes-for-scholarship-these-days\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Honest scholarship … and whatever passes for scholarship these days"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Although not one in ten thousand academics and other intellectuals would express dissent from what Bob says above [Bob Higgs’ post on Facebook<\/em><\/a>], quite a few express their disregard for what he says through their actions. As Bob notes, an excellent example of this academic utter shoddiness or execrable dishonesty (you pick) is Duke University “historian” Nancy MacLean<\/a> and her well-documented penchant for presenting fabrications as facts. Another example is Cornell University “historian” Ed Baptist<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Equally distressing as these (and an increasing number of other) examples of scholarly utter shoddiness or execrable dishonesty is the complete incredulity of many people in accepting the “findings” of such “scholars”.<\/p>\n

A perverted form of amusement can be had by imagining what sort of “scholarly” output you might offer to the world were you to operate according to the standards used by “scholars” such as Nancy MacLean. Free to present fiction as fact, you might, say, claim that because Dr. MacLean studied at the University of Wisconsin, and because Wisconsin was once home to the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer \u2013 and because in her book Democracy in Chains<\/em> she did not explicitly denounce serial killing \u2013 that Dr. MacLean’s work is a surreptitious attempt to justify serial killing.<\/p>\n

Of course, any such conclusion would be both preposterous and inexcusably unethical. Anyone who (unlike me here) seriously offered such a wacky, detached-from-all-reality, ideologically motivated thesis to the public should lose not only any claim to scholarly respect, but any claim to respect of any sort. And yet the bases for the conclusions reached by “scholars” such as Dr. MacLean are no more realistic than are those in my previous, satirical paragraph.<\/p>\n

Don Boudreaux, “The Wisdom of Bob Higgs”, Caf\u00e9 Hayek<\/em>, 2019-08-29.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although not one in ten thousand academics and other intellectuals would express dissent from what Bob says above [Bob Higgs’ post on Facebook], quite a few express their disregard for what he says through their actions. As Bob notes, an excellent example of this academic utter shoddiness or execrable dishonesty (you pick) is Duke University […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,28,41,13],"tags":[86,1490,764],"class_list":["post-51360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-media","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-criticism","tag-historiography","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-dmo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51360"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88237,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51360\/revisions\/88237"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}