The Academic Creed
in Theory and Practice
"Education is not just another business; it is a calling"
Howard Gardner
Fabrication of Data in the Humanities
Although the fabrication of data occurs most commonly in the hard sciences. it also occurs in the social sciences and humanities. In the early 1980s, Robert Maddox, in The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War, accused a host of historians of gross scholarly frauds and evidence-faking to advance their ideological agenda. After tracking down footnotes, Maddox concluded: "These books without exception [emphasis in the original] are based upon pervasive misusages of the source material" (10).
At Princeton, an assistant professor was recommended for tenure despite the fact that his book not only misquoted archival material but silently changed its documentary sources (Kernan 195). A prominent Harvard historian (Simon Schama) described his books as historical novellas and works of imagination, not scholarship, and boasted that they include passages that are pure inventions, "purely imagined fiction" (in Kernan 195). Kernan points out that Schama's public acknowledgement indicates "the extent to which such concepts as fact and originality" are losing their force in the academy (Kernan 196).
The recent and notorious case of Rigoberta Menchu and her somewhat fictionalized autobiography reveals just how shallow the commitment of many humanists to fundamental scholarly values actually is. Menchu, a Quiche Mayan from Guatemala, wrote an autobiography entitled I, Rigoberta Menchu:An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1983), which quickly entered the multicultural canon and won her the Nobel Prize for Peace (1992). The autobiography is popular on American campuses (2) because it presents a harrowing tale of class, gender and ethnic oppression under the right-wing Guatemalan army, and recounts the political evolution of Rigoberta from an ignorant peasant girl to a Marxist agitator for the rights of indigenous peoples and women. Her life is "an explicit indictment of the historical role of the West and Western institutions" (D'Souza 72-73).
The only trouble is much of Rigoberta's autobiography, including some of most moving claims of oppression, is fabricated, filled with ties and half-truths, according to David Stoll, an anthropologist, in Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999)(3). Yes, she told some important truths (the Guatemalan army did commit many atrocities), but Rigoberta's account is so distorted, according to Stoll, as to obscure many crucial issues, such as why the violence occurred in the first place, how the peasants reacted to it, and what they really thought about the local Marxist guerrilla movement.
In Defense of Menchu
But my interest is not with the lies, distortions and half-truths of this celebrated "autobiography" but with how professors reacted to Stoll's findings (which were checked out, incidently, by The New York Times). Not surprisingly, her supporters have leapt to her defense, concocting sophisticated, and elusive, explanations for the "discrepancies" between Rigoberta's published account and the documentary record (ix, 189-194). Since Stoll has dealt with these already, I want to focus on the claim that the validity and accuracy of Menchu's material simply should not concern professors committed to finding the truth.
As Wellesley's Marjorie Agosin famously declared,
"Whether the books is true or not, I don't care" (Wilson "A Challenge" A14).
Timothy Brook, a Stanford professor explains,
"This controversy does not inauthenticate Menchu's book. The controversy not only will not lead me to cut the book from the reading list, but might in fact induce me to move it up from secondary reading to required text."
When I asked a colleague at MSU to review Stoll's book, he replied that he wouldn't touch it;
"I prefer the myths to the truth. If it isn't true, it should have been."
Many instructors who now teach the book say that it doesn't matter if the facts in the book are wrong, because "they believe Ms. Menchu's story speaks to a greater truth about the oppression of poor people in Central America" (Ibid.).