MICHAEL PATRICK LEAHY ENGAGES IN “REPEATED INSTANCES OF PROFOUND STUPIDITY”
Big Government‘s currently running a blockbuster four-part series on the “THE ACADEMIC SCANDAL ELIZABETH WARREN AND HARVARD DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT.” THAT LINK WILL TAKE YOU TO PART ONE. IN PART ONE MICHAEL PATRICK LEAHY CLAIMS THAT HOLD ON WHY AM I YELLING WAIT ON A MINUTE LET ME FIX THIS. (Sorry about that.) Leahy claims that a “secret report” containing a “powerful allegation” against Warren was “accepted by University of Texas President William Cunningham.” The problems with the material in the quotation marks is that those words don’t actually mean anything. They represent a blatant attempt by Leahy to convince readers of a conspiracy where none exists. Consider “secret report.” Sounds pretty damning, doesn’t it? One problem: the “secret report” in question is actually a book review published in The Rutgers Review of Law in 1991. Don’t believe me? Click on the link Leahy provides. That “secret report” is only “secret” because no one actually reads academic articles. Meaning that it’s as “secret” as every other “secret report” I’ve published.
Which is to say it’s not “secret” at all. Just because an article’s in an inaccessible archive doesn’t mean it’s “secret.” It’s not. Leahy has mistaken “I can’t find it” for “secret,” a category error that turns many a home into a veritable “house of secrets,” complete with “secret car keys” and “secret books” and “I don’t even want to know about the secrets under the couch.” But enough about labeling an archived review article a “secret report.” What about the fact that this “report” was “accepted by University of Texas President William Cunningham.” What does it mean to have a law review article “accepted” by a university president? Does it mean he received this issue of The Rutgers Review of Law in the mail and later read it? I don’t know and Leahy doesn’t bother to tell. But doesn’t it all sound rather ominous? A “secret report” that’s “accepted by a university president” sounds much better than a “book review” that’s “read by a university president.”
But none of this earns Leahy the honor of being charged with “REPEATED INSTANCES OF PROFOUND STUPIDITY.” This is simply a case of a mischaracterization so gross it qualifies as a lie. Leahy is a liar. But he’s more than that: he’s a stupid liar. His evidence for Warren’s academic malfeasance is that a scholar invested in proving other scholars wrong wrote a mean review of their book. The scholar in question, Philip Shuchman, is the author of “New Jersey Debtors, 1982-1983: An Empirical Study.” One of his complaints? Warren and her co-authors’ “selection of Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Texas” for their sample (192). They should have tried to “maximize the heterogeneity of the states with respect to what might be important variables” (193). That translates as not unsubtle professional whining to my ears: “Why didn’t they use my ‘Empirical Study’ in the data set?” But even if it’s a valid complaint—even if Warren and her co-authors should’ve consulted Shuchman’s data in their set—that’s not a case of “SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT.” It’s one group of scholars arguing about the validity of another’s methodology:
“Your sample size is too small!”
“Yours isn’t sufficiently representative!”
That’s bog-standard academic debate. Leahy would have you think otherwise by repeatedly quoting Shuchman’s claim that Warren and her co-authors “have engaged in repeated instances of scientific misconduct,” and it’s the rhetorical strength of the accusation that Leahy relies on to mislead his readers. His argument boils down to “Shuchman wrote something that sounds very mean,” and he believes that tone says something damning about Warren’s work. It doesn’t. It’s typically not done with the rhetorical flair of a Stanley Fish, but writing highly critical essays about other scholars in your field is part of the warp and woof of the academia. Leahy contends that an argument made in the back of a law review in 1991 is significant because he doesn’t know that similar claims are made with similar force in the back of every law review. He’s too stupid to do what any other scholar would: examine other issues of the journal and determine whether Shuchman’s review is uniquely adamant. (It isn’t.)
You might complain that I’ve dubbed him a stupid liar when his ignorance of academic conventions only makes him an ignorant liar. Fine. Given the severity of the charge he’d like to levy against Warren and her co-authors, Leahy needs to establish the authority of the person, Philip Shuchman, on whose work he bases it. He does so by citing one of Shuchman’s obituaries:
Professor Shuchman was a champion of the underdog—the average debtor in bankruptcy. In the early 1980s, creditors attacked the 1978 Bankruptcy Code, and claimed that bankrupts could afford payment plans, hence bankruptcy should be made more onerous. Professor Shuchman set out scientifically to see what the facts were [...] and spent a lifetime teaching and writing and testifying for decent bankruptcy and consumer credit laws. He will be missed by all who strive for justice for consumers.
Audience matters, and in this case, his audience consists of conservatives. How authoritative do you think the readers of Big Government will think “a champion of the underdog” who acted on behalf of debtors against corporate interests is? I’d wager not very. So he’s building a case against Warren that relies on grossly mischaracterizing a book review, ignorantly misunderstanding the purpose of academic debate, and obtusely citing a person his audience won’t consider an authority. But that’s not what makes him stupid—much less profoundly so. What could he do that would warrant that? He could drop in a line about how this debate isn’t even a debate:
Professor Shuchman and Ms. Warren both came to the same conclusions about the causes of personal bankruptcy.
You read that right. Shuchman and Warren didn’t even disagree about the substance of their debate. They disagreed about how they came to the same conclusions. Leahy’s impugning the entire body of Warren’s work based on a disagreement that isn’t a disagreement in a “secret report” that isn’t secret on which “unresolved charges” that aren’t charges having been pending for twenty-two years.
Now that is some profound stupidity.
UPDATE: It turns out he did have access to the “secret report” and wasn’t basing it entirely on the content of the book review. So, while funny, that part of the post is factually inaccurate. But it is factually accurate to say that he sat on that information for over a month, and that his original claims were presented in a deliberately obfuscatory manner, and that he did this because The Heirs of Blessed Breitbart Most Holy care more about clicks than claims. I’ll untangle this mess in the morning.
tl;dr…but I did catch the bit about a huge scandal involving Warren!
(Seriously, shit like this has the effect it does because people begin talking about it and then the “controversy” becomes the story…regardless of whether there’s any real merit to the original freakout. See, e.g., the ginned up controversy about Warren’s Native American ancestry. I doubt that this one will stick. Most don’t. But they’ll keep inventing things to freak out about, and some of them will manage to have an impact.)
Sometimes it’s beneficial to nip a story in the bud, but honestly, sometimes it’s just fun to rip a budding story.
And if all else fails, it keeps the rubes’ anger simmering, even if they don’t quite understand what it is they’re so angry about and why.
No offense, but I prefer a nice short rant over a lengthy & pedantic diatribe any day.
ORLY? If you’re going to
fact-checkrip intocriticize every singleturdarticle from Breitbart/NRO/Malkin, etc, good luck with that.Looking forward to your liveblogging the RNC Convention, providing in-depth critical analysis and fact checking every 5 minutes.
Oops, I forgot Fox News. Because, you know, audience matters.
Thank you for this helpful comment. I’m sorry I put that gun to your head and forced you to read this post. That was wrong of me, and I apologize.
I think Leahy is claiming that the secret report was an investigation conducted by UT into the allegations made in the review, not the review itself. Which doesn’t excuse the rest of the stupidity in Leahy’s “series,” of course.
He elides over the fact that he hasn’t read the “secret report,” and turns the book review into the “secret report,” using it as evidence of the misconduct he claims is in the “secret report.” Which means that the “secret report” contains all the information in the article, which means there’s nothing secret about the claims in the “secret report.” See what happens when you try to apply logic to these things?
Leahy’s writing is pretty confusing, so I’ll grant your interpretation is plausible. I don’t how he knows that the secret didn’t investigate a particular claim in the review, but it doesn’t read to me like he’s saying the report is the review. But again, it’s unclear. Your reading is less charitable than mine, but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong one!
He explicitly claims that the “secret report” didn’t addresses one of Shuchman’s four “charges”:
How he knows that I don’t know. My interpretation isn’t charitable, but it runs like this: the “charge” of “scientific misconduct” couldn’t have been in the “secret report,” because if it had been, she would’ve been severely reprimanded, and since she wasn’t severely reprimanded, it must not’ve been in the report. Which means that he’s asserting that something isn’t in a report he hasn’t read.
Perhaps you should read the other three parts of the four part series before you decide what he knows, could know, read, or didn’t read? Since he posted a copy of the report, and analyzed it, I think he probably did read it. (Whether his ultimate conclusions are sound or not is a separate question.)
I read all the ones he linked to, and he never linked to the copy of the “secret report” he obtained. Trying to the search the site is impossible, since it’s designed to generate clicks because clicks mean money. But if he’s posted the “secret report,” I’ll read it.
Though I’m not sure how “secret” a report it’ll be if it’s not, you know, secret.
Found it. It was published a month after the first part, and it was provided by Teresa Sullivan, one of Warren’s co-authors, because she was obviously very concerned that it contained horrible truths about herself and Warren. His rhetorical excesses are still inexcusable, but at least he finally indicated how he knew what he knew … a month after he began smearing Warren. I’ll update the post accordingly.
It appears to be alleging that Warren et al. accorded more privacy to the subjects of their research (i.e., people filing for bankruptcy) than they told NSF they would be according. I gather the scientific misconduct here is denying the herd of James O’Keefe wannabes the opportunity to peer at the granite counters of those moochers in the wrong three states, which is clearly a violation of the Hippocratic oath, or some fucking thing.
Where the bourbon at?
More amusing are the comments left after the article on Breitbart.
They represent a blatant attempt by Leahy to convince readers of a conspiracy where none exists.
How’s this any different than Harry Reid?
Only in all the ways.
Maybe you’d like it better if it were taken to the Senate floor and said aloud…
What difference would that make? The “conspiracy” to compel Romney to release his tax records consists of a whole mess of people on the left and the right who are saying, openly and in places like the Senate floor, that Romney ought to release his tax records. If that’s a conspiracy, it’s pretty much the worst hidden one in history.
I think people are more interested in Obama’s record.
Lemme ask you this: The Democrats bragged and strutted their stuff upon passing and signing ACA into law. According to them, it was a great day for the American people.
Now, no one wants to talk about it…
Why?
No one, I tell you! No one!
Everybody’s talking about it, you’re just not listening. Go back in time to the distant, distant past of 1 August 2012, and read some of the stories about the roll-out of the major planks of the ACA. I know it’s difficult, reading things written all of six days, because it’s like they’ve been written in a different language, but I assure you, it can be done.
Good to see you’ve given up on the “conspiracy” nonsense, though. That was so stupid as to almost be below you.
It’s said that the past is a different country, and we all know that real Americans don’t have any truck with foreigners.
Here’s who’s talking about it…
You’re not allowed to claim “no one’s talking about it” and “here’s who’s talking about it.” I won’t allow violations of logic like that in my threads.
OK, fair enough….
Let me rephrase this for you.
COMMUNISTS are lauding this…they LOVE it!!
Sorry for the confusion, Scotty. It’s just good sense to not consider communists (or ThinkProgress) as anything mainstream.
Oh good, JenBob got himself a new name.
There are still communists?
Communists support a law that mandates that everyone purchases a commercial product? Man, the quality of communists these days has really declined. We need better communists!
Dear Bucknekkid asshat,
I am an actual honest to Dawg socialist (unlike the phantoms of your deliriums) and while I think ACA is a vast improvement over the prior status quo, I am not actually celebrating. If we had passed single payer (you know, actual socialist health insurance) or national health like England and Canada (actual socialized medicine), then I would be celebrating the total destruction of the the vile and parasitic insurance companies and the fact that all Americans could get high quality, affordable medical care like the rest of the developed world.
Sorry for the confusion, Scotty.
I’m also sorry, for the sake of the nation, that you’re confused. But I’m not going to let you apologize away your stupidity.
There are still communists?
Yeah, but they like to hide behind new names.
Democratic Socialists
Progressives
This is fun. Perhaps you can think of some more…
Democratic Socialists
Progressives
Actually those are people who kill Communists.
Actually those are people who kill Communists.
Now don’t go confusing littleJenBob with those pesky facts. (S)he know the TROOF and facts make his/her head hurt.
“Conspiracy,” asshole. Look it up.
Okay, I’ll bite on this. Mitt Romney’s failure to produce his tax records (and it IS a failure) is a matter of public interest and import. What do you when a public figure is doing something like that? Well, you investigate. You go looking for records or sources. When and if you find them, you evaluate their reliability, and then make a decision as to whether or not to go public with them.
Which is what Harry Reid did. It’s something that happens thousands of times a day here in the country, ranging from a Sheriff’s deputy tipping off the local rag that the Sheriff is fixing tickets for his extended family on the side all the way up to Thomas Drake blowing the lid off malfeasance in the heart of the NSA.
It’s called journalism. Ideally, actual reporters would be doing this work, but I see no reason the Majority Leader can’t do it in his spare time as long as he comports to standard journalistic ethics, which Reid has done.
Of course! Romney’s flat refusal to release documents unquestionably in his possession that might disprove Reid’s allegations is exactly analagous to the “secret” report on Warren’s “misconduct” that has been in the public domain for 21 years and contains no actual proof of misconduct.
Leahy’s charge appears to be wrong right now. Reid’s charge will be wrong when Romney releases the tax records that prove that he is an astonishingly rich guy who pays taxes.
“Scientific misconduct” in academia has a narrow and specific definition: fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism, all serious crimes, academically speaking. If the four “charges” did not involve one of those, then we’re not talking about scientific misconduct.
According to Leahy, Warren and her co-authors
Given how Leahy feels about Warren for reasons entirely irrelevant to her academic career, I’m sure he assumes the data he can’t accessed has been fabricated, falsified and plagiarized … by her parents, in June of 1949, because they knew that one day she’d be in the good graces of a black man who’d be born in Hawaii a few days later and be President one day.
… correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t human subject safeguards regarded as best practices? The sort of thing you do to protect the people whose experiences are helping you further the cause of science?
Yes. This is not only standard practice in social sciences, it’s precisely to protect individual subjects of research from having their lives upended by nosy-ass busybodies who are themselves several standard deviations from the mean.
As I say below, our IRB would not clear the proposal if you did not have those in place and I suspect the same is true most places in this country.
Would the same have been true in 1991? I don’t really care, because I’ve settled this matter to my satisfaction in the other post, but just in case a troll asks…
I am not sure that there even would have been an IRB in 1991. I cannot at the moment remember when that became de rigueur for all research with living human subjects and it may be a bit later. It would certainly have been the case by the late 90s.
It appears that they may have. The relevant rules were implemented that year.
Probably. The principles of subject protection go back to post-WWII revulsion at Nazi medical experimentation. By the ’80s it was also at work on social science research.
I know for a fact that they did not apply to all social science research in the 1980s. These rules originally only applied to biomedical and some psychological research. They were extended to all research on human subjects by persons eligible for federal funding in 1991 (see my link just above). There have subsequently been exemptions carved out for oral histories and some other activities. At my university, any research with living humans has to go through the IRB, but they grant automatic approval through an expedited review process for research not directly covered by the federal regulations. This varies from school to school.
I consider psychology a social science, so we may both be right.
I’ve never considered IRB review of historical work to be legitimate, but they keep trying.
Unverifiable? Oversimplifing, if they know the population and the sample method, then an equivalent research data base for the claims can be reproduced. Fuckin’ science, how does it work?
or:
How can we verify the Stroop effect if we don’t use the same research subjects over and over again?!!
Jeez, you mean to say that she treated bankrupts like humans? Shocking!
What is described there is in fact standard procedure for research with human subjects and our IRB would never clear it if you did not do that. Saying that the study cannot be verified is simply false. All you have to do to replicate it is to use the same sampling strategy and methodology. You do not have to look at the same subjects.
Indeed, what is the point of doing the same survey over again with the same subjects? What gives you interesting information is if you repeat the sampling strategy and methodology with different subjects.
It is also how you verify the study.
Seriously, SEK, the back pages of every law review are full of things like charges of “repeated instances of scientific misconduct”? Whoa, I’m glad I work in a staid area like mathematics. If a math journal article or book review contained such a claim a lot of people would sit up and take notice. I’m not denying what you say is true, but wow, I guess lawyers have their own rules for these sorts of things.
Lawyering has the double whammy of being three-quarters rhetorical strength AND a never-ending battle.
Math, even hotly contested areas of it with dueling and incompatible theories, has objective outcomes. You can prove people wrong with verifiable data confirmed and nailed down using the scientific method. The law doesn’t work that way. Legal theories and arguments you thought were long-discredited can rise from their graves and roam zombie-like across the land.
In a different life, I wrote a book chapter about the back pages of Critical Inquiry. The practice has been curtailed in recent years for various reasons, but in 1991 it wouldn’t be unusual at all to find a bunch of cantankerous wankers yelling at each other in the back pages of humanities and social science journals.
which were also often the most interesting part to read of course…
Absolutely. I read all of them when I wrote that paper. No, I’m not kidding. I read all of them.
But as per the difficult books post, it really wasn’t that difficult to do, because it’s woven with ripping yarns.
I once (well, more than once) thought of writing an Eliot parody called “The Love Song of J. Hillis Miller.” In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michel Foucault. If you can finish it, you’re welcome to all the credit, such as it is.
Foucault fits the rhyme, but not the subject. Hillis only ever talked about Foucault dismissively. (And this is the second time in two days it seems like I’m bragging that I know famous people. Everyone knows my degree’s from UCI, home of the Critical Theory Institute, right?)
Foucault fits the rhyme
but doesn’t scan.
Off-topic, but you’ve been on a tear around here lately, SEK. Lots of posts, and of those, many of them are both very long and display your obvious chops as a guy who takes rhetoric seriously. Are you on a break before fall semester and have a lot of free time, or something?
Stop it, I’m quick to blush. To answer your question, though, I’m only teaching three classes at the moment, so I have more free time on my hands than I’ve had since, well, since last summer. I’m not sure what or where or even if I’ll be teaching in the fall, so I may have more, less or no time in a month or so.
I’m also enjoying it again. Like most bloggers, I go through phases, but when I was mocking up the “Best of Acephalous” posts last month, I realized I didn’t like the fact that there were months that I only had two posts to choose from, and that I really wasn’t happy with either of them. Writing isn’t enjoyable when you half-ass it, so now I’m, um, whole-assing it again.
Well, it’s kind of nice to have threads around here that break into three-digit comment lengths and don’t involve JFL, JenBob, the ACA, or the Bully Pulpit.
You leave open the possibility you enjoy the triple-digit threads that involve brad pondering agrarianism or Manju being Manju.
I admit nothing.
Semi-off topic, it’s nice to see in your old Stanley Fish piece that Bart Giamatti once did something in his life that Stanley Fish considered important.
Leahy’s article is harder to follow than “War and Peace” in Hebrew.
If I didn’t know better, I would think his only goal was to confuse people trying to discredit him by being extremely vague and obfuscating his major points.
SEK, not only did Shuchman end up agreeing with Warren, if I’m not mistaken he, in the same paper Leahy touts, endorsed Warren’s conclusions.
The “Secret that ‘They’ Don’t Want You To Know About” meme, pioneered by convicted felon Kevin Trudeau, is of course used regularly by about every other ad on the internet. I can only imagine the disappointment felt by suckers who clicked on the link to the article and failed to discover tips for a flat belly.
[...] (typeof(addthis_share) == "undefined"){ addthis_share = [];}It turns out I need to revise my previous post because Leahy did, in fact, have access to the “secret report” he wrote about on 11 [...]