-Caveat Lector- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v45/i43/43a01201.htm The Chronicle of Higher Education From the issue dated July 2, 1999 The Academic Path to Pariah Status Personal disputes and controversial research lead some scholars to be shunned by colleagues By ALISON SCHNEIDER Peter H. Duesberg used to be a player in academe. Now he's a pariah. In his glory days as a cancer researcher, he helped set the agenda in the molecular-biology department at the University of California at Berkeley. But ever since he started insisting that AIDS isn't caused by H.I.V. -- a theory none too popular in a scientific community that has used billions of dollars in government funds to prove otherwise -- his institutional status has plummeted. Mr. Duesberg is no longer trusted with graduate teaching or faculty hiring. His sole departmental assignment is the picnic committee. He handles hot dogs. And that's the least of his worries. His grants have dried up. His 10-person lab has shrunk to two people -- and one of them works for no pay. No one wants to be associated with Mr. Duesberg. Almost no one is willing to be seen with him. The man hasn't been invited to an academic party in five years. He's not the only professor who has slid from the A list to the blacklist. Academe is full of scholars whose names have disappeared from the roll call -- for parties, promotions, raises. They've been shut out and shut down -- and their colleagues' clear message, they say, is that they ought to shut up. Given academe's liberal leanings, a lot of the outcasts -- like Lino A. Graglia, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin -- have a conservative slant. But there are some who sit on the left -- people like Tony Martin, an Africana-studies professor at Wellesley College. He ran into trouble after requiring students to read a controversial book, published by the Nation of Islam, that said Jews played a major role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Shunning is one of the most effective ways to keep wayward professors in line, say academics who have received the cold shoulder. Think someone is giving the campus a bad name? Change her class schedule, slash her merit pay, hide her books. Troubled by somebody's ideology? Tell students to steer clear of his seminars, pan his publications, torpedo his job offers. Do you really dislike somebody? Why not call the F.B.I. and link him to a serial killer? It's happened. Tenure protects a person's job, but there are all sorts of ways to make a professor's life miserable if you disagree with him professionally or dislike her personally. Professors who have become pariahs on their campuses describe shunning as academe's dirty little secret -- and they say it's high time the practice is exposed as the malevolent form of mind control that it is. Others think the only thing being exposed by such remarks is a streak of scholarly paranoia. The people who are steamed about shunning, their critics argue, have dined on too many sour grapes. They're cranks and complainers, bitter about their failures and looking for someone to blame. Who wants to have lunch with someone like that? All the conspiracy theories in the world, these observers say, won't change the fact that most of these so-called pariahs are short on friends because they are abrasive, arrogant, and argumentative. "It does wear on one's colleagues," says James Allison, co-chairman of Mr. Duesberg's department. "After a while, you fail to take these people seriously. If they say, 'My whole agenda is this one thing, and it's mine because it's unpopular,' well, it's a one-note band, and you do get sick of it." Particularly when the band seems off-key. A lot of the bellyachers are bad scholars to boot, their critics say, people wedded to theories that the rest of academe has discredited and discarded. "There's a difference between being unorthodox and unpopular on the one hand, and being wrong on the other," says Vincent Sarich, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Berkeley, when asked about Mr. Duesberg's theories on AIDS. And if a scholar is wrong, sometimes shunning can be the right response, some professors say. It would be unethical not to steer students away from a professor whose work seems devoid of intellectual merit, they argue. J. Philippe Rushton, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario has heard the "He's a loon" argument before. Ever since Mr. Rushton published research in the late '80s suggesting that black people have smaller brains, lower I.Q.'s, and stronger sex drives than white or Asian people do, he has been hanging on to his job by no more than a thread, he says. For months, the Canadian government considered prosecuting him under its anti-hate-crime laws. His academic evaluations went downhill. He was forced to teach by video for a semester in 1990, because the university said his presence on the campus might lead to violence. His only committee assignment is the one on space and facilities. "It's the lowest-status committee in the department," he says. "This is one-party science across the board," he adds. "I try to find places where I'm acceptable, but people can't accept that there are race differences." And if you try to discuss them, you'll end up in the same place he is, he says: "In the dock." Mr. Rushton's career may be on the line, but maybe he bears some of the responsibility for putting it there, other scholars say. Insisting, as Mr. Rushton does, that the average I.Q. of Africans in Africa is 70 is "absurd on its face," says Mr. Sarich, who has sat on the hot seat himself for arguing that crime and intelligence are influenced by genetic factors. "When you get associated with a claim that's absurd on its face, you ought to give it more thought before plunging ahead and saying, 'I'm just doing science.'" Mr. Rushton is indeed shunned, Mr. Sarich continues, and a lot of the shunners "go well beyond the pale. But they're being unduly tempted." Thomas J. Figueira, a classicist at Rutgers University, may have tempted fate as well, although personnel differences, not intellectual ones, explain his troubles. Five years ago, the self-described "leper of the university" was reclassified as a sociology professor and forced to move out of the classics department. He doesn't teach sociology or have an office in that department. He just gets his mail there. "It was as if my presence in my own department became a mirage," he says, noting that no one could find him in his new office, several miles away. He is suing Rutgers in federal court, charging that his First Amendment rights were violated. The university says the classicist was moved because he verbally abused his colleagues, interfered in a tenure case, and spread rumors that one of his co-workers engaged in sexual harassment. But Mr. Figueira thinks he was exiled because he was one of the first, and biggest, thorns in the administration's side -- a union activist who pushed for an ombudsman and loudly criticized the president. His "trip to Coventry" serves as a cautionary tale for his colleagues, he says. "The message is, 'You don't want to end up like this guy, so exercise self-censorship. If you keep it up, you could end up in the room next to Tom Figueira.'" That's the real evil of shunning, says Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist at California State University at Fresno: It creates a culture of conformity. No one wants to rock the boat when the water is full of sharks. His own harsh criticism of classics programs -- which he thinks are being destroyed by a coterie of theory-laden, P.C.-espousing careerists -- landed him in rough seas years ago. "I want nothing from the profession. That's given me an enormous amount of freedom to write and say what I like," says Mr. Hanson, a man with one foot in academe and the other on his farm in California. "But if at any point in my life I were to adopt traditional academic ambitions, I would be dead in the water. I don't think I would ever get a grant." Maybe that's because a lot of people can't stand his views. Many of those who read Who Killed Homer? (The Free Press, 1998), Mr. Hanson's tart assessment of the field of classics, call him a mean-spirited neo-conservative. In 1995, a fellow classicist fingered Mr. Hanson and the co-author of Who Killed Homer?, John Heath, in connection with the Unabomber. Judith P. Hallett, a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the two men might have some leads as to the serial killer's identity. Ms. Hallett had been feuding for years with the two classicists over a journal article that Mr. Heath wrote and she edited. She found it full of uncorroborated ad hominem attacks; he thought he was being censored. When the Unabomber's manifesto was published, she told the F.B.I. that it sounded remarkably similar to Mr. Heath's and Mr. Hanson's acid writings about the profession. The bureau didn't follow up on her tip, but Mr. Hanson is still smarting. He had been shunned before, but says being connected with a murderer was "a new low." But Ms. Hallett says her motive had nothing to do with shunning: "I felt that I did something that was reasonable and patriotic." The two men engage in "personal, bullying attacks on their colleagues," she says. "They have an absolute right to speak that way -- " but "you can't have it both ways. If you don't want to be careful, considerate, and cautious with your colleagues, you can't expect to be treated that way in return." Finding high-minded reasons for low-ball tactics is de rigueur in academe, says Linda S. Gottfredson, an education professor at the University of Delaware. "When people set out to paralyze you, often they won't blatantly violate your academic freedom. They use what appear to be normal review procedures and the usual technical language to reject your article or your grant, when it's merely a pretext for an underlying political disagreement." In 1989, after publishing several articles criticizing the use of racial curves in scoring the results of employment tests, Ms. Gottfredson was denied a promotion at Delaware. The education-studies department accused her of fudging her data and said her research had been slipping for a decade. The sociology department refused to let students take one of her courses for credit. Administrators began examining her students' papers to see if they contained "improper ideas" on racial differences, she says. And Delaware banned her from accepting grants from the Pioneer Fund on the grounds that the foundation had a racist agenda. Ms. Gottfredson hired a lawyer and eventually forced the university to retreat on every front. But the ordeal took its toll. "I don't give my address out to anyone who doesn't need it. My phone number is unlisted. I'm happy my children have a different last name than I do," she says. "Overnight, my institution seemed to be trying to crush me. That's how it felt for three years -- as if there was an attempt from inside to destroy me." "I think Linda suffered mightily," says James Raths, an education professor who led her department during the disagreement. "She was isolated. But both sides think they're right. They start attributing motive. This is compounded when someone who's aggrieved gets a lawyer. Then the other side gets a lawyer. It quickly escalated into a very unhappy situation." Most professors who find themselves ostracized on one campus say they don't stand a chance of finding a job on another. Before he started rubbing Rutgers the wrong way, says Mr. Figueira, the classicist, he was getting shortlisted for top posts at places like Harvard and Princeton Universities. Now he isn't even invited to apply: "Outside my institution, I'm dead. I couldn't get hired as a dogcatcher." Publishing is equally problematic. Joan D. Mandle, an associate professor of sociology and former director of women's studies at Colgate University, has been trying to get her book about the women's-studies program there published for a year and a half. Fifty university presses have turned it down. One editor, Ms. Mandle says, told her he loved the book -- an "ethnography" of the changes she had made in the program and the resistance she had faced from within -- but lost interest after receiving a negative review. "It said I was trashing women's studies and the book would hurt feminism," she recalls. "I don't want to make myself sound like a hero or a lunatic, but it seems to me that there is censorship going on," she says. "People are really worried about offending women's-studies programs. The book is shunned. I can't get this message out." But getting your message out doesn't guarantee that you'll get much of a reception. Mr. Rushton, the Western Ontario psychologist, frequently has armed guards protecting him at conferences. Things got particularly fractious three years ago at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he recalls. Despite the security guards standing next to him, "demonstrators kept coming up and taking photos of me and saying, 'Rushton, this is for a dead-or-alive poster.'" At least he still gets invited to conferences. Mr. Duesberg, the AIDS researcher, was asked this spring to speak at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine -- beating out Harold E. Varmus, head of the National Institutes of Health, in a student vote. The talk was scheduled, advertisements were posted, and Mr. Duesberg was set to leave when the invitation was withdrawn. The Graduate Student Council initially said it lacked the funds. But when a student offered to pay for Mr. Duesberg's visit out of his own pocket, the story changed. "I have spoken with several faculty members, and the general consensus is that many people would be frankly offended by Mr. Duesberg's visit," said the council's president in an e-mail to the student. "Some have even said that they would probably walk out on him." What stings most about shunning is the name calling, says Daphne Patai, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She once had a joint appointment in women's studies, and would receive four or five invitations a year to speak about the field. But that was before she wrote Professing Feminism (New Republic Books, 1994), arguing that identity politics and ideological rigidity were destroying the discipline. "I've gotten three invitations in the last five years" to speak to women's-studies programs, she says. Ms. Patai has been labeled a racist and a conservative -- things she says she's not. "There's always a name to throw around. It's painful to be called a racist or a fascist. It can be painful to be called a conservative. There's a lot of implicit blackmail going on in academe." Many professors say the blackmail works. For years, Ronald Marchese, a professor of ancient history at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, was locked in a bitter lawsuit with his institution after photographs of him and another professor were removed from a department display. The university said Mr. Marchese's picture -- in which he wore a cardboard laurel wreath and brandished a Roman short sword -- contributed to a climate of fear on the campus. (A female historian had received death threats a few weeks earlier, and a female administrator had been threatened the year before.) Mr. Marchese sued the university for violating his free-speech rights. He won several rounds and recently settled the case. But the stigma hasn't worn off, he says. His raises have been among the lowest in the department, even though he has won two Fulbright awards, he notes. And people scatter when he walks down the hall. "In the last seven years, I could count on one hand the number of faculty members who've come into my office. "It's like you have leprosy and want to crawl in a corner and have someone put the healing hand on you," he adds. "This is a mind-game situation, and it's consciously done to break you." It almost has, says Mr. Marchese, who is on a year-long sabbatical. "I absolutely dread going back." He's considering early retirement. Many of his colleagues would be glad to see him go, but not because of his messy lawsuit, they say. The university was playing fast and loose with academic freedom, and Mr. Marchese was right to call the institution on it, they say. "Ron is not a comfortable colleague for all kinds of reasons that have almost nothing to do with the lawsuit but a hell of a lot to do with who Ron Marchese is," says a fellow worker. Mr. Marchese, who lives in Minneapolis and spends three days a week on the campus, cares more about writing grant proposals than helping out in the department, the colleague adds. "This guy is telling a story -- 'I'm such a willing worker.' I just can't stand it!" It's a familiar lament. After Lino A. Graglia, the Texas law professor, publicly said that black and Hispanic students have trouble competing with white students at elite colleges, the Rev. Jesse Jackson urged people to treat him like a "moral and social pariah." Mr. Graglia believes some of his colleagues took the advice to heart. Exchanges with fellow workers are "abrupt and curt," he says. His committee assignments are minimal, and he's one of the only professors of his stature who doesn't have an endowed chair. It's tough to believe that all of this is not tied to the controversy, he says: "One hates to be a whiner or a paranoiac, but some people around here think that's a factor." It's a factor only in Mr. Graglia's mind, one colleague says, adding that the professor lacks an endowed chair because he's a political polemicist, not a top scholar. "Guess what? He's not the only person in academia who has a higher opinion of himself than the rest of the profession. Lino likes to piss and moan. It's part of his pose: 'I'm the aggrieved conservative.'" So-called pariahs are milking the martyr act to gain sympathy and support, and there's little that universities can do about it, frustrated colleagues say. "When we have a scientific dispute, that's easy," says Mr. Allison, co-chairman of Mr. Duesberg's department. "But when you find someone who is so entrenched that he thinks, 'Everybody is picking on me,' it takes it out of the realm of intellectual discourse and puts it into a sociopolitical sphere that's hard to deal with." Mr. Duesberg hasn't received grants because he hasn't published any original research, Mr. Allison says. He isn't on committees because he's "cantankerous" instead of constructive. "We're not sufficiently blessed with faculty members to do all the jobs to exclude people because we don't like their scientific views," the co-chairman says. With his departmental responsibilities reduced to ordering hot dogs, Mr. Duesberg finds that hard to swallow. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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