While I am teaching online this semester, I started my classes as I always do: with an introductory lecture / discussion about history as a scholarly discipline. I concluded that video lecture with a reflection on the relationship between wisdom, truthfulness, and the ethical commitments of a good historian. I have included that clip at the end of this post – it runs to a little less than eight minutes. (Please pardon the sound of wind blowing in the background; I did not realize that my headset mic would pick up the tiny breeze from my desktop fan. Live and learn.)
In the meantime, here’s the TL;DR of my riff on the ethics of our profession…
Historians have an ethical obligation to one another to be honest in how we represent our sources and the arguments of our fellow historians. We must submit our work to the scrutiny of our peers. If we find counter-evidence that cuts against our major claims, we must truthfully and fairly represent that counter-evidence, even if – especially if – that means we need to qualify our claims. We cannot twist the evidence available to us in order to tell a story that serves our polemical purposes, but we must fairly and charitably (I used the word “graciously,” but I think it still holds) read and represent our sources and our interlocutors in order to offer the most reliable and comprehensive explanation for the past that we can manage.
It would never have occurred to me that it would be necessary to add another, foundational ethical commitment: we must honestly and truthfully represent ourselves.
But here we are, three days into an absolutely disastrous and damaging crisis in the historical profession – disastrous for the reputation of the profession, damaging to Black and Latinx scholars who were marginalized and misrepresented and caricatured by a white woman who took opportunities and resources meant to encourage and foster more diverse voices and viewpoints in our scholarly community.
For those of you who are not online in the way that many of us are (Twitter, Facebook, etc), I’m talking about the outrageous, malign behavior of Jessica Krug, a tenured historian of Africa and the African Diaspora at George Washington University. On Thursday, in a Medium post, Krug disclosed that over the course of her academic career she has pretended to be (at various times) someone of North African descent, someone of Afro-Caribbean descent, and (most recently) an Afro-Latinx Puerto Rican from the Bronx who grew up in “the hood.” Krug admitted that, in fact, she was a white suburban Jewish girl from Kansas City, Kansas, and she has been cosplaying an identity she had no right to claim.
Before the day was over, her blog post and the righteous uproar that its disclosures prompted had been covered by the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, CNN, the BBC, and the tabloids.
In her blog post, an attempt to control the narrative of the revelation of her malign duplicity before someone else outed her, Krug had the audacity to write that she was cancelling herself and that she should be canceled. But she did not make any promises to quit her job or to return fellowship funds she may have received. It was a lot of hand-wringing and narcissistic reflection on her own awfulness, but there was no indication that she was doing anything to make amends or make restitution.
I wondered to myself if Krug’s behavior might constitute a firing offense for a professor with tenure. I mean, I think it should. But I did wonder what the institutional response would be, from her colleagues in the GWU history department to the dean to the provost to the president of the university. Here is a professor who, as far as we know, has not committed fraud in her published scholarship – something that would indeed be grounds for a disciplinary proceeding that would probably end in the revocation of tenure. But she committed fraud with her life, with her self-presentation to her colleagues and her students. How do you handle that?
Well, here’s how the history department at George Washington University has recommended handling it:
GW History Department faculty statement on Jessica Krug pic.twitter.com/tpUpyHwlO9
— GW History Department (@GWHistoryDept) September 4, 2020
“The discipline of history is concerned with truth telling about the past. With her conduct, Dr. Krug has raised questions about the veracity of her own research and teaching. Accordingly, the department calls upon Dr. Krug to resign from her position as associate professor of History at GW. Failing that, the department recommends the rescinding of her tenure and the termination of her appointment.”
Perhaps only academics will understand just how radical a departure from routine professional discourse this statement is, especially coming from historians. There’s no call for an investigation, an inquiry, an examination of Krug’s scholarship and her teaching to see if she has been as disingenuous and dishonest on the page as she has been in life. There’s no argument or even implication that someone can be a horribly dishonest person but still a fine or even passable historian and teacher. There is no handwringing here about separating the scholar from the scholarship. There is not even a nod to “due process” – something you would normally expect in a faculty statement about revoking someone’s tenure. Nope. Not this time around. The history professors at GWU have spoken in unison: she needs to get the hell out of here or be thrown out.
In a discipline concerned with truth-telling, the history faculty at GWU have said, there is no room for liars or frauds.
And, I would add, there is no need to cite them or draw from their scholarship.
Here I will pick up the thread from my post of a couple of weeks ago about W.E.B. Du Bois, who found himself in the frustrating position of needing to cite the work of racist scholars, scholars whose racism dripped from the pages they wrote. He cited their work because it was in some cases the only available scholarship on the subjects about which he was writing. Thanks to Du Bois’s pioneering work in the field of the history of the African diaspora (among many other fields), there is a massive body of scholarship that is constantly being enriched and refined by the contributions of scholars working in that field today, including scholars who are African-American, Latinx, Afro-Caribbean, and white.
Whatever Jessica Krug wrote, however important it may have seemed, it’s not necessary. I’m not a specialist in her field, but I will say it again: her work is not necessary. To anybody. She should never be cited again. Someone else — a Black woman, or a Latinx woman, I have no doubt — has already written something just as useful, just as good, just as groundbreaking as her scholarship, and they have done so without claiming to be someone they’re not. I guarantee it. And someone – many people – will re-traverse any ground she claimed to have covered and will produce scholarship that is governed by a fundamental integrity of character, an ethos of truthfulness that permeates all aspects of their professional lives, not just what they write on the page. Cite those people.
I tell my students that history is a moral discipline and an ethical discipline, and that good history depends on people with sound ethical commitments to one another, to the notion of fairness, to the principle of veracity, to the idea of integrity. I tell my students that practice in this discipline – this rule of life, if you will – will yield not just knowledge, but wisdom. When we are dealing with the work of those who have found wisdom, we will not need to worry about separating the scholarship from the scholar.
But we will not find what we do not seek. Instead, we may find ourselves in a world of trouble, and we may very well deserve it. And that’s being charitable.
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5 Thoughts on this Post
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What a good online introduction to history for your students. Bravo. (Re Jessica Krug: Today’s WPost has a great retort: ” “Nothing says white privilege like trying to orchestrate your own cancellation,” tweeted Sofia Quintero, a writer and activist from the Bronx.”
Thanks Bob. On Facebook and on Twitter, a few people reading this post have raised some variant of a “slippery slope” argument: If we can fire people just for lying, even if their scholarship is good, where does it end?
The answer, clearly, is to ask Joseph Ellis. The man made up a Viet Nam combat history for himself out of whole cloth and regaled his students with tales of his utterly fictional experiences, yet he was not fired. FWIW, I think what Jessica Krug has done is orders of magnitude worse than what Ellis did, because her fraud led to her getting scholarships and institutional support that were earmarked for underrepresented scholars. Ellis, whose fabrications certainly betrayed the ethos of historians to be truthful about the past and to be trustworthy teachers, was suspended and demoted from his endowed chair. Yet he was able to retire a while back, and his books are still assigned to this day. Somehow the slippery slope hasn’t claimed him. Can’t imagine why.
I’m not going to comment on the Krug case because I have not read her blog post or the news coverage (partly or mainly for reasons of time). I was aware of the story from headlines but that’s all.
I would like to comment on the GWU History Dept statement that “the discipline of history is concerned with truth telling about the past.” They could have simply said that they don’t want a dishonest person as their colleague and left it at that. Instead they decided to tie their position to a general statement about what history is “concerned with.”
It would have been just as accurate — indeed, probably more accurate — to say that the discipline of history is concerned with telling multiple and sometimes conflicting truths (plural) about the past. Which does not contradict what the GW historians said but does differ a bit in emphasis. In their eagerness to dissociate themselves from a crude postmodernist skepticism about truth, some historians, I sometimes think, are tempted to suggest that there is one singular discoverable truth (capital T) about the past, which it seems reasonably clear to me is not the case, not about most big historical processes at any rate. That the French Revolution started in 1789 is true, but there is no singular discoverable Truth about its causes in the way that there are singular discoverable and provable truths about biology or epidemiology or aspects of the physical universe. There are good arguments and not-so-good arguments about the causes of the French Rev or WW One (or whatever), but the arguments don’t end because they are not ultimately resolvable by appeal to evidence in a way that would convince all scholarly participants.
As to how historians deal with evidence, of course they should acknowledge evidence that runs against their claims and qualify the claims accordingly. But if you qualify claims too much you wreck the chances of writing a coherent narrative. That’s why I suspect a fair amount of counter-evidence gets acknowledged only in passing or in notes, unless the piece is explicitly about weighing evidence pro and con about a particular issue. I had occasion to think a little about this recently when reading (or rereading) parts of E.H. Carr’s _What is History?_, esp the first chapter on “The Historian and his [sic] Facts.”
In short, the GW historians could simply have said “we think her conduct is deplorable and we want her out.” Instead they chose to reach for some profundity about the nature of history, opening up significant and well-worn issues but also ones that are unnecessary to broach in order to deal with the matter at hand. Or so it seems to me, though I suppose I might change my mind on further reflection.
P.s. For the record (and for those who may not be regular readers of this blog), I am not a historian. (However, the longest chapter in my dissertation was a piece of historical narrative, which I figure gives me almost, though not quite, as much right to pontificate, for lack of a better verb, about history as real historians have.)
Btw I listened to the linked end of the lecture after writing the above comment; I don’t disagree with any of that.
Why does a liar, who could be viewed as one who employed aspects of political ponerology as her weapon of choice, suddenly come clean? That’s the question to be answered. What was Krug’s end game and why did this portion of the game end now? History doesn’t happen in a vacuum.