Historians in the News Archive
This page includes, in addition to news about historians, news about political scientists, economists, law professors, and others who write about history. For a comprehensive list of historians' obituaries, go here.
SOURCE: NYT (9-1-07)
After a news agency reported in July that an important art historian had faked her credentials, a nationwide wave of allegations and confessions followed that has so far swept up a movie director, a renowned architect, the head of a performing arts center, a popular comic book writer, a celebrity chef, actors and actresses, a former TV news anchor and now the Venerable Jigwang....
In an intensely competitive country that has long put a premium on impressive degrees, suspicions that academic records had been falsified have circulated for years. But the tissue of untruths began to disintegrate in July, when reports emerged that Shin Jeong-ah, an art history professor at Dongguk University, the top Buddhist university in Korea, had misrepresented her past. Ms. Shin, who claimed to have a Ph.D. from Yale and other degrees from the University of Kansas, had risen quickly in the art world. At 35, she was appointed co-director of the Kwangju Biennale, one of the biggest and most acclaimed art events in East Asia.
Her troubles began when a member of her university’s board of directors questioned her academic record, and then brought it to the attention of the news media. It turned out that she had attended the University of Kansas but had not graduated, and that she had never attended Yale. The university fired Ms. Shin, who lost her other positions and left for the United States.
Questions arose about other prominent figures’ academic degrees. Some came forward to confess.
In an intensely competitive country that has long put a premium on impressive degrees, suspicions that academic records had been falsified have circulated for years. But the tissue of untruths began to disintegrate in July, when reports emerged that Shin Jeong-ah, an art history professor at Dongguk University, the top Buddhist university in Korea, had misrepresented her past. Ms. Shin, who claimed to have a Ph.D. from Yale and other degrees from the University of Kansas, had risen quickly in the art world. At 35, she was appointed co-director of the Kwangju Biennale, one of the biggest and most acclaimed art events in East Asia.
Her troubles began when a member of her university’s board of directors questioned her academic record, and then brought it to the attention of the news media. It turned out that she had attended the University of Kansas but had not graduated, and that she had never attended Yale. The university fired Ms. Shin, who lost her other positions and left for the United States.
Questions arose about other prominent figures’ academic degrees. Some came forward to confess.
Saturday, September 1, 2007 - 20:30
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SOURCE: NYT (9-1-07)
A front-page article in The New York Sun yesterday trumpeted what seemed to be a striking fact: Pete Seeger, the quintessential leftist balladeer and a former Communist, had denounced Stalinism.
The article centered on a letter from Mr. Seeger to the writer, Ron Radosh, a historian and adjunct senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. “I think you’re right I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in U.S.S.R.,” Mr. Seeger wrote.
He also included the lyrics to a song he wrote several months ago called the “Big Joe Blues”:
He ruled with an iron hand.
He put an end to the dreams
Of so many in every land.
He had a chance to make
A brand new start for the human race.
Instead he set it back
Right in the same nasty place.
Mr. Radosh, who once studied banjo with Mr. Seeger, said in an interview that he had idolized him, but he has become a dogged critic of Mr. Seeger’s politics. Mr. Radosh wrote that he was “deeply moved” that the singer, “now in his late 80s, had decided to acknowledge what had been his major blind spot opposing social injustice in America while supporting the most tyrannical of regimes abroad.”
But in fact, Mr. Seeger, 87, made such statements years ago, at least as early as his 1993 book, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” In the book, he said in a 1995 interview with The New York Times Magazine, he had apologized “for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader.”
But Mr. Radosh said that Mr. Seeger’s comments before had been little noticed and had never gone as far. And Mr. Seeger had never written a song condemning Stalin until now, Mr. Radosh said....
The article centered on a letter from Mr. Seeger to the writer, Ron Radosh, a historian and adjunct senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. “I think you’re right I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in U.S.S.R.,” Mr. Seeger wrote.
He also included the lyrics to a song he wrote several months ago called the “Big Joe Blues”:
He ruled with an iron hand.
He put an end to the dreams
Of so many in every land.
He had a chance to make
A brand new start for the human race.
Instead he set it back
Right in the same nasty place.
Mr. Radosh, who once studied banjo with Mr. Seeger, said in an interview that he had idolized him, but he has become a dogged critic of Mr. Seeger’s politics. Mr. Radosh wrote that he was “deeply moved” that the singer, “now in his late 80s, had decided to acknowledge what had been his major blind spot opposing social injustice in America while supporting the most tyrannical of regimes abroad.”
But in fact, Mr. Seeger, 87, made such statements years ago, at least as early as his 1993 book, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” In the book, he said in a 1995 interview with The New York Times Magazine, he had apologized “for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader.”
But Mr. Radosh said that Mr. Seeger’s comments before had been little noticed and had never gone as far. And Mr. Seeger had never written a song condemning Stalin until now, Mr. Radosh said....
Saturday, September 1, 2007 - 19:26
