An omitted citation on a radio program sent academic social-media circles into a furor on Sunday and Monday, when observers saw the slight as evidence of a problem that overwhelmingly dogs early-career scholars, especially women and people of color.
Here’s what happened: Last week the NPR show Here & Now did a segment on the politics of tobacco that drew from a forthcoming Harvard University Press book by Sarah Milov, an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia. The host, Jeremy Hobson, spoke with two regular contributors, the historians Edward Ayers of the University of Richmond and Nathan Connolly of the Johns Hopkins University, about tobacco politics. The peg was Virginia’s raising the legal age this month to 21 for purchasing tobacco products and e-cigarettes.
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An omitted citation on a radio program sent academic social-media circles into a furor on Sunday and Monday, when observers saw the slight as evidence of a problem that overwhelmingly dogs early-career scholars, especially women and people of color.
Here’s what happened: Last week the NPR show Here & Now did a segment on the politics of tobacco that drew from a forthcoming Harvard University Press book by Sarah Milov, an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia. The host, Jeremy Hobson, spoke with two regular contributors, the historians Edward Ayers of the University of Richmond and Nathan Connolly of the Johns Hopkins University, about tobacco politics. The peg was Virginia’s raising the legal age this month to 21 for purchasing tobacco products and e-cigarettes.
The problem is that the two scholars — one of whom, Ayers, is a former university president — didn’t mention that their information had been drawn from Milov’s The Cigarette: A Political History. The omission both undermined her achievement at a pivotal moment in her career — she’s coming up for tenure — and potentially blunted the impact of her book’s release, in October.
People are in a rush to label this something that it was not. The apologies are sincere.
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On Sunday, The Lily, The Washington Post’s publication for millennial women, ran an article about the nonattribution. In that story, the producing NPR station, WBUR, apologized and said that Milov’s name had been added to the web page for the segment.
Connolly emphasized that there was no intention to misrepresent where the scholarship had come from. He said that he had drawn from Milov’s book as well as that of another scholar, and that the parts drawn from the other scholar, Nan Enstad, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, may have been cut during the edit. The producers of BackStory, a history podcast on which Ayers and Connolly collaborate, apologized for not crediting Milov properly when they prepped the two historians for the Here & Now segment. And Milov told The Lily that “I do not believe that anyone acted out of any sort of malice in this.”
So everybody made nice and went home for dinner, right? Er, no.
The Lily story prompted Twitter threads interpreting the incident as typical of academic and broadcast cultures that belittle younger colleagues, women (including trans women), and minorities.
Pilfered Insights
Erin Bartram, a historian who co-edits and cofounded Contingent Magazine,said in a phone interview on Monday that the Here & Now flap illustrates what goes on at universities frequently, with senior scholars claiming credit for junior scholars’ work. The problem is exacerbated when young scholars leave academe without their dissertations becoming books, leaving the research and insights to be purloined by the senior scholars who remain.
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The Milov situation is even more vexing, Bartram said, because the book, which has crossover trade-market appeal, isn’t yet published. When it comes out in the fall, Bartram fears, its audience will think, Hmm, I already heard those other guys talking about this tobacco-politics stuff. The incident also reinforces a media stereotype of the authoritative historian’s voice as being older and male, she said, like Frank, the “Famous Historian,” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The omission brought back bad memories for Anne Mitchell Whisnant, a senior historian for the consulting firm Primary Source History Services, in Chapel Hill, N.C., who wrote about the Blue Ridge Parkway in a 2006 book published by the University of North Carolina Press. A few years later a documentary filmmaker interviewed her on camera and used many of her ideas without attributing them to her or her book. She and the university counsel tried to get the filmmaker to insert those attributions, but he said it was too late because the film was already distributed on DVD and headed for frequent airings on PBS stations.
“This was unfortunate for me as an emerging scholar,” Whisnant recalled in a phone interview. “I definitely think there’s a gender pattern and seniority pattern” — a thoughtlessness, she said.
“Systemic sloppiness” is Silke-Maria Weineck’s phrase for such arch oversight. She experienced it, too, when NPR interviewed her and a co-author of a book about soccer and society, then not only cut out all the segments with her in them, but listed the male co-author as the sole author. Weineck, a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, doesn’t think NPR or other communications outlets are part of a misogynistic conspiracy — “they were probably mortified.” But they “need to pay attention to this issue … just make it part of the process before they go to air.”
‘Not Brushing It Aside’
There are systemic issues, Ayers agreed, but he and Connolly — through their work at BackStory — have been part of the solution, not the problem. If you go back and listen to the show’s 200 downloadable archived hours, he said, you’ll hear that he and Connolly have regularly interviewed junior scholars, including Milov, who Ayers said has been a guest on the program three times. “We’re all admirers of her,” he said.
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However, Ayers agrees that the Here & Now omission was a serious, albeit uncharacteristic, problem. The criticism is fair, he said, and “I’m not brushing it aside.” But, he added, “I think people are in a rush to label this something that it was not. The apologies are sincere.”
That’s why he and Connolly are going to have Milov on the show on Tuesday afternoon. Connolly told The Chronicle onMonday that the three of them would discuss last week’s faulty process and highlight the book and Milov as “a scholar and not a victim of a professional parable.” Among other problems, Connolly said, he wasn’t aware when preparing for and taping the segment that Milov’s book hadn’t been published yet.
Connolly said that during the duo’s two years of volunteering their time and content for Here & Now, the relationship had always been strained. They’ve tried to give credit to the works they draw from, he said, and “the hat tips ended up on the cutting-room floor again and again. We tried to operate in the confines of the form. It was a tortured relationship on our end.” He called it “a kind of dance between skimming across the top and our own desires to uphold scholarly conventions.”
Whether discussing the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, abortion rights, or judicial review, he and Ayers, Connolly said, “never, ever pretended to be research experts in these areas” but rather to offer “a general sense of the background.”
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Connolly said that he had spent much of his career trying to advance and highlight the scholarship of women and minorities and that the Twitter attacks on him had been “absolutely obscene.” His critics, he said, are making opportunistic hay of an unfortunate situation.
“The branding apparatus in this profession,” he said, “has absolutely just collapsed on itself.”
A Knife-Twisting Tweet
While the broadcast duo’s relationship with Milov seems likely to survive, Ayers’ and Connolly’s relationship with Here & Now could be iffier.
Sam Fleming, managing director of news and programming at WBUR, told The Lily that “it’s unfortunate that we didn’t acknowledge the author who was largely responsible for much of the content.”
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But then Monday afternoon, Here & Now’s host, Hobson, tweeted: “Historians @edward_l_ayers & @ndbconnolly did not cite @allofmilov in the segment, but they should have. I know the BackStory team and I know how sorry they are. I am sorry as well.”
Say what? fumed Connolly. He and Ayers didn’t cite Milov because for two years the Here & Now producers have cut and discouraged those citations, so why keep beating their heads against the wall? Of that tweet thread, Connolly said, “I and a number of people are very upset by being thrown under the bus.”
Marsha Barber, a professor of journalism at Ryerson University and a former CBC news producer, said that it’s possible Milov was the victim of “a somewhat unthinking intellectual arrogance.” But, she said, the ultimate responsibility for making sure ideas are attributed is the journalist’s, not the historian guests.
If it’s all about branding, as Connolly suggested, ironically, the brand that looks brightest after this hullabaloo might be Milov’s. You can bet she’ll have some serious air time too. In reply to Hobson, she tweeted: “Looking forward to our chat in the fall!”