Columbia University announced on Friday that it was rescinding the Bancroft Prize that it awarded to Michael A. Bellesiles, a professor of history at Emory University, for a book that has come under attack for poor scholarship. The university said that its trustees had concluded that the book, on gun ownership in early America, “had not and does not meet” the standards associated with the prestigious prize.
Mr. Bellesiles had been awarded the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy in 2001 for his book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), which questioned whether gun ownership in early America had been as widespread as previously believed.
The book was attacked for careless scholarship, however, and the ranks of its critics soon expanded from gun-rights advocates and a few historians to an array of scholars on both sides of the gun-control issue (The Chronicle, February 1). An independent investigative panel appointed by Emory officials concluded in a report issued in October that Mr. Bellesiles’s “carelessness in the gathering and presentation of archival records,” along with his questionable use of quantitative analysis, raised serious questions about his “scholarly integrity.”
Mr. Bellesiles adamantly denied the investigative committee’s conclusions that he had knowingly evaded his responsibilities as a scholar and had misrepresented historical evidence in one of the book’s tables. Nevertheless, upon the report’s release, he announced that he was resigning, effective at the end of December, because he could not continue to teach in “a hostile environment” (The Chronicle, November 8). He is on paid leave and could not be reached for comment.
In a statement, Columbia said that its trustees had agreed with the findings of the Emory-appointed panel and concluded that Mr. Bellesiles had “violated basic norms of acceptable scholarly conduct.” The board’s decision, made at its December 7 meeting, “was based solely on the evaluation of the questionable scholarship of the work and had nothing to do with the book’s content or the author’s point of view,” the statement said. Columbia is asking Mr. Bellesiles to return the $4,000 cash award given with the prize.
The Bancroft Prize is awarded by Columbia annually, and is supposed to go to the authors of books “of exceptional merit and distinction in the fields of American history and biography.”
Background articles from The Chronicle:
