The Academic Creed
in Theory and Practice
"Education is not just another business; it is a calling"
Howard Gardner
Truth Re-Defined
This defense suggests that a new standard of truth--"new" since the sixties--is gaining ground in the humanities and social sciences. As Cynthia Ozick puts it, "Scholars are nowadays calling historiography into radical question; history is seen as the historian's clay; omniscience is suspect, objectivity is suspect, the old-fashioned claims of historical truthfulness are suspect...(23). To the old left-wing argument that since there is no objective history, the past should be exploited to achieve ideological goals in the future, is added the postmodern notion that there is no such thing as truth, only rhetoric. So some scholars place more emphasis on voice, narrative, and story than on truth (Leo). One of the outside evaluators of the manuscript for Pappas's Plagiarism and the Culture War advised the publisher not to print it because "such honesty and truth-telling could only be destructive" (in Pappas Plagiarism 174).
When a senior appointment's committee dutifully refused to award tenure to a scholar who fabricated material and silently changed archival sources, his colleagues railed against "facticity" and "the tyranny of facts" (Kernan 195). Eleven professors joined to defend the author in an issue of Radical History Review (March 1985).
Ironically, postmodernists and "scholars of the left" have a renewed respect for facts and truth when talking about, let's say, Jefferson's alleged fathering of children with one of his slaves; then DNA evidence is accepted as incorrigible proof. When evidence and proof work against their politics, they evoke political expediency: "Yes," they respond, "the work is full of lies, deceptions, and fabrications, but they serve a good cause." Indeed, the Tawana Brawley syndrome--lying for a noble or "higher" truth--recently discredited in court, now has found a comfortable roost in the universities, where growing numbers of "well-intentioned" students fabricate "racist" incidents to drum up support for "diversity" (Gose).
To assert that certain lies are good, as Menchu herself has declared, is dangerous and illogical. Take, for example, one of her own deceptions. By transforming of a squalid dispute between family members over a parcel of land into a drama of indigenous victims and evil invaders, she fed "dangerous illusions" and created "easy pretexts for violence" (Schwartz). Moreover, if facts, validity, and truth don't matter, how can we defend beneficial laws and policies or talk about "human rights?" If it's all "interpretation," why establish "truth" commissions after bloody civil war? How can we oppose totalitarian murderers like Stalin? Or honor real victims?