The Chronicle of Higher Education article on my AAA presentation contains a number of errors, so I’m correcting them here, pending correction by the Chronicle. You can read the Chronicle news story here, though I recommend instead reading the article by Inside Higher Ed. (And not just because I get called “demonic” in that one!)
- The Chronicle reports that UCSB was among the institutions that “issued statements that generally exonerated Mr. Chagnon and Mr. Neel.” In fact, UCSB did not. Three colleagues of Chagnon’s at UCSB did an investigation into Tierney’s claims and issued a report. On the front page, it states clearly that the report “is not an official statement issued by the University of California or the Department of Anthropology.” The report is excellent and honest (it includes corrections as the authors became aware of them) but it is not a statement of UCSB.
- The Chronicle states that the recision referendum passed “on the grounds that the association was ill-equipped to judge individual members’ conduct”. In fact, the issue was not whether the association was equipped; the issue was whether the association’s ethics code allowed for such a thing. It did not.
- I do not believe Leda Martins was not a graduate student in anthropology at Cornell in 1995; I believe she was a Fullbright Fellow studying in Pittsburgh.
- The Chronicle’s discussion of Martins’ account to me of the dossier makes it sound as if her claim was consistently that Tierney wrote the dossier. As I noted in my paper, in one interview, Martins told me she wrote the dossier. In another (later), she told me Tierney wrote it.
- The Chronicle says, “it seems impossible to know whether any deception about the dossier’s authorship actually had any impact on those events.” The more important point is that Tierney apparently intentionally obscured (presumably lied about) authorship of the dossier, and that Martins apparently participated in that deception and then later changed her story. What this tells us is that there is, apparently, a long pattern of deception being carried out by Tierney and Martins where claims about Chagnon are concerned. That’s very important.