The Chronicle has appended this note to Michael Bellesiles’ article:
The Chronicle has looked into questions raised by commenters and bloggers about this article.
We talked to the teaching assistant for the course, who confirmed Mr. Bellesiles’s account of the student’s story. According to the teaching assistant, a Marine veteran, the student told him that his brother had been shot in the head and later died from his injuries.
The Chronicle also spoke with the student called “Ernesto” in the article. The student said the soldier who died was his half-brother, was a member of the U.S. Army, and had died in Afghanistan in November. The student declined to provide further details because of unspecified “issues.”
At The Chronicle’s request, an Army spokesman searched a database of all U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan using the name the student provided. There were no matches. The Chronicle’s own search of Department of Defense news releases turned up no casualties under any name that matched the student’s description.
Subsequently the student told us that he had fabricated several details in the story he had told Mr. Bellesiles and The Chronicle. The student said he knew a soldier who he believed had died in Afghanistan, but he said the person was not his half-brother. The student had no explanation for why the name was not on the military’s casualty lists.
Asked for a response, Mr. Bellesiles said he was saddened that his student had altered the details of a personal tragedy and that he regretted that he had unknowingly passed on a story that was not accurate. “But I hope that no one mistakes the point of my article in calling for greater sympathy and support in our colleges for veterans and the families of those who have suffered loss in our current wars.”
Oh dear. In a way I feel bad for Bellesiles. It’s plausible enough that a student told him this story and he thought, well, what a nice anecdote to use in a piece about being sensitive to veterans et al. in the classroom. Can you imagine being in Bellesiles’ place and asking for confirmation?
The Edge of the American West 
9 comments
July 21, 2010 at 11:27 am
Rob_in_Hawaii
Sorry, considering the prior big kerfuffle about his use of sources, Bellesiles probably should have sussed out a little more about this student’s story.
I’m no cold-hearted cynic, but I have heard enough poignant tales from my own students, who, like Bellesiles’ class member, were trying to explain absences and missing assignments.
Yes, demanding a certified copy of the death certificate might have been rude. But there are other ways of teasing out the information. Especially if you are publishing something for an audience that just might include one or two folks waiting to do their own fact checking.
Unfortunately, instead of an essay with a sound lesson for us to be more compassionate in the classroom, we come away with the feeling that college professors are easily duped.
July 21, 2010 at 11:50 am
dana
I’m with Neddy, I think. It’s relevant to me that the focus of this piece was how the presence of a student who claims to have certain experience affected the atmosphere in the classroom. That isn’t retroactively changed by the student’s confession. That would seem to suggest that the appropriate time to fact-check your students would be not when you write up the reflection, but when you take into account their personal experiences in the classroom.
That’s an awful lot of fact-checking, and most of the stuff that comes up in my classes are not excuses about missing class, but things like having a mentally handicapped sibling when we talk about Singer, or personal experience with sexual assault and mental illness or parents with cancer, etc., or belief in God, etc. All of that means a delicate touch is required when discussing related philosophical topics, and I’m not sure what my duty would be to dig into the students’ personal lives before I’d give advice to a classmate or colleague on how to handle similar situations.
July 21, 2010 at 11:51 am
John
Re: “Can you imagine being in Bellesiles’ place and asking for confirmation?”
Before publishing it in a professional journal? Sure.
But more to the point, I can easily imagine being in his place and not repeating the student’s story at all, since it was, after all, nothing more than an unconfirmed story from a source of unknown reliability. Bellesiles was merely repeating something he had heard, without apparently having made any effort to determine whether or not it was true. In other words, it was pure bullshit.
July 21, 2010 at 11:52 am
silbey
Can you imagine being in Bellesiles’ place and asking for confirmation?
I can, I’m afraid. And you don’t need to ask for confirmation to check online to see if army fatalities matched the story. Lindgren found the holes pretty easily without even knowing the student’s name. Bellesiles needs to be extra diligent, given his record.
That isn’t retroactively changed by the student’s confession.
I think it is, though, because then it brings up the issue of the strategies that students use to appropriate authority in the classroom.
July 21, 2010 at 12:04 pm
dana
I can accept that there is good prudential reason for Bellesiles to be extra careful about anything that he puts in print. I’d be willing to bet, though, that most of the various “here’s how to deal with various atypical situations in the classroom” advice that I’ve received or read about have not involved fact-checking the student’s story.
July 21, 2010 at 12:30 pm
silbey
I can accept that there is good prudential reason for Bellesiles to be extra careful about anything that he puts in print. I’d be willing to bet, though, that most of the various “here’s how to deal with various atypical situations in the classroom” advice that I’ve received or read about have not involved fact-checking the student’s story.
I think we should be careful of making an assumption about something and then using that assumption as evidence. It also strikes me that they should have been, and bad practice by another doesn’t justify Bellesiles.
July 21, 2010 at 12:55 pm
politicalfootball
Journalists have a phrase for stories like this: “Too good to check.”
July 21, 2010 at 1:29 pm
dana
I’m not doing that. I’m asserting that I believe that it is uncommon to fact-check otherwise plausible student stories before offering advice based on those experiences to other colleagues, and if I’m right, then Bellesiles is remarkable only in that he and his TA were thoroughly duped.
Whether that means everyone is guilty of bad practice is a separate question. I’m not sure where I fall on that as a general rule, because a lot of things that affect the classroom are hard or impossible to verify.
July 21, 2010 at 2:00 pm
silbey
I’m not doing that. I’m asserting that I believe that it is uncommon to fact-check otherwise plausible student stories before offering advice based on those experiences to other colleagues, and if I’m right, then Bellesiles is remarkable only in that he and his TA were thoroughly duped
I think the “if I’m right” is the part where we disagree about how useful that line of argument is.
Whether that means everyone is guilty of bad practice is a separate question.
Sure. That’s why I signaled that with “It also strikes me…”