WHY COPY ERRORS?

Seeing Red: Philip Foner influenced a generation of young labor historians, but critics call him a plagiarist who helped himself to their research (SCOTT McLEMEE, June 27, 2003, Chronicle of Higher Education)

The question remains: Why did his colleagues put up with it?

Younger labor historians in the 1970s and '80s "tended to be people with left sympathies, who felt the man had suffered enough," says Mr. Dubofsky. "So even the people whose work he had borrowed from freely did not want to say anything." [...]

"If you look at the whole of his body of work, a lot of historians think that my uncle's most important contributions are things that aren't being discussed at all in this," says Eric Foner. "He edited the writings of Frederick Douglass at a time when, believe it or not, nobody remembered him. He edited seven volumes of documents on the history of black labor in the United States, and collections of material from black political conventions in the 19th century. And he did all of it without research assistants or grants. This debate is not doing justice to his contributions to scholarship."

The New York Labor History Association has no plans to revoke the lifetime-achievement award it gave Foner in 1994, according to the group's president, Irwin Yellowitz, a professor emeritus of history at CUNY's City College. "I was on the board, and there was a discussion about the rumors that he had been cutting corners," he says. "But the decision was finally made that the award would be given in recognition of the body of work as a whole, even if it was not always of the very highest quality all throughout."

Eric Foner is sort of right: his uncle's Marxism mars his work more than his plagiarism. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 24, 2003 5:57 PM