Truth, Lies and Professor Ellis

By GIL TROY

Forward, AUGUST 24, 2001

Finally, the president of Mount Holyoke College has rediscovered academic integrity.

After a summer of dithering, Joanne Creighton imposed a one-year suspension on professor Joseph Ellis for lying to his students. Apparently, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for history repeatedly spiced up his lectures with tall tales about his past, including non-existent civil rights protests and imaginary battle tours in Vietnam, with fictitious football heroics thrown in for good measure. Over the years, he repeated these lies to several journalists, who printed them in profiles. Alas, the punishment, coming more than two months after the disclosure of Mr. Ellis's fabrications in The Boston Globe, will do little to undo the damage Mr. Ellis — and his apologists — have wrought.

Mr. Ellis has destroyed his own credibility and sullied the reputations of teachers everywhere. Bad enough that in a culture that worships fame he is a rare academic historian who has attained celebrity. Bad enough that the pinhead Mount Holyoke bureaucrats first valued public relations spin over academic integrity, dismissing The Boston Globe's expose as meddlesome. But, believe it or not, in the current academic environment, Mr. Ellis actually has his defenders.

Mr. Ellis's fabrications were manna for the post-modernists who preach that all truths are artificial social constructs and that "the narrator" is more central than the narrative. Furthermore, popular historians such as Edmund Morris, who is still trying to justify his bizarre decision to riddle his biography of President Reagan with fictional riffs, defended Mr. Ellis. Mr. Ellis's fibs are "just our imaginations running away," Mr. Morris insisted on the oped page of The New York Times. (Is this the standard the Times would subscribe to?)

Moreover, Mr. Ellis's lies mobilized defenders of President Clinton, many of whom are still seeking support for their stance compartmentalizing the liar from the lie. Once again, we heard piffle such as "but the sinner is so good at his job" and "everybody does it."

"I would hope that when Mount Holyoke investigates him, they take into account how good and popular a professor he is," one former Ellis student told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Besides, I expect this isn't so unusual."

A fan at an Ellis book signing said, "People lie all the time."

In fairness, Mr. Ellis himself, at least, did not attempt to use this defense. Nevertheless, he did lapse into the Clintonian passive voice. "Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made," this usually vivid communicator offered meekly.

While it is fashionable to pit the modern versus the traditional, the secular versus the Jewish, this case offended my sensibilities both as a historian and as a Jew. The professor who advised me on my doctoral thesis in American history, David Herbert Donald, is a masterful teller of stories. His description of how a Southern congressman caned Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate still gives me chills when I read it — or feebly try to recreate it in my own lectures. Nevertheless, Mr. Donald taught that truth comes before showmanship. Without theorizing or bloviating, and simply by example, he taught that a meticulous commitment to accuracy is the historian's primary obligation. Without it, there is no history. When I was writing my thesis, Mr. Donald once chided me for a footnote that inaccurately referred to two consecutive pages, when, because I had edited down the text before submitting it to him, the actual quotation I used came from only the first page.

The Jewish tradition is equally exacting. The meditation at the end of the Amidah, the silent devotion, begins: "O Lord, Guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile." The silence of the prayer emphasizes the great challenge embodied in the meditation; the idea that the tongue and the lips serve as sentries, ready to override the evil impulse, emphasizes the supreme importance Judaism places on the truth.

Of course, for teachers and rabbis, who impart truths through storytelling, the obligation has special salience. The Talmud speaks of "Emet La'ameeto," truth in its truthfulness. The Vilna Gaon explained the redundancy by calling for both the specific facts and the broader truth, accuracy and verity. The search for truth, while elusive, is transcendent, linked to godliness. As a result, the Talmud in Sanhedrin 7A says, "A judge who delivers a judgment in perfect truth [Emet La'ameeto] causes the, the divine presence [Shechinah] to dwell in Israel, and he who does not deliver judgments in perfect truth, causes the divine presence to depart from the midst of Israel."

A good historical storyteller will be selective, controlling the pace, orchestrating the drama and pounding the lesson home. All that latitude makes it more important for the building blocks to be pure, for there to be zero-tolerance for lies, especially when those lies seem designed for self-puffery.

Judaism consecrates the teacher-student bond. "Aseh lecha Rav," make for yourself a teacher, the "Ethics of the Fathers" preaches. Each of us should seek out a good teacher, a worthy mentor and role model. Those of us privileged enough to function as teachers have a sacred obligation to strive for the highest of standards.

In these days of docudramas and infotainment, we must distinguish between history and fiction, between honest mistakes and blatant lies. In these days of hostility to authority and rampant cynicism, teachers in secular and religious institutions must stand out as beacons of integrity. The entire intellectual community should rise as one and condemn this man for ripping the fragile tissue of trust between teacher and student. This September, as we renew so many teacher-student relationships, all of us, on both sides of the lectern, need to strive to make that bond as honest, as authentic, as virtuous, as transcendent as possible.

Mr. Troy is a professor of history at McGill University and the author of "Mr. and Mrs. President: From the Trumans to the Clintons" (University Press of Kansas).