Thread by @PhilWMagness

If a historian on the right abused evidence in this way, they'd face career ruination.

When Boston University's Quinn Slobodian does it, he gets a Guggenheim fellowship, book awards, and a Hewlett Foundation grant.

Academia's rot runs far deeper than a simple crisis of rigor.

Slobodian does this sort of thing frequently in his published works - almost always to make the person he is misquoting appear to be sympathetic to racism.

Here's another where he excerpts out the very next sentence in the passage...because it completely contradicts his own claim.

Here's another where he tries to depict Mises as having written "admiringly" about the Roman fasces - better known today as a symbol of fascism.

The full passage reveals the exact opposite.

From another of Slobodian's books. He takes a quote condemning the abuse of black South Africans by the white minority's use of laws to keep itself in the Apartheid government's majority, and manipulates its text through quote-editing into a defense of white South Africans.

Another example I found in Slobodian's latest book "Hayek's Bastards," where he splices unrelated passages to try to portray Mises as having certain sympathies with Nazi race science. The real passage shows Mises disavowing Nazi race science as nonsensical.

These are not one-off errors or cases of sloppiness. It's a pattern of intentional quote editing, with examples like this from Slobodian's books and articles, crossing almost a decade of his scholarship.

Academia rewards him for it because it reinforces left wing politics.

Academia has peer review to catch this sort of thing. In 2018 Slobodian got caught by a referee for the journal Contemporary European History.

The report dinged him for "quoting out of context, partial reading of the relevant material, and ascribing views to other's that they did not hold."

I discovered several of the passages in the thread above after publication, but I then learned that the referee had dinged Slobodian on the same pattern of misquotation.

The referee urged rejection of the piece on these grounds...and was overruled by the journal's editor.

I learned of this in 2020 after I attempted to submit a correction to CEH calling attention to Slobodian's quote-editing. The editors would have none of it and dismissed my efforts.

When I published them online, the referee from 2018 saw it & shared the exact same experience.

We both submitted ethics complaints to the journal documenting how its editor had ignored their own referee, and how they refused to correct unambiguous misquotations.

The journal did a sham "internal investigation" that never contacted either of us, and sided with Slobodian.

But the kicker is what happened in the middle of the discovery of this incident.

Slobodian himself was named as the new co-editor of Contemporary European History, the very same journal where he committed several of these quote-editing exercises.

So there's academic rot for you

Side note: from the above, I also see that Harvard gave Slobodian an award named for the late Thomas McCraw.

I knew McCraw. He was the reader on my dissertation committee. We corresponded until he died in 2012. He would be appalled at Slobodian's abuses of historical evidence.

Side note 2: here's an online copy of the paper I submitted to Contemporary European History to correct Slobodian's misquotations and to challenge his thesis...after Slobodian himself urged me to do so in a now-deleted X thread. I preserved an account of what happened below.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…