BELLESILES UPDATE: Melissa Seckora reports:

EMORY’S STATEMENT ON MICHAEL BELLESILES: [Melissa Seckora] “Professor Michael Bellesiles will be on paid leave from his teaching duties at Emory University during the fall semester. The University’s inquiry regarding Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture is continuing. Professor Bellesiles and the University have agreed that the results of the University’s inquiry will be made public when the inquiry is completed.”

I’m not quite sure what to make of this. More later.

UPDATE: Michael Tinkler emails these observations:

1. paid leave because they’re not able to come to a decision.

2. will be made public because of the pressure from the professional world (that is, you as a professor of law and Prof. Lindgren) not from the blogosphere. However, they know the blogosphere is watching, some of them are part of it, and they know that publicity is not helpful here.

I have had a few irritable emails and a very irritating telephone conversation about the way universities work. I keep trying to explain that Emory is NOT a multiversity and that though there are a several other American historians there is no one who really overlaps Bellesiles so OF COURSE there was no one in the department competent to drop the guillotine.

Emory did something with some ‘experts’ over the summer – can you, a law professor, imagine how much it would cost to get 3-6 senior history professors (and they have to be senior) to come to campus (and I think they would have to meet in person at least at the start, though they could write their report without physical proximity) and to toss their planned research out the window for 2 months to deal with this?

The senior folk they brought in were NOT up to Prof. Lindgren’s numeracy – as he suggests on occasion many humanists are incapable of the statistical understanding necessary (though there’s a Latin America specialist in the Emory department who should be – a really good demographer).

–what follows is the rankest of speculation–

My read – the outside committee delivered a damning report, but with some caveats along the “we have not had the time or the resources to investigate the

archival material.”

That would leave Michael Bellesiles room to appeal on those grounds. Emory is nervous and is willing to give him the term with pay to try to reconstruct some

archival research.

We’ll see.

Very interesting thoughts from someone with far more insight into the discipline, and Emory itself, than I possess. I rather doubt that Emory is feeling much pressure from me; in fact, I have no particular reason to think that any Emory administrators are even aware of InstaPundit. But there’s a lot of discussion of Bellesiles among historians and legal academics, and although people were slow to face up to the reality of what was going on, most people (including, perhaps especially, some of those who were his biggest backers initially) are now pretty unhappy with him and that has to be putting pressure on Emory not to ignore the problem or paper it over — which, by now, has to be pretty obviously impossible.

Several other readers, though, sent messages like this one:

My take on the situation:. It looks like they’re stalling for time. Maybe they’re hoping this will blow over and they can deliver a token punishment to the guy when no one cares anymore.

That’s possible, but I tend to doubt it. They’re just keeping the matter open, and it’s just going to cause Emory’s reputation to suffer during another academic year. That’s going to hurt hiring, graduate student recruitment, and general position as the department gets the reputation of being “troubled.” There’s no benefit there.