reviews 604 College & Research Libraries Moran, Gordon. Silencing Scientists and Scholars in Other Fields: Power, Paradigm Controls, Peer Review, and Scholarly Communication. Greenwich, Conn. and London: Ablex Publishing (Contem­ porary Studies in Information Man­ agement, Policies, and Services), 1998. 187p. $73.25, cloth (ISBN 1-56750-342­ X); $39.50, paper (ISBN 1-56750-343-8). LC 97-30773. This book is difficult to review. It is badly written by the wrong author on an im­ portant topic. Furthermore, that topic— how can intellectual “outsiders” get their work published, indexed, collected by li­ braries, and taken seriously?—means that criticism might appear as more of the cen­ sorship the author sees as commonplace in academia. Gordon Moran raises important is­ sues, including library issues, but does so in ways that demonstrate why scholarly detachment and judicious evaluation of information are important. He also in­ vokes the particular situation of the out­ sider who persists to the extent of being perceived, and received, as a crank. Moran’s passion so affects his writing that one wishes someone else had written the book. Moran is an art historian who was sav­ aged in the scholarly literature after he proposed that a different artist than com­ monly thought was the painter of a noted mural in Siena. His experience, naturally enough, led him to a wider interest in how scholars encounter, evaluate, and respond to ideas outside conventional wisdom. This book attempts to ground his experiences, and those of others, in such a wider review of issues and cases. That review, or perhaps its supporting bibliography, may be the most useful achievement of the book. In trying to situate his case among oth­ ers, Moran relies on a mix of personal communication, newspaper and schol­ arly articles, and books. Secondary and journalistic sources are used in place of easily available primary sources, leading one to suspect that Moran wants to accu­ mulate cases rather than analyze them. November 1999 Citation of allegations—not warranted in the view of this reviewer who was there at the time—of administrative oppression of the conservative Dartmouth Review, re­ lies entirely on an article in USA Today. Because the book is not his first writ­ ing on the topic (he cites four earlier ar­ ticles and monographs), Moran too often makes general statements about cases while referring the reader elsewhere for actual details. This book cannot stand as an independent work containing both arguments and supporting data. Introducing the topic of “Punishment of Dissidents and the Big Lie, “ Moran alludes to an unnamed source: In a movie that depicted university life under Nazi rule, a professor was asked (by a monitor, either an offi­ cial … or self-appointed one) if the blood of Aryans was different. The professor stated … there was no proof … This was enough, accord­ ing to the script, to have the profes­ sor sent to prison and fired. He died shortly thereafter … (it was not clear if he was killed from hard labor [sic] or was actually executed.) This view of the Nazis is perfectly con­ ventional, but an unnamed and undated film, possibly fictional, fails to qualify as supporting evidence. Moran refers several times, opaquely, to his battles in art history before finally, in his seventh chapter, providing details of the Guido Riccio mural controversy. The author sometimes refers to his per­ sonal experiences in the third person, so that the reader is led some distance into the case before realizing that it is not a corroborating, independent event but, rather, a piece of his running fight. The same pattern is evident in Moran’s discussion of what he considers editorial bias in a medieval-studies refer­ ence book. The travails of “a scholar” in dissent occupy several paragraphs before it becomes clear that Moran is the scholar and that this incident requires more con­ text. Only sketchy details are given here, however, with four citations to Moran’s 1991 article in Reference Librarian. In general, the book is an attempt to show that the practice of science and scholarship departs radically from their fundamental principles of peer review, self-correction by testing, and receptivity to new ideas and new information. Apart from his own, and some other cases from art history, most of his examples are drawn from medical research (most es­ pecially, that of David Baltimore and the paper in the journal Cell that bore his name and was alleged to contain data fab­ ricated by a junior colleague). Moran’s view of the canons of science never considers that no ideals are fully achieved and that the search for truth may be improved, but truth never absolutely reached, by methodological rigor. He quotes a letter hounding alumni for au­ tobiographical statements: “those who submit nothing . . . risk seeing something we made up under your name.” “[S]omething shall be said about every­ one, regardless of truth, decency.…” One may, or may not, find the jocularly face­ tious letter amusing, but it is a mighty weak reed to support, as Moran would have it, an indictment of moral failing in academe: “For someone studying the phenomenon of toleration of falsification, the compilation of [my] Reunion Direc­ tory was a real eye-opener.” Like most authors writing about sci­ ence in the past forty years, Moran fre­ quently invokes Thomas Kuhn, usually (in Moran’s repeated phrase) with reference to “paradigm-busting” opinions and their suppression. And like too many, Moran’s use of paradigm is meaninglessly looser than Kuhn’s. There is a very great differ­ ence between the fundamental principles upon which understanding is based— heliocentrism versus geocentrism, in Kuhn’s defining case—and differing judg- Book Reviews 605 ments about which artist painted a mural. Placing oneself alongside Galileo invites invidious comparison. Why is this book reviewed here? The short answer is that it is addressed to us, in a series of monographs that mostly have far more familiar “library lit” titles. The real answer, however, is that it is ad­ dressed to us because Moran expects much, perhaps too much, from librarians, recognizing that whatever the failures of scholarly publishing, libraries and librar­ ians are the final custodians of knowledge and the guarantors of present and future access to it. Moran expects us, no less than scien­ tists and journal editors, to take utterly seriously our principles of intellectual freedom that he approvingly quotes. He asks us how we are prepared to ensure that our users have access (in all senses) to the unpopular or the unconventional. Some ideas are practical, such as main­ taining bibliographies of retracted articles to aid patrons. Others, such as annotat­ ing catalog records to indicate that other scholars dissent, say, from an art catalog’s attribution of works, would strike most of us as beyond our competence and re­ sources. That Moran’s absolutist expectations of us are more than we can fulfill does not relieve us of responsibility for our roles in scholarly communication. A bet­ ter book should address these issues. This one by itself will not persuade readers of much except the ability of an injury to influence a person’s perspective. As a ros­ ter of cases, the book is a useful starting point for considering the never-ending problem of how dissenting scholars can be heard by those whose opinions they challenge. For that reason, and probably only that reason, this book may be con­ sidered for acquisition.—Gregory A. Finnegan, Harvard University.