Will a 14-year-old start a wave of self-critical soul-searching in academia?

Great Debates
1

The historical phenomenon of “No Irish Need Apply” has already been examined in this thread, but there hasn’t really been an examination of the flawed scholarship which purported to debunk “NINA.”

Briefly: In 2002, a history professor claimed that NINA discrimination was nearly nonexistent in the U.S., because (he claimed) he had examined many, many newspapers from the era, and he hardly found any NINA’s. Many historians accepted this conclusion, while doing nothing to review it. In 2015, a very intelligent and google-savvy 14-year-old did review those findings, and guess what she found: lots of NINA’s, all over the country, over many decades. And anyone could have found the same thing, if only they had felt like doing it. (Here is one of the better popular articles on the controversy, featuring excerpts of the exchanges between the 8th grader and the increasingly defensive professor. And lots and lots of pictures of NINAs. :slight_smile:

Which kind of makes you wonder if the original professor really “did his homework” and searched where he said he searched. In my opinion, this episode is less about the humiliation of a single person and more about the humiliation of an entire discipline: academic historical scholarship. It raises questions about the peer review process, about the greater attention paid to to controversial papers, about complacent acceptance of “the last word” on a subject, about using academic conclusions as the basis for political rants, and certainly about intellectual arrogance. Me? I’m loving this. I hope this episode leads to turmoil within the halls of the University of Illinois and Oxford. But, do you think it will? Will some academic reforms come out of this, or will it be business as usual by next year?

I also feel some glee that my ethnic group’s history was not all just imagined. Just as the “no-NINA” believers felt glee at claims of discrimination being imaginary (as they imagined). It is one thing to accuse the Irish of constantly throwing a “pity party” for themselves, but it is quite another to claim that the pity party has no basis in reality.

By the way, the Irish are not the only group whose claims of discrimination have been belittled and dismissed. This is a victory for anyone who has been wronged and disbelieved.

This is also a victory for authentic history, honest academics, humble and careful research, and very smart teenagers. :slight_smile: I hope the girl gets a full-ride scholarship to the institution of her choice.

2

I sent a message to the mods about fixing your broken first link. In the meantime…

“Racism in Nineteenth Century America” is the sort of field where I would expect this problem to be at its worst. In the applied sciences other people are less likely to just take your word for it and leave it at that - somebody who wants to profit from your idea is going to need to put it in a situation where it might fail.

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The current method of research, in many subjects, is reach your conclusion first, work to find all the evidence that supports your conclusion, ignore everything that does not.

Good for that 14 yr old.

4

So “No Irish need apply” has been debunked, huh? Cool.

5

No, the debunking has been debunked.

6

The spin you’re trying to put on this is weirdly unhistorical.

Try thinking like an historian and consider how things were back in the dim and distant past of 2002. The idea of doing electronic searches of newspapers was still an exciting novelty which many historians were eagerly embracing. Compared to the old methods, the new technology was simply amazing. Moreover, the sort of search that Jensen undertook was exactly the type that would have been almost impossible before then but which seemed perfectly suited to the new electronic searching. Showing that there was no record of something is inherently more difficult than showing that such records do exist. Being able to search huge datasets in an instant was therefore a fundamental game-changer.

But much has changed since then. Datasets that seemed vast in 2002 now seem tiny. Incomparably more newspapers have been digitised in the meantime. So any search of them made in 2015 is bound to be more sophisticated. Note however that Freid’s method is in fact exactly the same as Jensen’s. That the ability to search many more newspapers might produce new examples was always an obvious possibility.

The actual lesson here is one about the biases in electronic archives. Jensen presumably judged that the newspapers he could search electronically in 2002 were a roughly representative sample. That wasn’t so unreasonable an assumption and, in any case, it was one that would have been difficult to test. But it turns out to have been an incorrect one. Working out why would in itself be an interesting exercise. My hunch would be that certain types of newspapers or ones from certain geographical areas were more likely to be digitised first.

Faced with the new electronic riches, plenty of historians in 2002 doubtless did just assume that no such biases existed or that they did not matter. As well they might. To repeat, at the time this was all amazing. But once such searching had become routine, that was actually just the sort of question historians were rather good at asking themselves. Certainly more so than most other users of those resources.

What’s more, this question is one that still needs to be asked. It’s not as if the resources being used by Freid will themselves necessarily be representative. Worryingly, both of them ignore this in their exchanges about the frequency of the adverts.

7

Uh, cite?

8

Speaking as an Irish-American…

I always believed that such signs and advertisements were real. My only contention was that no one alive has ever actually seen one.

I’m 54 years old. Have I ever seen such a sign? No.

Did my parents? No.

Did my grandparents, who all came from Ireland to America in the 1920s ever see such signs? No!

Heck, by the 1890s, New York City had elected an Irish-born mayor. Such signs would have been unthinkable after that.

Yes, in the middle of the 19th century, there WERE angry nativist Protestants who had no use for the Irish. Yes, in many respectable corners of the Northeast, the Irish were viewed about as kindly as illegal aliens from Mexican are today. There WAS hatred and discrimination directed against the Irish in 1850.

But that was a long time ago. No living Irish-American has ever seen a NINA sign. We Irish have had it pretty good in America for a long time now. So it ill-behooves us to keep dredging up memories of discrimination neither we nor even our great grandparents ever experienced.

9

Knowing accurate history “ill-behooves us?” Seriously?

10

Perhaps Professor Jensen has learned that when one of the leading authors of the era you’re investigating drops a mocking reference to the very topic you’re investigating into one of his most famous humorous works, perhaps you should broaden your investigation out a bit more.

Roughing It by Mark Twain; Chapter XLVII

11

There is no need for the “uh,” it would be sufficient to simply say, “Cite, please?” or “Do you have a cite?” OK, here you go:

This article recounts how Kerby Miller, a recognized authority on Irish-American studies from the University of Missouri who doubted Jensen’s conclusions, had his motives attacked, even at academic conferences. The Daily Beast article also says that Miller “can name” fellow academics who also doubted Jensen’s conclusions, but chose to do nothing about it.

Since those names are not provided in the Daily Beast article, I understand that the cite may not come up to your standards, but there are good discretionary reasons why a working professor may not want to publicly call out his colleagues by name. If I recall correctly (and I could be wrong about this), Lee Smolin in The Trouble With Physics claims that, for a few years, there was an oppressive academic atmosphere for scientists who did not subscribe to string theory, but (and I could be wrong), he does not call people out by name either. In my opinion, anecdotal first-hand experiences do count as evidence.

Also, this article and this article give examples of popular websites that pretty much accepted Jensen’s claims without too much examination, such as Snopes.com, History Myths Debunked, and VOX.com . I personally recall that Jensen’s claims were accepted at face value in the Wikipedia article on NINA, although the article has since been updated. Popular websites on academic subjects are not representative of the academic world, of course, but they do not ignore, and are not ignored by, the academic world; and, apparently, no professor wrote in to challenge Jensen’s claims.

I apologize if my cites are not sufficient for you.

12

It’s been rebunked!

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Also, the first comment in the Reddit article refers to someone’s history professor accepting Jensen’s claims as fact. Just anecdotal evidence, I know.

14

No, the lesson is about biases in Jensen. Have you read Jensen’s paper? He finds that there is little evidence for the NINA signs. Fine. As you say, this could simply be due to the types of source that were digitized in the early days.

Then he concludes from this absence that Irish-Americans as a group were the victim of a mass delusion, likely because they drank too much. If you don’t want to read the entire paper, the OP’s link lays out the silly stuff more concisely. The whole thing is a total crock of shit and it’s astonishing that it made it through peer review.

15

This is absolutely a victory for all of those things.

But remember that academia is huge. Nobody, not even journal publishers, have the time or ability to do their own analysis of every data set that is referenced in their publication. And science is a self-correcting process: this is exactly how it is supposed to work. A paper is written describing the data, analysing it, and drawing conclusions from it. If better data is discovered, as happened here, the conclusions may need to be altered. There’s no need for self-critical soul-searching when the system’s working as designed.

The best takeaway from this controversy is this: if you’re an academic, you always have to keep yourself open to the idea that you might have been wrong. There’s no place for ego in science.

16

That neatly reinforces my point. If locating examples was as easily as it now is, why didn’t Miller himself do so?

17

Yes, it is true that since 2002 we have made amazing progress in digitizing historical documents and old newspapers. That is why genealogical searches are so popular – people no longer have to travel to a regional library and pore through musty stacks.

However, lack of access to data in 2002 is probably the least of the problems with Jensen’s work. He confidently makes strong, certain assertions based on his lack of search results, using them to conclude that the NINA signs did not exist. He goes further, drawing ancillary conclusions, not supported by evidence or by logical deduction, that the Irish were never oppressed as an immigrant group except by English expatriates, and not after the 1840’s. He diminishes the anti-immigrant nature of the Know-Nothing Party, even though that is not the subject of his research. Sometimes his rhetoric is downright bigoted: he accuses Irish-Americans of indulging in a mass delusion, and using that invented history of oppression to bully other groups and seek unwarranted influence in labor disputes and in politics. (And those ape-like caricatures by Thomas Nast do not at all indicate a common societal attitude.) Jensen clearly has an axe to grind, and it is he who is not thinking like a historian.

Second, it is Jensen who displays “weirdly ahistorical” and unscientific thinking by interpreting absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Instead of saying, “The data is insufficient at this time, this warrants further study,” or simply going to the library and looking at microfilm of the Brooklyn Eagle, he makes the sweeping statement that, since he could not find any evidence of NINA signs (if indeed he ever looked), they did not exist. This qualifies as an extraordinary claim, which would require extraordinary evidence. Conversely, it would not take much evidence to disprove his broad conclusions. One would only have to find examples of NINA signs and ads, and that’s exactly what happened.

Third, in Jensen’s patronizing replies to Fried, he moves the goalposts, stating that all the examples she found are still not enough to met the standard of commonality and representativeness. But, as this blog from Swarthmore points out, Fried correctly replies that her examples should be viewed as a surviving subset of what actually existed. In contrast to Jensen’s seeming surmise that “that’s all I found, so that’s all there was,” the amazing thing is that so many examples survived, not that there are so few. Fried certainly has enough examples of NINA ads and signs and cultural references to them to indicate a commonly held and noticeable cultural norm. Therefore, Jensen’s careless and sweeping conclusion that NINA did not exist, or hardly ever existed, is disproven.

I would still like an answer to my original OP: do you think this episode will lead to soul-searching and changes in academia? I see signs of a brewing scandal, and I have seen headlines with words like “bad history” (Reddit) and “exposes professor’s myth” (Daily Beast). I know it is still early in the controversy, but so far I have not read anything defending Jensen. If you do, please post.

18

Cite, please?

(The “Uh” is a “gentler,” which softens the bare assertion of the demand. It’s the equivalent of “Pardon me,” or “Well…” It’s an effort to show a modicum of respect for one’s correspondent. There may be no need for it, but it is a valid part of written conversation – just like smilies and emoticons.)

19

Oops! I wrote this before I saw Baffle’s response, which does indeed respond to the OP. More responses addressing academia are also welcome.

20

If no offense was intended, then none is taken.