Scholars of the Year

Campus Report ^ | January 10, 2008 | Malcolm Kline

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Scholars of the Year

by: Malcolm A. Kline, January 10, 2008

Because of the nature of our work, we don’t often get to do “best of” lists. By definition, almost, we are chronicling professors of questionable scholarship in our often vain search for accuracy in academia.

What we have assembled, then, is something of a bottom 10 list, sort of a reverse U. S. News & World Report ranking. Indeed, it was hard to narrow down such a selection from the more than 100 professors a year whose antics we cover.

Arguably, and we would argue the point, our own roster is perhaps a truer reflection of life in the ivory Tower than most publications offer. Submitted for your consideration, as Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling used to say, is the honor roll, if you could call it that, of the professors you might call “America’s Least Wanted.”

Because we still work in the old inverted pyramid style of reporting, we will take the pedagogue we consider most notable first:

o That would have to be Montclair State University's Grover C. Furr who is still intent on proving that Joseph Stalin was framed on charges that he committed genocide, no matter what the Russians themselves may say.

• For his part, Lowell “Rusty” Pritchard of Emory is trying to warn the globe that “humans have caused most of the warming” “since 1950” despite temperatures that dropped in the intervening years.

• On the home front, Brigham Young University’s Valerie Hegstrom says “I have to teach my female and male students to think like women” when studying Spanish literature.