CENTR A L CONNECTICUT STATE UNIVERSIT Y Wednesday, September 1, 2010
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Volume 107 No. 1
Past Controversy Haunts History Professor jonaThan sTankiewicz The Recorder
President Jack Miller gives first public speech of the semester in Alumni Hall.
maTT kieRnan | The RecoRdeR
Opening Meeting Cites Overall Campus Growth maTT kieRnan The Recorder
President Jack Miller’s speech at the opening meeting of the 2010-11 academic year on Wednesday gave a positive outlook for CCSU’s future, with Miller citing growing numbers in statistics for most of the central aspects of the campus. “One of the things that remains the same is that we’re changing all the time,” said Miller during his opening remarks in Alumni Hall. All across the board CCSU did appear to be growing, stretching from student retention rates, all the way to energy sustainability. The campus saw a growth of 414 undergraduates totaling 7,859 in fall 2009 from fall 2005. Miller attributes this not to greater numbers of students being accepted into the university, but to the work professors have put into retaining students and giving them incentives not to transfer. Extracurricular activities have also jumped in numbers of participation, measured by 63 percent of students getting involved on campus in 2010, compared to 47 percent in 2007.
Graduation rates are still a troubling factor for the university though. Of students graduating within six years, only 51 percent of whites, 37 percent of African-Americans and 38 percent of Latinos do so in that period. Miller made predictions as to what the state of CCSU will be in 2015. He expects there to be 15,000 students as long as there’s proper funding, 20 percent of which will live in residential halls and 20-30 percent in private apartments. “We’re going to have a lot more facilities on campus,” said Miller. There will be a new residential hall, police station and academic building, among other projects, according to Miller, to combat the increasing room shortage on campus. Environmental sustainability has drastically improved within the last few years. In 2010, 37 percent of the campus trash stream has been recycled, compared to 28 percent in 2008. Miller recalled a moment when he first took the position of president in 2005 when he asked where on campus he could recycle a soda can and was answered that there wasn’t such a place. Criticism is something Miller says is needed in order to improve the
university, but must be delivered in a civil and proper manner. Without naming names, he briefly mentioned that most of the negative and difficult voices over the recent years have left, creating a much more positive atmosphere. After the meeting, professors and students met outside of Alumni to discuss Miller’s presentation, and it appeared to have an overall warm acceptance. “There was a lot of celebration of our success and what we’re trying to do,” said Thomas Delventhal, professor of theatre, on the general tone of the speech. “We [professors and students] should always be learning how to grow,” said Barbara Clark, assistant professor of teacher education. Gilbert Gigliotti, professor of English, was granted the university’s Distinguished Service Award at the meeting for his exceptional work with students and the outside community. “I don’t want to make people think there won’t be any bumps in the road, but that we will be prepared for those bumps,” said Miller.
Adjunct history professor Michael Bellesiles is no newcomer to scandal. Having released a controversial book on the history of guns in America and an article about a former student's loss of a half brother from war, he's now trying to give a second go at teaching. “I’m an adjunct, [I] was a full-time professor,” said Bellesiles. “I cannot get a fulltime job in the U.S.” Before the firestorm, Bellesiles was a respected historian, now he is left trying to make a fresh start, a task which is proving easier said than done. “I wish I never written about guns,” said Bellesiles. The drama started with Bellesiles’s first book, published in 2000, titled Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. Bellesiles was a highly acclaimed historian at Emory University and was working full-time. After Bellesiles’s book came out and he won the highly acclaimed Bancroft prize in 2001, things began to unfold. The book showed that guns were not prevalent before the Civil War. Arming America challenged foundations that the National Rifle Association has thrived on for years. Gun rights activists were outraged and started to look through Bellesiles’s notes and sources very, very closely. Questions were raised about how Bellesiles used the records, who he talked to and even his counting of the number of guns was under fire. The use of probate records, which are composed of information about family
relationships, property holdings and values, and land and building locations and descriptions, came into question, isn’t an exact science. Scholars know that wills and records written hundreds of years ago shouldn’t be taken for concrete fact. Soon other history scholars couldn’t replicate the numbers and they began to see misquotations. “Arming America is changing the way that some historians think about their own profession and how some scholars in fields allied to history regard historical research and publishing,” said critic James Lindgren, in a book review from April 2002 in the Yale Law Journal. Things were beginning to get out of hand and Emory’s dean, Robert A. Paul, decided to establish an expert panel of scholars to investigate the charges against Bellesiles. The panel consisted of three distinguished historians Stanley Katz of Princeton University, Hanna Gray of the University of Chicago and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard. The investigation concluded with a 40-page indictment, along with a 7-page response by Bellesiles himself. Among the findings of the panel they found that “Every aspect of his work in the probate records is deeply flawed.” “Bellesiles seems to have been utterly unaware of the importance of the possibility of the replication of his research,” said the panel in their findings. Soon after the investigative report was released in October, Bellesiles resigned from his HISTORY | conT. on 3
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