Not a Professor

That was fast.
On Monday, West Point law professor William C. Bradford resigned after The Guardian reported that he had allegedly inflated his academic credentials. Bradford made headlines last week, when the editors of the National Security Law Journal denounced a controversial article by him in their own summer issue:
As the incoming Editorial Board, we want to address concerns regarding Mr. Bradford’s contention that some scholars in legal academia could be considered as constituting a fifth column in the war against terror; his interpretation is that those scholars could be targeted as unlawful combatants. The substance of Mr. Bradford’s article cannot fairly be considered apart from the egregious breach of professional decorum that it exhibits. We cannot “unpublish” it, of course, but we can and do acknowledge that the article was not presentable for publication when we published it, and that we therefore repudiate it with sincere apologies to our readers.

6 comments:

raven said...

And it's 1,2,3, blacklist!

Pretty soon we will need smaller units of measurement.
The femtosecond will no longer be adequate to describe the speed of the anti-orthodoxy airbrush in action! Trotsky would be amazed.

Anonymous said...

This story is the product of the breakdown in our employment verification process.

At one time, a job applicant would supply names of former employers and friends as endorsements. A potential employer could then verify the work history of the person, including the quality of work. These days, allegedly due to the threat of lawsuits, many companies and academic institutions have an explicit policy to verify employment only, and not to give further information, even in cases of separation for cause. Some just do not reply. A background check for a non-criminal person is therefore an exercise in futility. Some companies have simply stopped screening.

The press is not so limited.

So, schools have to hire the professor first, and then find out whether his resume was exaggerated, or falsified, or whether he was fired for being a nut, because the original sources of information will not make appropriate disclosure.

West Point is to be commended for acting promptly in this case, assuming they read the article and verified the other information that has come to light. How a law journal published an article without reading it is a whole 'bother smoke.

Valerie

Texan99 said...

"In December 2005, the Indianapolis Star discovered that his claims to military service were distorted and false. Bradford claimed to have served in the Army infantry from 1990 to 2001. He stated that he received a Silver Star for his service and would often wear the medal around campus at the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis.

"A service records request revealed that Bradford served in the Army Reserve from 1995 to 2001, at which point he was discharged as a second lieutenant. His record did not indicate any medals. In fact, he hadn’t even serve as active duty. He played a role in military intelligence, but was not in the infantry. He resigned from the university Jan. 1, 2006."

http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/31/west-point-professor-accused-of-stolen-valor-resigns/#ixzz3kUrByt6x

Why West Point discovered this to be a problem only after he outraged them with his political views is something only they can explain.

Grim said...

If you followed the link from the last post about him, he sounds like a pretty weird guy. He explicitly draws and rejects a parallel between himself and Ward Churchill, which tells me something about him is probably off. That's how he got hired and published without being read, though: like Elizabeth Warren, he can claim to be a Native American academic. That's worth a lot in getting a job or a publication these days.

raven said...

If he had written some balderdash about what a great deal the Iran Bomb'n Dollarz givaway was, he would still be there.







Texan99 said...

So sadly true.