I consider Alan Freeman to be a friend and I hold him in high regard. But his
recent post about URPE and Andrew Kliman is wrong-headed and irresponsible.
Lawsuits, by their nature, have a Rashomon quality about them. At the end of
his post Alan quite sensibly urges us to hear both sides of this story; but
his own version of events is informed entirely by Andrew Kliman’s account of
the matter.
From what I’ve seen, all of the URPE members who have direct knowledge of the
case ¯ that is, the Editorial Board of the RRPE and to a lesser extent the
Steering Committee ¯ have been extremely circumspect in their public and
private statements about it, and have refrained from destructive public
rhetoric. Alan suggests that the URPE fundraising letter sought to mislead
URPE members about what was at stake in the lawsuit: it was not about a
rejected paper but about pluralism and freedom of expression. Ultimately
Andrew is the only person who knows why he filed a lawsuit, but it is of
course the case that the tensions between him and the Editorial Board began
with the rejection of a paper he had submitted to the RRPE. The fundraising
letter made no reference to the defamation issue in part because it would not
have been in Andrew’s interest to inform the entire URPE community that the
lawsuit involved a question of professional integrity, and we wanted to avoid
any statement that could be construed as an attempt to make him look bad. Now
we are accused by Alan of trying to dissemble. This comes under the heading
of “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Alan also suggests in his penultimate paragraph that the Editorial Board
sought to damage Andrew’s reputation in retaliation for the questions he’d
raised about the Board’s commitment to pluralism: “The fact that URPE’s
leadership has responded by trumping up a damaging charge and by banning
[Andrew] from ever publishing in its journal, shows that pluralism and freedom
of expression are indeed the fundamental issues at stake…. There are more
comeradely and principled ways of conducting theoretical dispute than trying
to stifle dissent and injure one’s critics.” This is a reckless accusation
for which Alan offers not a shred of support.
Any discussion of the alleged ethical breach took place entirely among
members of the Ed Board, as a legitimate matter of editorial policy. The
precise nature of the Board’s concerns was communicated outside these internal
discussions mainly by Andrew himself in his very public efforts to discredit
Hazel Dayton Gunn and the rest of the Board. Indeed, the fact that there was
a question of professional integrity at all was made public, that is,
disseminated outside the Editorial Board, by Andrew. And thanks to Alan
Freeman many OPE-L members have just heard about the defamation charge for the
first time. The Editorial Board has been scrupulous not to discuss the matter
outside its own circle, which of course is why the judge dismissed the case.
(It is perhaps worth noting that in resorting to a lawsuit Andrew made the
issue a matter of public record and compelled the Steering Committee to be
made aware of the details of the case: from the start, the circle of
individuals aware of the details has been widened solely by Andrew’s actions,
not by the Ed Board or any agent of URPE.)
Alan asserts that Andrew has repeatedly sought to settle the case.
This too is inaccurate. URPE and the Editorial Board offered to rescind the
ban and make a public statement to the effect that there had been a
misunderstanding between Hazel and Andrew. The gist of it was that the
circumstances of the situation were sufficiently subtle that both parties
could have been acting in good faith. (It was not an admission “that Andrew
did not engage in the behaviour of which [Hazel] accused him,” as Alan
misleadingly puts it.) Some of us on the Editorial Board didn’t see the sense
in publicly retracting an accusation that had never been publicly made; but we
agreed that if such a statement could put the case behind us, we should make
it. Andrew and his lawyer rejected the offer. In effect, they insisted that
we publish a statement that, reading between the lines, would have amounted to
an admission of an intent to inflict harm on Andrew. Since this was not true,
we declined to make such a statement.
I might add that as soon as Andrew denied the impropriety, Hazel agreed to
look into the matter, and she informed him that if she turned out to have been
mistaken, she would process his paper straightaway. But before she had a
chance to follow through, she’d been served papers by Andrew’s lawyer. The
rest is history.
This has been a most unpleasant episode for the academic left. Alan and
Andrew will, as all of us do, interpret events according to their own biases,
and I fully appreciate that this rejoinder reflects mine. Rashomon again.
But there is a difference. The Ed Board have not been aggressively trying to
undermine Andrew’s reputation in every public forum available to us; outside
of the Ed Board we have mainly kept silent on the matter, except for an
occasional, measured, defensive response. When, out of a sense of
professional decorum, we decline to respond to an accusation, we are accused
of arrogance (see the various contributions on pluralism in the URPE
Newsletter); when we do respond we are accused of using our overwhelming
institutional power to crush dissent. In fact, the attacks have come entirely
from the other side. Alan’s ill-informed post is the latest episode, and I
understand that at last week’s Association for Heterodox Economics conference
he and Andrew launched another attack.
What I find particularly distressing is the willingness of people I
know to be honorable and intelligent to accept a set of ungrounded hysterical
charges as fact ¯ solely on the word of a friend who must be acknowledged to
have an axe to grind. Not one of the 19 signers of the URPE Newsletter
pluralism pieces contacted me to get a take on the situation that was
different from what they heard from Andrew Kliman, even though many of them
know me well enough to ask “Hey, man, what the hell’s going on with Andrew and
the Ed Board?”
As a general rule, I think solidarity is a good thing; but when
heterodox economists stop thinking critically about what we are told, even if
we do it for the sake of friendship or solidarity, the only ones we end up
damaging are ourselves.
Gary Mongiovi
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