A tenured professor of history at Columbia University will be stepping down at the end of next year after an investigating committee at the school found “incontrovertible evidence of research misconduct” in his controversial 2013 book.
Charles King Armstrong, the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences, was found to have “cited nonexistent or irrelevant sources in at least 61 instances” in “Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950-1992,” according to the Columbia Spectator, which first reported on the resignation last week.
In a September 10 letter, Maya Tolstoy, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, announced the news to the institution:
Generally, findings of research misconduct are communicated to the public through retractions or corrections published in the scholarly literature. Where such a retraction is not feasible, the University may choose to notify the relevant community.
It is therefore with regret that I must inform you that Professor Charles K. Armstrong, Professor of History at Columbia, has been found to have committed research misconduct, specifically, plagiarism, in his book, Tyranny of the Weak. These findings were made in accordance with our Policy, which required a confidential preliminary review by an Inquiry Committee, an Investigation by a separate ad hoc faculty committee, oversight and recommendations by the University’s Standing Committee on the Conduct of Research, and final decisions by the Executive Vice President for Research and the Provost.
Professor Armstrong, who is retiring at the end of 2020, will be on sabbatical for the academic year of 2019-2020.
In 2017, as we reported, Armstrong corrected “Tyranny of the Weak,” after Balazs Szalontai of Korea University claimed the book contained 76 issues, mostly plagiarism of his own work covered by unrelated or invalid sources. At the time, Armstrong admitted on his blog that the book contained mistakes, but he argued that they were relatively minor:
That there are errors in the book I have no doubt; that the book was a sincere and vigorous attempt to construct a historical narrative drawing from a wide array of existing works of scholarship and primary sources, I also have no doubt. I also firmly believe that the errors did not cause serious damage to any scholarly field or to the validity of the book itself. Whether it is a convincing narrative is up to the reader to decide.
Szalontai disagreed, and found the corrected version wanting. In a 2018 email he told us:
I have purchased a copy, and found out that the “corrected” edition still includes over 20 cases of plagiarism and source fabrication … It can be clearly seen that the author and the editors worked solely on the basis of my first 76-item list (which I submitted to Cornell [whose press published Armstrong’s book] in November 2016), and wholly disregarded the new cases that I made publicly accessible in the summer of 2017 and afterwards. From the very beginning, I emphatically stated that the search was still going on, and by now, the total of such cases has reached 98.
“Tyranny of the Weak” won the 2014 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History, but quickly drew allegations of plagiarism and shoddy citations. In an unprecendented move, the American Historical Association revoked the award in 2017. And its publisher, Cornell University Press, told Inside Higher Ed last week that the book was no longer in print.
‘Executed for jaywalking’
According to the Columbia committee’s report obtained by Retraction Watch (see pages 2-18 of the PDF), Amstrong attributed at least some of the citation problems to his use of “‘placeholders’” that he left in the course of his research, and to mistakes in the process of transcription. The investigators found those excuses “not credible.”
Although the investigation vindicated Szalontai, it wasn’t a total victory. The university’s standing committee, in its final report, overruled recommendations from the investigating body that would have awarded Szalontai $25,000 in research funding as compensation for his efforts pushing the misconduct case and for the potential hit to his “academic reputation.” It also rejected the recommendation that Armstrong be ordered to formally acknowledge his misdeeds to Szalontai.
Szalontai told us:
My opinion is that both the inquiry and the investigation was 150% professional but the higher administrative bureaucrats created a formula that effectively treated the complainant as an author long dead (i.e., plagiarism did occur, but there is no need to publicly vindicate the complainant, provide any sort of apology or compensation, etc.) and that wanted to conceal the extreme nature of the case from the public. Notably, I was never given a document that I could have shown to the public, and even the faculty members heard only that Professor Armstrong committed some sort of plagiarism in a single book published in 2013. These laconic words did not reveal that the cases of plagiarism were not in the range of, say, 5-10-15 but nearly reached 100 (or at least 61 officially proven cases); that they were systematically linked to fabricated sources; and that the practice started in his tenure application. As such, his supporters are already claiming on Facebook that he was subjected to an unreasonably severe punishment for a relatively small offense (“executed for jaywalking,” as someone put it).
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Since the term “fabricated references” seems to imply that the references given did not exist (and that may be the case), I like to use the term “garnish references” (“Petersilienreferenz” in German). This is because even though the references do exist, they do not state what is implied. So they are only there to make the “dish” look better, they don’t contribute to the entrée.
See linked Report p. 29: “…in at least 61 instances…Dr. Armstrong…cited nonexistent [fabricated] or irrelevant [garnish] sources…Dr. Armstrong engaged in both plagiarism and fabrication as defined by the Misconduct Policy and in accordance with the standards set forth in the AHA [American Historical Association] Statement.”
The Armstrong case has revealed some uncomfortable truths about how power works in the academic profession. Armstrong himself is now disgraced, at least in the eyes of his historical peers, but I think we need more scrutiny on the action – or lack of it – of both Columbia University and Cornell University Press. They dragged their feet unacceptably in prosecuting and acknowledging Armstrong’s gross misconduct, and have still not apologised to its principal victim, Balazs Szalontai.
In 2016 Cornell UP were presented with chapter on verse on how, when and where Armstrong had plagiarised in ‘Tyranny of the Weak’, forging archival references to non-existent documents to disguise where he had lifted material from Szalontai’s ‘Kim Il-Sung in the Khrushchev era’. They nevertheless brought out a supposedly ‘corrected’ edition in 2017 which replaced these citations with references to Szalontai’s book, but maintained the fiction that these were just minor technical errors rather than wholesale plagiarism which rendered the entire publication worthless in scholarly terms. They did not apologise to Szalontai or acknowledge their violation of his copyright. I have written to their Executive Editor, Roger Haydon, to say that I will no longer review for them until they admit what they did wrong and apologise publicly, and have urged my colleagues to do the same.
As for Columbia, how could this process take all of three years, when any professional historian, looking at the examples laid out so clearly by Szalontai and B. R. Myers, could see immediately what Armstrong had done? It is the most shocking case of plagiarism I have ever heard of in history – a systematic, cold-blooded theft of hard-won archival data from a scholar in a much weaker position, which Armstrong used to elevate himself into the position of what Myers rightly described as an ‘Academic Ward Boss’. Even now Columbia have not apologised – how much would that cost them? Yes, the man deserved due process, but this smacks of a cover-up which simply aims to minimise repetitional damage rather than to ensure justice is done and is seen to be done. Once again, some hard questions need to be asked by the academic profession – particularly Korean Studies, but also historians more broadly.
I spent three and a half years teaching in Kazakhstan, and wrestling with the plagiarism that is rife in post-Soviet academia. There and in every other post I have held I am constantly educating my students in what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. A case like this – showing how someone can rise to the top of the greasy pole of academia through fraud – is enormously damaging to these efforts.