I’m not bitter with Mr. Miller. I sincerely think his article is pernicious and not in the best interest of my field. You don’t have to share my opinion, but I think I have earned the right to make that assessment.

Don’t insult me by implying that the phrase “tenured radical” could set me off. You’ve read my blog long enough to know better.

If I haven’t convinced you that “Sounding Taps” is intentionally constructed so as to make it sound as if academic military history is already past saving, and that the existing military history programs are like prisoners in the dark, awaiting our turn to be executed, then so be it. But your response doesn’t even begin to give me pause. I have had enough exposure to fund-raising to know that this sort of article, if it goes unchallenged, can easily become a conventional wisdom that will indeed deter benefactors from investing in academic military history.

And it really is appalling in its intellectual dishonesty. The omission of Duke-UNC can hardly be unintentional; it is such a major program that every historian to whom Miller spoke would have mentioned its existence, and Richard H. Kohn at UNC is one of the pillars of academic military history. That he went unquoted in this piece also raised my eyebrows.

But the Wisconsin opener is the real giveaway that Miller was not going to let good reporting get in the way of an ideologically driven fairy tale.

I’ve made a few phone calls today — calls that Miller could easily have made if he were a responsible reporter — and I have a much better understanding of the University of Wisconsin’s situation than Miller supplies.

As I wrote in a comment under my cross-post at Cliopatria:

Earlier this afternoon, I spoke to Prof. David McDonald at the University of Wisconsin. He tells me that I was right about the endowment — it’s big but not quite big enough. Even so, the department wanted to run a search to replace Mac Coffman this year. They couldn’t get permission from the Dean, because too much internal funding would be required to make up the gap between the endowment and the necessary salary and benefits package (at Wisconsin, the benefits are computed at 36 percent of salary).

Another problem is that over the past four years, the University of Wisconsin has absorbed a net cut of $190 million in state funding. That makes it even more difficult to do new hiring, and the Wisconsin history department has six other faculty slots that need to be filled.

BTW, there’s a rumor to the effect that the department was balking because of the plagiarism allegations concerning a couple of Ambrose’s last books, and thus it didn’t want to have a chair named, in part, for Ambrose. In fact, Ambrose himself hoped to create a Hesseltine Chair, but could not get much help with the funding. He wound up pouring in so much of his own money that the department made it the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in honor of his generosity.

If the bias against military history is as intense as you believe, and Miller wants to aver, then why the need to be so selective in the use of facts? Why the need to construct the piece so tendentiously? The most convincing arguments are those that play fair with the evidence. “Sounding Taps” has no interest in playing fair.

Unfortunately, it also hosts some of the worst echo chamber drivel and partisan hackery I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter. I believe the magazine itself is much better, but I’m not particularly inclined to spend money finding out.

gad they are worthless.