Some do good, and some do well

Not the time for wit. No need for interpretation. The facts:

Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker has parlayed his standing as ASU Foundation Professor of History into a $268,800 no-bid contract -- with the possibility for a $96,000 extension -- with the City of Phoenix.

 Professor Whitaker will provide 448 hours of training in procedural justice, police legitimacy, and cultural competency, and an additional 448 hours of evaluation in those matters, to Phoenix' 2900 police officers.  He will do this between July of 2015 and April of 2016, through his consulting firm, while he continues to collect his salary as a full-time professor of history at Arizona State University (whose rules state that employees may do no more than 384 hours per year of outside work).

Professor Whitaker will "plan and execute" this training despite the fact that he does not even pretend to do research into procedural justice or police legitimacy training. He will do this despite the fact that he does pretend to do research into African-American history, a pretense that has been repeatedly  pulled aside: even his reluctant university deems his work to fall "below the standard of the profession," Dr. Whitaker himself admits that the books he has published with ABC-CLIO contain extensive plagiarism, and  the publisher of his most recent volume has issued a statement that the book would not be sold in its current form because of errors of attribution. The Press, it added, "maintains no inventory."  But there is more.

Yes, it is still possible to be shocked

Matthew C. Whitaker's plagiarism-riddled Peace Be Still has long since been discredited.  The book's publisher, the University of Nebraska Press, announced this:

"The University of Nebraska Press is in the process of incorporating revisions to Peace Be Still proposed by its author, Matthew Whitaker.  These changes will address the issues of paraphrasing and attribution that have come to light since the book's publication.  Nebraska currently has no inventory for this title, and future printings will reflect the author's revisions."

As a result, the paperback edition on Amazon shows this: Temporarily out of stock. 

Order now and we'll deliver when available.

Yet Professor Whitaker believes there is still money to be made from the repudiated edition, either to enrich himself, or to add to the corporate money flowing through his Center.  He just has to avoid the usual publishing and academic channels.  So this morning, he is selling the theoretically unavailable paperback of his book.  At a church. At a higher price than Amazon was.  Here is the astonishing announcement, which was removed from his ASU Center's Facebook immediately after the event took place:

Edit:  Wow, cool!  The image -- Professor Whitaker, his book, praise for self, date and time of sale -- was visible on the Cabinet's page for some time, despite having been wiped from Professor Whitaker and his Center's Facebook and twitter feeds.  But, now it's gone.  Trust us: it was spectacular.
Anyhow, the book, it appears, is good enough to be sold to members of the Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church, but not to anyone else. Perhaps that's unfair.  Professor Whitaker is teaching in spring.  Who doesn't think he will order his students to purchase Peace Be Still  from his well-stocked larder?

University of Nebraska Press has enabled this situation by declaring the book flawed and out of stock, but declining to recall it. ASU has enabled this situation by continuing to credential the professor.  Will they as well as Professor Whitaker share in the spoils of today's sale?  Will they benefit when Professor Whitaker assigns the book in his spring class, as he surely will?  Or is there somewhere a limit?  

Three Strikes, and You're Just Getting Started

Can't anybody here play this game?  This week comes word that yet another humanities professor, in this instance Mustapha Marrouchi of UNLV, has pieced together his writings from the patches of other scholars.  The Chronicle of Higher Education tells the tale, its side-by-side reprintings of original and stolen passages the now familiar tombstones of our scholarly hopes and dreams.  Like Matthew Whitaker at Arizona State University, Mustapha Marrouchi is the well-paid possessor of a named professorship.   Like Matthew Whitaker, he seems to have spent a career writing with others' books and articles open on his desk, their research and analysis to be appropriated as needed. It's all quite deplorable.   But what about the rest of us?  The Cabinet is struck by an unwelcome thought:  do these professors get away with not actually writing, because the rest of us are not actually reading? 

Questions from our Readers

Surprisingly, we have them.  Readers, we mean.  In its heart, the Cabinet suspects some of their questions are rhetorical, such as the ones that begin with the phrase, "What the...."  But we are going to take a moment to answer some of them to the best of our ability, anyway.  Judging from the startling number of visitors to the Cabinet, there is a fascination to the spectacle of a professor, a university press, and a university turning lead into gold -- or at least turning a grotesquely derivative text into a work of true scholarship -- through the sheer power of insistence.  Sure, they are invoking personal authority over empirical evidence, and sure they are chipping away at the fragile edifice of humanities scholarship every day they persist.  But they are saving themselves from having to admit error, and isn't that what academic scholarship is all about?
But enough of the Cabinet's questions. On to the readers'!