How much of a liar is Ross Douthat?

Sitting Bull's tobacco bag and ceremonial war club, Native American Collection, Peabody Museum. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

A quirky little thing disturbed me in Susan's elegant takedown of Douthat's 2005 article about the failure of Harvard to educate him properly, "The Truth [!] about Harvard", in a passage from the article about how easy it was for him to fake his way through a difficult-sounding assignment:

One of the last papers I wrote in college was assigned in "The American West, 1780—1930." The professor handed out two journal articles on the theory and practice of "material history"—essentially, historical research based on the careful analysis of objects. We were told to go to the Peabody, Harvard's museum of archaeology and ethnology, where the professor had set out three pairs of objects from the frontier era. One object in each pair had been made by Indians, one by Europeans, and we were to write a ten-page paper that compared the objects in a given pair. Aside from the articles on material history and a general text, North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment, we were to use no sources.

I picked a Sioux war club and an American revolver with its carrying case. As I stood in the museum taking notes, the assignment seemed impossible. How could I eke out ten pages when I knew nothing about the provenance of the weapons or the significance of their markings?

Sitting at my desk two weeks later, I realized I had been wrong. The paper was pathetically easy to write—not despite the dearth of information but because of it. Knowing nothing meant I could write anything. I didn't need to do any reading, absorb any history, or learn anything at all.

Really? The instructor wouldn't permit the students to know anything about the objects they were to be writing 3000 words about? They couldn't look at the exhibition captions? Certainly sounds like malpractice to me. I went to the 2001-02 course catalogue to see if I could get a feeling for the teaching technique and found that the syllabus for that spring's class in "The American West, 1780-1930", taught by Catherine A, Corman, seemed to devote no space to material culture at all (other than a brief notice of visual art alongside literature) in its century and a half's worth of conventional document-based history (not that it doesn't look like a great class!), while another class from the previous fall certainly did, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on "Material Life in Early America".

So he was lying for some reason about what class it was, and it seems likely he was lying about the assignment as well, since Ulrich is very clear in writing from around the same time (fall 2002) that she is committed, like any other specialist in the field, to a material culture study that is fully integrated with other kinds of evidence: she quotes from Robert St. George

All sherds--ceramic, literary, and religious--are only remnants, pieces of torn cloth, broken vessels, mere shadows of whole culture.  They can only be given new life when they are interpreted as related parts of a larger puzzle.

and Thomas Schlereth

a mode of inquiry primarily (but not exclusively) focused upon a type of evidence.... Material culture thus becomes an investigation that uses artifacts (along with relevant documentary, statistical, and oral data) to explore cultural questions.

And the course description itself notes,

Readings drawn from interdisciplinary scholarship in history, historical archaeology, demography, and the decorative arts.

If Ulrich really assigned such an essay, then, it would have to have been very early in the semester, maybe as a demonstration of the impossibility of interpreting such "sherds" in the absence of the other puzzle pieces, and ten pages would have been the upper bound (and Ulrich quietly saying "I hope to God they don't write that much"). Douthat's description is what we bloggers refer to technically as "making shit up". And it may be a stretch, but his reason for lying about which class it was might have been to stop people from noticing it was about Ulrich, and hide his calumnies of her from her own eyes.

And what else is he lying about? I've had to use the words "Douthat" and "dishonesty" together quite a number of times on this page, considering how little time I devote to him, and what a deeply sincere Christian he is supposed to be. Is it possible that even chunky Reese Witherspoon will turn out to be a floppy-breasted phantom?

One thing that's certainly true is those last two sentences above:

Knowing nothing meant I could write anything. I didn't need to do any reading, absorb any history, or learn anything at all.

It was a deeply significant moment in his own life, yes? It's when he found his vocation.