In the tank: the intellectual decline of AEI

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2003 by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

In 1998, John R. Lott Jr., an economist then working as an instructor at University of Chicago Law School, published More Guns, Less Crime, a book that argues that arming civilians has a substantial deterrent effect on violence. He produced data seeming to show that deaths from multiple-victim shootings dropped 90 percent in states that passed laws permitting concealed weapons. His book tipped the terms of the debate, handing the gun lobby, which had previously relied on brute politicking to win over lawmakers, a devastatingly effective academic study supporting their side. Conservative legislators in several states used his book to push through laws permitting civilians to carry guns. Lott used the book's profile to get off the itinerant academic circuit, and land a permanent post as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Washington's premier conservative think tank.

This spring, two economists, Ian Ayres of Yale and John J. Donohue III of Stanford, published a paper charging Lott with falsifying his statistics. Then things really got weird. Someone named "Mary Rosh" started turning up on Web sites where Lott's work was being discussed, claiming to be a former student of the embattled academic and defending him vigorously. Some Web loggers investigated and couldn't find any student of his by that name. Eventually, Lott admitted that he himself was "Mary Rosh." Criticism continued to mount, though both Lott and his sponsors at AEI have argued that Ayres and Donohue's paper contained inaccuracies of its own. Several other academies called into question separate aspects of his scholarship, the National Academy of Sciences set up an expert panel to establish whether he'd fabricated data (the panel is still investigating), and the editor in chief of Science called Lott a "fraud."

Had Lott been in academia, he would almost certainly have lost his job--as did Michael Bellesiles, the Bancroft Prize-winning liberal historian from Emory University, who resigned after a panel found he had faked data purporting to show that fewer Americans had actually possessed guns in the 19th century than historians had previously thought. But AEI is not a university. It is a conservative think tank, operating in a world where penalties for bad scholarship hardly exist. AEI did not fire Lott, or reprimand him, or even investigate him. The institute's president, Christopher DeMuth, repeatedly refused to even answer reporters' questions about the incident. Indeed, several AEI fellows had warned DeMuth of their suspicions on Lott's lack of scholarly honesty back when AEI was recruiting him in 2000. DeMuth hired Lott anyway. In an email to The Washington Monthly, DeMuth defended Lott and questioned critiques of his work, adding, "We welcome and encourage challenges to our research rather than regarding them as cause for empaneling boards of investigation."

Since coming to AEI, Lott, not previously known as a polymath, has expanded his range of pronouncements, penning papers and op-eds on everything from the disputed votes in Florida (he published a study which seemed to show that blacks hadn't been discriminated against, a charge which was vigorously disputed), to the McCain-Feingold campaign reform bill (he's against it) to Rush Limbaugh's firing from ESPN for saying the media let black quarterbacks like the Philadelphia Eagles' Donovan McNabb off the hook too easily (Lott dashed off a quick regression analysis which purported to show that the media was, indeed, less inclined to criticize black quarterbacks). Last month, AEI proudly led its Web site with an op-ed by Lott, arguing that gun-safety locks "are more likely to cost lives than to save them."

The scholarship of others at the think tank has been challenged. Laurie Mylroie, a leading Iraq scholar and AEI fellow, has theorized that al Qaeda is an agency of Iraqi intelligence, that Saddam Hussein was behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center, and that Iraqi intelligence was linked to Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols--claims dismissed by countless experts in the field, and for which Mylroie has been unable to supply credible evidence (see "Armchair Provocateur" on page 27). And James Glassman, an AEI fellow and ubiquitous pundit, hosts an influential Web magazine whose editorials frequently mirror arguments made by lobbyists for its corporate sponsors (see "Meet the Press" on page 32).

Plenty of intellectuals offering disputed research lurk in other Washington think tanks, liberal as well as conservative--often B-team refugees from the academy who have not managed to get tenure. But AEI is in a different league, because of the influence its scholars wield in Washington and their consequent power to turn research into government policy. There's Lawrence Lindsay, former AEI scholar and until this year head of the White House's National Economic Council, who, among other things, counseled the president not to support new corporate accountability measures in the wake of the Enron scandal. There's AEI scholar Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, whose advice led the president to restrict federal funding for research on future stem-cell lines based on a gross overestimate of the number of the lines already existing (see "Science Friction" from our July/August issue). Indeed, the whole idea that regime change in Iraq should be at the center of American policy was nurtured at AEI, by current and former AEI fellows who became the architects of the administration's war in Iraq, including de-fense advisor Richard Perle and Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Dick Cheney is a former senior fellow of the institute, and Paul Wolfowitz a former member of its Council of Academic Advisors. It is perhaps not coincidental that so many Bush administration officials formulated their policy ideas at a think tank that takes a laissez-faire view of scholastic rigor. Indeed, AEI has both enabled and been enabled by the general drift of conservative culture in Washington, one in which information from forged documents about yellowcake uranium makes its way into the State of the Union address, and a mounting GI body count is deemed a sign of the enemy's desperation.