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A
heads up for Down Under: for readers in Australia
and NZ
[Visit
our dossier on Professor Richard "Skunky"
Evans] 
Wednesday, August 20, 2003  COMMENT
Richard J.
Evans: Academic standards the issue, not freedom
Three years ago I was asked by
the New Zealand Jewish Council to read a Canterbury
University dissertation
by Joel Hayward and to give my opinion on
its academic merits. The dissertation, awarded a master's degree in
1993, purported to assess on the basis of an
objective study of the historical evidence claims
by Holocaust deniers that the Nazis did not
deliberately kill some six million Jews between
1939 and 1945, and did not use mass gassings to do
so. What I found was very
shocking. The Holocaust denial literature Dr
Hayward was considering was well-known to
specialists and others as anti-semitic, racist and
frequently neo-fascist propaganda masquerading as
scholarship. Yet Dr Hayward not only treated it on an equal
footing with genuine
historical research but consistently denigrated the
many historians in many countries who had carried
out bona fide research into the Holocaust, claiming
for instance that they were mainly Jewish (not
true) and therefore produced tendentious and
unscholarly work (which did not follow, and was
also untrue). He presented Holocaust
deniers on the other hand as objective scholars
searching for the truth, and concluded that in
many cases the deniers' claims were justified.
Dr Hayward's dissertation was systematically
tendentious and dishonest in its appraisal of the
literature. I found evidence that he had suppressed
material he claimed to have read if it counted
against the deniers.  I
concluded that it was not a bona fide work of
scholarship, and that the degree of MA should be
withdrawn.
The university appointed a working party to
consider the case. It concluded,
astonishingly to anyone familiar with this area,
that Dr Hayward's work was merely flawed, and that
the degree awarded to it should not be
withdrawn. 
NOW Dr Hayward has left the academic profession. A
new row has broken out, with his defenders,
principally Dr Thomas Fudge, claiming
in your pages
that Dr Hayward has been the subject of a
witch-hunt [Website note:
Dr Fudge is a specialist in mediaeval
witch-hunts].
In advancing his case, Dr Fudge has
systematically denigrated my work and assailed my
integrity and objectivity as a historian. He has
also made a number of inaccurate claims about my
report and the use made of it by the working
party. Dr Fudge is misleading your readers when he
claims that no appropriate expert historians were
approached by the working party. The working party
explicitly accepted my expertise, and indeed could
hardly do otherwise when I had shortly before been
accepted by both sides in the London High
Court case of Irving versus Penguin Books
and Lipstadt as an expert witness in the
field. The working party accepted that my report has a
strong scholarly foundation. It upheld all of its
central findings, which included detailed evidence
of selective and biased use of evidence in Dr
Hayward's dissertation, failure to disclose
contrary evidence, failure to pay attention to
relevant secondary literature, tendentious
interpretations and, to quote the working party
report, being consistently misleading in the
handling of relevant evidence. The number of points that the working party did
not accept in my 71-page report were few, and all
very minor. Dr Fudge claims my report was a partisan opinion
commissioned by an interested caucus. He should be
aware that while expert reports are customarily
commissioned by one party or another in a dispute,
the law insists that they should be objective,
irrespective of who has commissioned them, and
experts who have acted as advisers to court
proceedings, such as myself, in the past, are fully
aware of the need to be objective. When I was asked to write the report, I made it
quite clear to the New Zealand Jewish Council that
I would carry out the work completely
independently, and I required them to submit it to
the working party irrespective of my
conclusions. The report was not edited or vetted by the
council in any way. The working party
claimed that the language I used went beyond
that normally used by an expert witness in a law
case. It did not provide a single example to
back up this unconvincing claim. Moreover, this was not a law case, and I was not
an expert witness, merely an external
consultant. It is not true of Dr Fudge to claim that the
working party took little or no account of the
criticisms made by Dr Hayward and his defenders of
my report. On the contrary, it gave them full
consideration, and in almost every case upheld my
findings. It is completely untrue of Dr Fudge to claim
that the report makes no reference to extenuating
circumstances, qualifications about the nature of
Dr Hayward's preliminary research exercise go
unnoted, and Dr Hayward is treated as though the
thesis in question was the culminating work of a
long career rather than an inaugural effort. These astonishing claims make me wonder if Dr
Fudge has read my report at all. Let me quote directly from my report: "Clearly we are not dealing here with
deliberate and repeated falsification and
manipulation of the historical record of the
sort undertaken over the years for example by
David Irving. Nor does there appear to be
any racist or anti-semitic purpose behind
Hayward's writing, such as the court documented
in Irving's case." My report made a particular point of noting that
Dr Hayward's chosen subject was far too large a
topic for a master's thesis. His supervisor was
clearly at fault in not guiding him towards a more
manageable topic, and also lacked the expertise to
correct the numerous errors and tendentious claims
present in the dissertation. There were no procedures in place at the
university to ensure that the topic chosen was
appropriate for the level of the degree. Worse
still, the regulations in force at the time allowed
the supervisor to act as internal examiner, a clash
of interest if ever there was one. These procedural faults, as I pointed out, bore
a large measure of responsibility for the fact that
the dissertation received an MA degree with high
honours. I am glad that they have since been
rectified. What has happened to Dr
Hayward since is not my responsibility. The central issue in all this is not academic
freedom, because in dealing with Holocaust denial
we are not dealing with academic work. It is,
rather, the upholding of academic standards. Nobody has stopped Dr Hayward or Dr Fudge from
publishing what they have written. Whether it
should receive the imprimatur of a respected
university institution is the question at
issue.  Richard
J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at
the University of Cambridge.
 
Our dossier on the Joel
Hayward case | Our
dossier on Professor Richard "Skunky"
Evans | Hayward
replies to this article-
Canberra MP Rodney
Hide signs petition calling on University to
recompense Joel Hayward
-
July 2003, NZ Herald: "Holocaust
thesis ruined my life says historian"
-
Report of the Working
Party established by University of Canterbury to
Inquire into Hayward Case | summary
-
Holocaust scholar
at heart of 'book burning' row | 'Book-burners'
feared libel suit
-
Joel Hayward thesis: 'The
Fate of Jews in German Hands' (zip
file)
-
The
Fate of Joel Hayward in New Zealand Hands: From
Holocaust Historian to Holocaust? Part I |
Part
II
-
Death
threats and breakdowns - the Holocaust thesis
destroyed my life
-
Aug 19, 2003: University
chief's job in doubt. The position of Canterbury
(NZ) University Vice-Chancellor Roy Sharp to be
reviewed after Hayward scandal
-
| 
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