Books
Reed N. Wright

Serge Lang has been a hero of mine for several years now. He's a tenured professor at Yale -- but he has the soul of a zinester. Challenges (Springer-Verlag, New York; 1998) collects some documents from his relentless crusade for honesty in high places.

For example, "Academia, Journalism, and Politics: A Case Study: The Huntington Case" (pp. 1--222) deals with Lang's (successful) challenge to the nomination of the political science professor Samuel P. Huntington to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. "I: Political Opinions Passed off as Science" documents some of Huntington's techniques as a propagandist. In particular, Huntington is shown, in detail (with numerous citations given and even quoted at length), to have distorted the historical record and to have used ill-defined concepts with spurious numerical values in meaningless equations.

When confronted with such evidence, Huntington's supporters attack Lang's motives, or his competence, or his right under the bylaws of the NAS to mount a challenge . . . but seldom respond directly to the evidence itself. "II: Comments from Social Scientists" begins the discussion in this area; the non-academic public gets involved in "III: Journalism".

And so on. Lang's basic method of inquiry is to publish a rant (of course I use this term non-pejoratively) in the form, say, of a Letter to the Editor, or, failing that, a paid ad. He then collects responses in a "File". Copies of the File itself (or parts thereof) are shared with interested parties in a manner akin to zinedom's familiar APAs (Amateur Press Associations), typically at some not insignificant personal expense on Lang's part. Responses then go into the file in their turn.

An earlier File was published by Springer in 1981 as The File: Case Study in Correction (1977--1979), one of the great unknown books of our time. The File consists almost entirely of photocopied documents -- mostly letters -- with a small amount of commentary by Lang after the fact (of course, many of the letters in the File proper are Lang's). Challenges uses quotation rather than photographic reproduction, presumably to save space (it's over 800 pages long as it is) and it generally has a greater density of commentary by Lang.

A brief section in Challenges revisits the "Strange Survey of U.S. Profs" that motivated The File: another case of propaganda masquerading as social science. Then there's "Questions of Scientific Responsiblity: The Baltimore Case": a scientist is caught fudging the experimental record and the whistleblower becomes the object of criticism and persecution as the community closes ranks behind the guilty party. Again, the press gets into the act in "Questions of Editorial Responsibility: Publication of the Baltimore Article".

Which is about as far as I've gotten: halfway through Challenges. This certainly isn't a book to be read straight through, like a novel. Most of the rest, just for the record, deals with "The Gallo Case" in AIDS research.

Again and again, Lang has caught powerful academics and journalists at evasions, stonewalling, and intimidation. It's cost him considerable time, effort, and money; it's also made him a lot of enemies. It should be mentioned here that Professor Lang is also a productive researcher in mathematics and a prolific author of books of mathematics. I literally don't know how he does it. He must have absolutely no life outside his office.

OK, sure, Lang is a crank. He's also a national treasure. His commitment to the ethic of honesty and plain speaking should be an example to us all.

You probably won't find Challenges in the public library or the bookstore, more's the pity. I seem to be in a bit of a rut here. My review last issue was also about hard-to-find stuff by an author I consider a model truth-teller (Brian Fawcett). OK. I promise: next time I'll write about something less obscure. Maybe even by a liar.

There's a Challenges page at Amazon where you can order it.