reviews.indd


Book Reviews 87 

of interest to those involved in the design 
and implementation of such systems. 

In summary, I believe that there is 
much of value and interest in this book 
for many readers of this journal, although 
I find it impossible to recommend whole-
heartedly due to the problems outlined 
at the beginning of this review. In addi-
tion, I believe the author and publisher 
made a critical error by not including an 
index, even though the table of contents 
is quite detailed. I strongly encourage the 
author and publisher to consider issuing 
a revised and corrected edition, includ-
ing an index. Otherwise, I doubt that this 
book will have the positive impact that it 
otherwise might have.—Wade R. Kott er, 
Weber State University. 

Johansen, Bruce E. Silenced: Academic 
Freedom, Scientific Inquiry, and the First 
Amendment Under Siege in America. 
Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007. 185p. 
alk. paper, $49.95 (ISBN 0275996867). 
LC 2007-8456. 

In Silenced: Academic Freedom, Scientific 
Inquiry, and the First Amendment Under 
Siege in America, Bruce E. Johansen has 
brought together several diverse stories 
from the news in recent years that stand as 
examples of increasing attacks on humans’ 
age old search for knowledge, pursuit of 
scientific truths, and yearning for justice by 
political, economic, and religious activists 
whose power is threatened by an informed 
citizenry. Johansen opens with two quotes, 
the oft-quoted one in recent years of Ben-
jamin Franklin about those who give up 
freedom for security deserving neither, 
and another by Thomas Jefferson: 

Truth is great and will prevail if left
to herself, that she is the proper and 
sufficient antagonist to error, and 
has nothing to fear from the conflict, 
unless by human interposition dis-
armed of her natural weapons, free 
argument and debate. 

The book following the page on which 
stand these wise words tells six stories 

exemplifying the extent to which power 
elites play on the public’s ignorance and 
fear in pursuing their own interests and 
maintaining their power. In Johansen’s 
introduction, he writes, “This is a book 
about people whose ideological circum-
stances found them on the opposite side 
of the powerful in our times.” 

Divided into six chapters, the book cov-
ers climate change, evolution, the Second 
Amendment, academic freedom, student 
and faculty rights, and terrorism, and ends 
with a “coda” written as a beacon of hope, 
a bibliography, and an index. Although 
many of these events will be familiar to 
anyone who follows the news, the impor-
tant contribution here is Johansen’s com-
prehensive analysis and synthesis of the 
debates surrounding each, his integrity as 
a scholar, and his engaging (occasionally 
humorous) writing. 

Although most people and politicians 
in the United States have largely been liv-
ing as if in the Dark Ages when it comes to 
climate change, the international scientific 
community has been researching and 
documenting global warming for decades 
and knows for certain that the observed 
changes are not part of earth’s natural 
climate cycle but are caused directly by 
human activity. In other words, global 
warming is a fact. It is real. It is a funda-
mental truth of today’s world. Climate 
change itself is not debatable. 

What is open to debate, of course, is 
whether or not anything will be done to 
begin reducing the production of carbon 
dioxide and other substances, which are 
changing the chemical composition of 
the atmosphere. Those individuals who 
do not want to do anything to address 
the problem cannot say to the public at 
large, “Yes, cars and power plants are 
changing the climate, but there’s no way 
we captains of industry are going to risk 
profits or market shares or stockholder 
returns on investments, and so nobody 
is going to tell us to go namby-pamby 
green!” Such a self-serving (and reveal-
ing) message would make oil company 
presidents, auto industry CEOs, airline 



88 College & Research Libraries 

operators, and others sound selfish—self-
ish doesn’t work for glossy ad campaigns, 
marketing, and public relations. 

So, instead, these people (and the politi-
cians they constantly court and sometimes 
buy) hire “experts” who will, for a price, 
tell journalists and the public that hu-
man-induced global warming is bunk, a 
message picked up and promulgated over 
the airwaves and via cable into the minds 
of either unsuspecting or equally selfish 
listeners, viewers, and, yes, readers. 

Johansen focuses chapter 1, “Weather 
Wars: Hard Science and Hardball Poli-
tics,” on the world of James E. Hansen, 
director of NASA’s Goddard Institute 
for Space Science and a true (and truth-
ful) expert on climate change. In relating 
Hansen’s experiences, Johansen shows 
that political meddling with scientific 
facts is not a recent development. Work-
ing for NASA, Hansen has had more than 
his share of run-ins with presidents and 
their minions intent on making the facts 
fit policy, not vice versa. Hansen suffers 
fools lightly and refused to be muzzled by 
both presidents Bush. Satirist Molly Ivins 
is quoted by Johansen commenting on the 
second Bush administration’s “editing” of 
one of Hansen’s reports on anthropogenic 
climate change: 

Think of the possibilities presented 
by this ingenious solution. Let’s edit 
out AIDS and all problems with 
drugs, both legal and illegal…. We 
can do away with unemployment, 
the [medically] uninsured, heart 

Index to advertisers 
Annual Reviews 5 
CHOICE 82 
E-Image Data cover 4 
EBSCO 2 
Emery Pratt 70 
IGI Global 1 
Intelex cover 2 
Perry Dean Architects 94 
Readex cover 3 
Serial Solutions 50 

January 2008 

disease, obesity, and the coming 
Social Security crunch. We could try 
editing out death and taxes… 

Chapter 2, “Soft Science: How Intel-
ligent Is This Design?” describes the 
mechanisms by which public discourse 
on scientific subjects is undermined by 
people determined to inculcate within the 
public mind an approach to science that 
grants equal status to myth, religion, and 
science as sources of knowledge about 
the mechanisms of biology and other life 
sciences. Johansen refers to some recent 
polls that indicate the extent of ignorance 
regarding basic science among the general 
public: 

…polls indicated that only about 40 
percent of U.S. citizens subscribed 
to the theory of evolution, about 
20 percent insisted that the sun 
revolved around the Earth, one-
half believed that human beings 
coexisted with dinosaurs… 

Of particular interest in this chapter 
are Johansen’s descriptions of the dispo-
sition of many people toward relativistic 
thinking, which posits that “everybody 
has a view, and all are equally valid”; 
academia’s unwillingness in many cases 
to protect teachers from attack by zeal-
ous creationists; the phenomena of 
“closet creationists” who teach science 
in our public schools; and proposals 
that religious belief and text enter into 
education not through the door of the 
science classroom, but through those of 
history and literature where they more 
properly belong. 

Chapter 3, “The Second Amendment 
Trumps the First,” is the book’s shortest 
and deals with the experience of historian 
Michael Bellesiles, whose book Arming 
Americans: The Origins of a National Gun 
Culture raised the ire of many gun en-
thusiasts and what Johansen describes 
as the “armaments-industrial complex.” 
Johansen covers this unusual case with 
considerable care and attention to detail, 



which, after all, is what the story is all 
about—the devils within the details 
regarding interpretations of statistical 
sources, accuracy of footnotes, and the 
construction of sentences in a book over 
600 pages long. The campaign waged 
against Bellesiles and his book cost him 
his job at Emory University, the loss of the 
Bancroft Prize for history, five years of his 
life spent, and untold personal stress. Was 
Bellesiles a dishonest scholar, as the gun 
lobby contended? 

Mary Beth Norton, a historian of 
early America…concluded that 
Bellesiles’s interpretation of the 
documents [in question] was “just 
as plausible” as that of his crit-
ics, “if not more so.” She did find 
Bellesiles’s use of probate records 
“slapdash and sloppy,” but con-
tended that other criticisms of Arm-
ing America “strike me as the usual 
sorts of disagreements historians 
always have about how to interpret 
documentary evidence, although 
those criticisms have been expressed 
more vehemently than is usual in 
the scholarly literature.” 

Echoing the notion that anything less 
than impeccable scholarship justifi es an 
open season on dissenting voices, chapter 
4, “Gut-Based Discourse in the Age of the 
Internet,” describes the travails of Ward 
Churchill, just recently removed from his 
tenured teaching position at the Univer-
sity of Colorado following two years of 
attacks on the talk-radio circuit and an 
investigation into his scholarship follow-
ing allegations of plagiarism. 

Johansen gives a thorough examina-
tion of this complex case, beginning in 
the preface to Silenced when he describes 
his own connection to the case and in 
chapter 4 telling the fascinating story of 
how Churchill’s detractors used his own 
shortcomings as a scholar to fuel their 
virulent attacks to bring him down. 

Chapters 5 and 6 continue the exami-
nation of the state of academic freedom, 

Book Reviews 89 

with the last chapter, titled “Terrorology 
101,” focusing on the most troubling 
development in post-9/11 United States, 
which is the targeting for persecution of 
foreign faculty and students, along with 
anyone who questions U.S. foreign policy, 
by “defenders” of “homeland security.” 
Johansen tells the stories of professors 
Joseph Massad, Nicholas de Genova, Juan 
Cole, Sami al-Arian, and Ali a-Timimi and 
describes new State Department policies 
greatly inhibiting the ability of foreign 
students to study at U.S. universities—to 
the detriment of both. 

Johansen’s “coda” ends Silenced on an 
upbeat, with an overview of the successes 
of Marxist scholar Mike Davis, who fl our-
ishes in the hostile environment described 
so well in the preceding 152 pages. 

Silenced is strongly recommended for 
all libraries that serve students, teachers, 
and the general public. It could even be 
used as a textbook in courses dealing with 
current events, censorship, or education. It 
is a mighty fine and timely book.—Elaine 
Harger, Mount Si High School, Snoqualmie, 
Washington. 

Keeran, Peggy, Suzanne Moulton-Gertig, 
Michael Levine-Clark, Nonny Schlot-
zhauer, Esther Gil, Christopher C. 
Brown, Joseph Kraus, Carrie Forbes, 
and Jennifer Bowers. Research Within 
the Disciplines: Foundations for Reference 
and Library Instruction. Lanham, Md.: 
Scarecrow, 2007. 267p. alk. paper, $35 
(ISBN 0810856883). LC 2006-32340. 

Developed collaboratively by refer-
ence librarians and subject specialists 
affiliated either currently or previously 
with the University of Denver, this book 
derives from the university’s decision to 
integrate writing and research across the 
curriculum and the ensuing demands on 
reference staff to support those efforts 
through library instruction. The book 
aims “to provide a degree of orienta-
tion toward conducting research within 
specific disciplines and across others,” 
emphasizing optimizing the research 
experience “through the utilization of