In the tank: the intellectual decline of AEI.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, Benjamin
• Position: American Enterprise Institute

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...