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Not long ago, Kerri Greenidge was a celebrated historian. She had tenure at Tufts University in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Her 2022 book “The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family,” won awards for its critical retelling of the lives of white abolitionist sisters and their Black relatives. In 2024, she was appointed to a reparations research committee in Boston. She spent the 2024-25 academic year at Harvard in the prestigious Radcliffe Fellowship Program.
But at some point in the past year, everything fell apart.
As The New York Times reported on July 10, Greenidge no longer works at Tufts. According to statements to the Globe by Tufts spokesman Patrick Collins, allegations arose in 2022 that her book on the Grimkes “contained multiple errors of fact and failed to give appropriate credit to the work of another.” The university commissioned a “thorough peer review” by “external scholars of American history.”
That review confirmed “multiple errors of fact and citation,” Collins said, so “the university proactively moved to correct the public record.” It relayed the findings to W.W. Norton, the publisher of “The Grimkes,” which removed the book from her author page, and to the American Historical Association, which decided this past January to revoke the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in women’s history that “The Grimkes” had won in 2023.
But the story doesn’t neatly end there, because Tufts is leaving a lot unsaid.
If the university truly wants to correct the public record, its selective disclosures of the peer reviewers’ report aren’t enough. Ideally, the school would publish it openly — not just to clarify what happened but to model the transparency that’s necessary for public confidence in higher education.
Otherwise, what is the public now to make of “The Grimkes,” a book that was widely acclaimed, or Greenidge’s 2019 book “Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter,” an award-winning biography of a pioneering Black journalist in Boston?
Is Greenidge guilty of major academic fraud that discredits these books and her other scholarship? Just how many “errors of fact” did the reviewers find? Is it possible that large portions of her research still hold up? Was Greenidge punished for sins that other scholars get away with?
“We cannot distinguish sloppiness, recklessness, or intent without seeing the evidence,” says Alexis Coe, who writes about American history for The New York Times Book Review and is the author of “You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.” “Instead, the punishment is being used to prove the offense.”
Greenidge, who is Black, told the Times she had been unfairly attacked by white historians who disagreed with her conclusions about racism in American history. She acknowledged that she probably had “misattributed” some citations but also said: “I have never plagiarized anything in my life. I have never fabricated anything.” (My efforts to reach Greenidge were unsuccessful.)
Other scholars, however, say her work is full of misrepresentations intended to support her preferred narratives about race. Myra C. Glenn, an emerita professor of women’s studies at Elmira College, wrote in a 2024 review that although “The Grimkes” was well written, it is “a deeply flawed book. All too often Greenidge lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims. Her work is also riddled with factual errors and repeatedly omits needed endnotes.”
Stephen Fox, who wrote a 1970 biography of William Monroe Trotter, says that Greenidge’s book on Trotter cites his book in six footnotes, “and four are bogus. They do not support the claims she is making.” He found other falsities too.
“She’s a smart person, and she knows what you’re supposed to do,” Fox told me. He thinks Greenidge showed “indifference to the basic standards of historical scholarship,” and he hopes Tufts publishes its report so anyone can see why those standards matter.
Collins, the Tufts spokesman, says the university won’t comment on “potential personnel actions” and its review process “is intended to be highly confidential.”
But Tufts’ own policy on research integrity says that “confidentiality no longer applies once the final determination of a Research Misconduct finding has been made.”
And there is precedent for releasing a report like this.
In 2000, Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles came out with “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture,” a book that purported to show that gun ownership was surprisingly rare in early America. After his findings were questioned, Emory commissioned a report that was published online. Over the course of 40 pages, scholars from Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Chicago explained how they had examined Bellesiles’s research and found it shoddy. Bellesiles eventually resigned, and Columbia University rescinded his prestigious Bancroft Prize.
It may appear that the record has been corrected to a similar extent in the Greenidge case. But several historians told me that the Tufts story doesn’t quite add up yet.
Tufts says it was alerted to problems in Greenidge’s scholarship in December 2022. That’s a long time ago now. So when did Tufts call for this special review, and when did it report its findings? And who was on the panel? Greenidge told the Times that two of its members were hostile toward Black women in academia. An accusation like that is all the more reason for Tufts to show the panelists’ work, so other scholars can review their findings. Academic peer review is a good path to the truth because it’s a two-way street.
What’s apparent in Emory’s report on Bellesiles is academic integrity: scholars coming together to exhaustively correct the record. You can see the profession mounting something like an immune response against low standards. It’s honorable. With trust in academia now at severe lows, this would be a great time for Tufts to put that kind of work on display.
Brian Bergstein can be reached at brian.bergstein@globe.com.