Academic Infallibility: Who Dares to Check‪?‬

Unlike those in business or medicine who are fired or face malpractice suits when they make mistakes, academics and scholarly pundits almost never are called to account when their predictions bear no relationship to what actually happens. Thus when Jerry Hough, a Sovietologist at Duke University, insisted that the coup attempt against Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 was all part of Gorbachev's clever ploy for power, the fact that it was anything but, evidently bothered neither Hough nor his employer. He simply went on to make more--as it turned out, equally erroneous--predictions. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]