Mark Moyar Forsaken

I have referred several times to Mark Moyar's stunning book on the Vietnam War, Triumph Forsaken. Over at Power Line, Scott Hinderaker has a post up in which he predicts that Dr. Moyar's book "will prove to be the indispensable history of the Vietnam war."

The central point of Scott's post, however, is to highlight a New York Sun article documenting the fact that academe won't give Dr. Moyar a job. Hell, most institutions apparently won't even give him a preliminary interview. I particularly liked this paragraph:

Yet over five years, this conservative military and diplomatic historian applied for more than 150 tenure-track academic jobs, and most declined him a preliminary interview. During a search at University of Texas at El Paso in 2005, Mr. Moyar did not receive an interview for a job in American diplomatic history, but one scholar who did wrote her dissertation on "The American Film Industry and the Spanish-Speaking Market During the Transition to Sound, 1929-1936." At Rochester Institute of Technology in 2004, Mr. Moyar lost out to a candidate who had given a presentation on "promiscuous bathing" and "attire, hygiene and discourses of civilization in Early American-Japanese Relations."

It's also worth noting that, toward the end of the article, the ever-loony Eric Foner is entirely predictable:

Asked about the treatment of conservatives in academia, a professor at Columbia University, Eric Foner, said he did not know Mr. Moyar, but he said most history departments do not know or care about the politics of candidates. Mr. Foner, who leans to the left, said conservatives should stop complaining about being victims, which they blame liberals for doing.

I wonder how long he's been waiting to deliver that line?