Adieu to Two Scholars

Here at Accuracy in Academia, we mostly get to cover only ersatz intellectuals. Actual scholars, we too frequently find, are far fewer in number.

Their ranks just got thinner this month with the passing of Robert Conquest and Peter Schramm.

“Robert Conquest spent decades estimating a casualty rate amassed from the testimony of defectors,” I noted in 2009. “Most academics denigrated his work, relying on Soviet government statistics instead.”

“Few of them volunteered to carry Conquest on their shoulders when his numbers proved closer to the actual count than theirs. For this reason, he wanted to retitle the reissue of one of his books, ‘I told you so, you f—-g fools,’ according to In Denial by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.”

Peter Schramm, who also passed away this month, headed the Ashbrook Center in Ashland, Ohio for years. Hungarian-born, his family fled to the U. S. after the 1956 uprising in then-communist Hungary.

Schramm spoke at many TEA party meetings and found in the attendees a hunger for knowledge of American history that matched his own. A warm and generous mentor to many, he always made a point of taking students at the annual Philadelphia Society meetings out to dinner on the last night of the conferences.

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