Correction Notice for 'The Fall of Rome' Triggers Immediate Resignation of Entire Department Chair

Marlowe Hall's Department of History issued a one-line erratum on Tuesday and its department chair had resigned by Thursday afternoon, according to a notice taped to the lobby door.

The erratum appeared at the foot of the departmental newsletter, beneath a notice about the graduate fellowship deadline. It read, in full: "The Spring lecture brochure gives the fall of the Western Roman Empire as 476. The department now dates the end of the western imperial office to 480, on the death of Julius Nepos, whom the eastern court continued to recognize as lawful emperor. The brochure should read 480."

Chair Harlan Prewitt's resignation letter ran to four pages and was circulated as a PDF attachment before it reached the chair's own assistant. "I did not supervise the production of a lecture brochure in order to have it publicly amended on a question I have taught, examined, and defended before external reviewers for thirty-one years," Prewitt wrote. "Any successor will find the date already taken."

The date, it should be said, is defensible. Four eighty is the year Nepos died in Dalmatia and the western claim lapsed with him; the department's own late-antique seminar recommended the correction in March, and the correction was approved by the committee that approves corrections.

What failed next is worth keeping on the bench until it has a name. Departmental house style requires that a correction restate the erroneous claim before replacing it, so the wrong date now appears in the newsletter twice and the right date once. The newsletter's mailing list resends the full issue to 1,400 addresses when any item is amended, which means the original brochure's 476 reached more inboxes on Tuesday than it had in April. The exhibition in the lobby, meanwhile, still reads 476 on the wall, because wall text is a separate approval stream with its own committee, and that committee meets in even months.

Edith Marrow, who compiles the monthly departmental update and signed the erratum, declined to discuss the sequence. Colleagues say she has since been asked to issue a correction to the correction, which contained a comma splice in the clause about Julius Nepos, and that she has requested, in writing, that the correction to the correction not be emailed to the full list.

The succession collapsed on Wednesday. The acting chair designated by the bylaws declined the position citing "the correction and the correction's implications for the correction." The second in line asked whether the department could date its own fall to a period and was told this was not helpful. A graduate student pointed out that the whole dispute concerns an office that no longer held Italy, Gaul, or Spain at the time of either proposed date, and was thanked for the observation.

Prewitt's final act was to empanel a committee on the periodization of the department's difficulties. Its preliminary finding, leaked to this paper, is that the fall is ongoing, with a terminus post quem of last Tuesday and no agreed terminus ante quem.

The brochure, in the meantime, has been reprinted. It says 480. It is in a drawer.