I read Gingrich's dissertation in the last month or so of doing research for my own, and the experience was not pleasant. The University of Texas at Austin library had the work among its microfiche holdings, so I trudged over one afternoon to sit in the basement and scroll through Gingrich's research on an ancient microfiche reader.

What I read was, for the most part, interesting, although I had already encountered many of the topics Gingrich discussed in articles from the Journal of Negro Education, in which scholars like Ellsworth Faris and Morris Siegel took a special interest in education policy in central Africa in the early 20th century. One issue of which I had not been aware was the absurd debate among Belgian colonial authorities as to whether education in Congo should be bilingual -- that is, in French and Flemish -- which Gingrich covered in great detail.

My initial sense of Gingrich's work was fairly negative. He'd expressed a positive view of the colonial project in general and in Congo particularly, both of which surprised me. Gingrich tried to evaluate Belgian colonial education policy on its own terms, without, as historian Adam Hochschild recently noted, referencing the actual experiences of Congolese people under Belgian rule.

While Gingrich did acknowledge that Belgian colonial education policy was largely a failure, he saw their stated goal -- primarily, that of bringing the Congolese into the modern era -- as noble. This policy, however, severely restricted the educational opportunities of the vast majority of the Congo's residents. Most were only allowed to attain a fourth-to-sixth grade education, and none were allowed to become medical doctors or to prepare for similarly important professions. Gingrich acknowledged that this system left the country unprepared for independence. But he also understated the extent to which that failure doomed the country. He wrote in his conclusion, "If the Congo was not the model colony Belgian publicists pretended, neither was it the disaster news reports from 1960 to 1965 suggested."

Yes it was. The early days of Congolese independence were fraught with horror, from the wars over secessionist movements to the Mulele Rebellion in the east to the famines that occurred as a result of violence to the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the country's many problems were a direct result of Belgium's failure to adequately educate and prepare its citizenry. This would have been obvious when Gingrich wrote in 1971 and it is obvious today. What is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo has never been well governed by an effective leader who had full control over the territory.

That said, looking back at the April 2009 blog post that became the meat of a recent Maureen Dowd column and subsequent micro-scandal over Gingrich's dissertation, I'm not sure I would write the same post today. Dowd quoted from my post, "The whole thing is kindof a glorified white man's burden take on colonial policy that was almost certainly out of vogue in the early 1970's. Gingrich wrote this as the Black Consciousness and Black Power movements were approaching their pinnacles. It was most decidedly not the time to be arguing that white European masters did a swell job ruling black Africans through a system that ensured that most Congolese would never get a real education." She called his approach "anti-anticolonialism."