Give Clemson Professor Jonathan Beecher Field credit. He wants to know why plagiarism doesn’t matter. He works hard to explain to his students that plagiarism is a serious infraction, and his job is harder now that Joe Biden is on the Democratic ticket.
The kind of wholesale plagiarism Biden evidently committed, copying chunks of a law review article into a paper with his name on it, suggests an inclination toward the kind of malfeasance present in the Kinnock incident. In every class I teach, I spend time talking about citation, and why it is so important for scholarship. As part of this conversation, I emphasize that acknowledging sources is a condition of membership in the community of scholars: if scholars do not acknowledge sources, they do not belong in this community.
So far, so good. But then Field reprises the case of Michael Bellesiles and his book Arming America.
By way of illustration, I have sometimes shared the Emory University report on the conduct of former history professor Michael Bellesiles, who undermined a provocative and compelling argument about gun ownership in early America with gross violations of scholarly norms for citation. The report demonstrated serious concerns about his scholarship and led to his resignation. If Bellesiles had chosen a less contentious subject, he would not have had legions of NRA supporters going through his footnotes, and he might well still hold his tenured position at a prestigious university. However, he presented his research in sloppy and dishonest fashion, and he lost his job.
Thank God for the ever-vigilant NRA. Field veers off course here, insisting that Bellesiles had a “compelling argument” marred only by faulty citations, as though the gun nuts discredited Bellesiles on a mere technicality. George Will said this about the incident in Newsweek:
Bellesiles’s thesis is startling. It is that guns were not widely owned, or reliable enough to be important, at the time the Second Amendment was written. The implication is that the amendment should be read to protect only the collective rights of states, not the rights of individuals. The book pleased partisans of a cause popular in the liberal political culture of academia–gun control. Reviews were rapturous: “exhaustive research,” “intellectual rigor,” “inescapable policy implications,” “the NRA’s worst nightmare.”
Then people noticed inconsistencies, and
When Bellesiles’s evasive response led to more tugging on the threads of his argument, it unraveled. The unraveling revealed a pattern of gross misstatements of facts and unfounded conclusions. His errors are so consistently convenient for his thesis, it is difficult to believe that the explanation is mere sloppiness or incompetence. It looks like fraud.
Others reached the same conclusion:
Garry Wills, who had enthusiastically reviewed Arming America for the New York Times, later said, “I was took. The book is a fraud.” He also told an interviewer for C-SPAN that Bellesiles “claimed to have consulted archives he didn’t and he misrepresented those archives,” lamenting that Bellesiles did not have to do it, since he had good evidence for many of his claims.
This last bit is sophistry. Having evidence for some of the claims in a book doesn’t make a very good book, and it’s fair to conclude that Bellesiles would not have manufactured fraudulent data if his argument could be supported without it. But Field and Wills continue to defend the result of fraudulent research because they find the argument appealing. Fields concludes:
Bellesiles cheated, and he lost his job because of it, and in spite of an argument that continues to make sense.
How can the argument make sense if the data supporting it are fraudulent? Bellesiles’ conclusion is fruit of the poisonous tree.
A plagiarist takes credit for someone else’s work – misrepresenting the source. Bellesiles, however, did his own fabricating. His conclusion was therefore as tainted as the data supporting it. It was a lie, but a pretty lie that gun control advocates wanted to believe.
Field condemns the methods but lauds the result. I suspect he will present a more compelling case against academic dishonesty if he finds an illustration without that glaring inconsistency.
August 26th, 2008
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Temple University’s sexual harassment code has been ruled unconstitutional. Inside Higher Ed explains why “The Court Got It Right.”
This month in an important victory for free speech on campus, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that Temple University’s former sexual harassment policy was unconstitutional. While free speech advocates from across the ideological spectrum cheered the Third Circuit’s ruling in DeJohn v. Temple University, some critics expressed dismay at what they deemed a “very ominous” example of “activist judging.” These critics are wrong — and it’s important for both students and university administrators to understand why.
* * *
The DeJohn opinion should come as no surprise to public universities. District courts have been striking down overbroad harassment policies for nearly 20 years. Rather than reaching unexpectedly “ominous” or “activist” legal conclusions, DeJohn simply provided a reaffirmation of clearly established law.
August 18th, 2008
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“The Russians have sized up the moral bankruptcy of the Western Left. They know that half-a-million Europeans would turn out to damn their patron the United States for removing a dictator and fostering democracy, but not more than a half-dozen would do the same to criticize their long-time enemy from bombing a constitutional state.” Victor Davis Hanson.
As Boring as St. Paul. Tim Wu reviews Michael Heller’s The Gridlock Economy (about intellectual property rights) and comes up with an interesting analogy:
It’s almost enough to make you wonder why we have property rights at all. This is where Heller’s book begins to face the problem that every counterintuitive work encounters: the fact that the intuition you are challenging has quite a bit of truth to it. The classic example of this is the New Testament, which begins with exciting counterintuitive ideas like loving your enemies and ends with a series of boring letters from Paul acknowledging the importance of at least a few rules.
Despite being boring, Heller’s book is commanding a lot of attention. I hear the New Testament is still selling well, too.
Speaking of Counterintuitive. The New Criterion takes a look back at the 1960s forty years later and deconstructs the conventional wisdom (without becoming boring).
You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how “creative,” “idealistic,” and “loving” it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. In fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the “herd of independent minds.” Its so-called creativity consisted of continually recirculating a small number of radical clichés; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for “love” was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence. What Allan Bloom said in comparing American universities in the 1950s to those of the 1960s can easily be generalized to apply to the culture as a whole: “The fifties,” Bloom wrote, “were one of the great periods of the American university,” which had recently benefitted from an enlivening infusion of European talent and “were steeped in the general vision of humane education inspired by Kant and Goethe.” The Sixties, by contrast,
were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.
Gitmo on the Platte. Denver has built a secret jail for people protesting the Democratic National Convention.
The makeshift holding center, dubbed “Gitmo on the Platte” by activists, is located on city-owned property near Steele Street and 38th Avenue. Newly-installed security cameras guard the exterior, chain-link fences and barbed wire form cells inside.
“We feel the city should be ashamed of this secret prison they’ve set up,” said Re-create ‘68 organizer Glenn Spagnuolo.
Spagnuolo and other activists gathered outside the formerly-secret facility on Friday to protest the city’s plan to use it as a processing center for all those arrested outside the DNC.
August 17th, 2008
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Defense Secretary Robert Gates reached out to academia in a speech to the Association of American Universities in April 2008. His speech covered the sometimes testy relationship between academia and the military, development of “soft power,” and education of service personnel.
In reality, there is a long history of cooperation – as well as controversy – between the U.S. government and anthropology. Understanding the traditions, motivations, and languages of other parts of the world has not always been a strong suit of the United States. It was a problem during the Cold War, and remains a problem.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the heroic efforts and best intentions of our men and women in uniform have at times been undercut by a lack of knowledge of the culture and people they are dealing with everyday – societies organized by networks of kin and tribe, where ancient codes of shame and honor often mean a good deal more than “hearts and minds.”
Gates’ speech also included a specific proposal for Project Minerva, in which the Pentagon will fund anthropological research on issues such as China, Iraq, terrorism, and religious and ideological extremism.
Let me be clear that the key principle of all components of the Minerva Consortia will be complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity. There will be no room for “sensitive but unclassified,” or other such restrictions in this project. We are interested in furthering our knowledge of these issues and in soliciting diverse points of view – regardless of whether those views are critical of the Department’s efforts. Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand – or even seek to understand – the countries or cultures we were dealing with.
The response from academia is predictable. One Thousand anthropologists signed a pledge not to work with the Pentagon:
While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world, protects soldiers on the battlefield, or promotes cross-cultural understanding, at base it contributes instead to brutal wars of occupation which entail massive casualties.
So much for building bridges. On the other hand, the anthropologists will take the money if it can be laundered through another agency and if they can spend it however they want.
Seth Low, president of the American Anthropological Society, says the Pentagon has a conflict of interest, and the money needs to come from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, or the National Endowment for the Humanities.
So the Pentagon teamed up with the National Science Foundation and solicited proposals. Not good enough. Hugh Gusterson explains:
[U]nder the guise of fixing the Pentagon’s review process, the agreement between the Pentagon and NSF corrupts the integrity of the NSF review process because NSF has agreed to allow the Pentagon to place its own reviewers on the NSF selection panels alongside the reviewers chosen by NSF. In a not-for-attribution conversation, a senior official of another funding agency described NSF to me as having “sold out the integrity of scientific peer review.”
So any participation by the Pentagon is unacceptable. To prove his point, Gusterson cites an anonymous senior official of another funding agency who doesn’t like the NSF deal. Might that be a funding agency that competes with NSF or someone who simply wishes he had the $50 million to play with? Gusterson doesn’t say.
What are the anthropologists really afraid of? Is it that some unorthodox point of view will creep into the Pentagon’s knowledge base, or that professors will be faced with a difficult choice of (a) turning down money, or (b) admitting to their left-wing colleagues that they are doing work for the Pentagon. Gusterson concedes that anthropology is “the academy’s most left-leaning discipline” and that working for the Pentagon would carry a significant stigma.
Gusterson tries to bolster his case with a little history, suggesting that experts in anthropology could have prevented prior wars (if only those thick-headed generals had listened). And in the past, when the government did turn to academia . . .
Why did “the best and the brightest” misread the situation so profoundly? Because U.S. foreign policy was made in an atmosphere that had been stripped bare of insights from the left and robbed of debate between left and right. Under McCarthyism, many left-leaning academics had been purged from universities, and Joseph McCarthy and his allies had rooted out the liberal experts on Asia from the State Department, leaving the policy debate bereft of the very people who might have foreseen the calamity of Vietnam.
Got that? The universities were an exclusively right-wing enclave in the early 1960s, and the Kennedy administration simply didn’t have access to liberal views.
Gusterson has a solution: Let the anthropologists, like the 1000 who signed an anti-military pledge, use their own peer-review process to ensure that the liberal view is adequately represented. That would eliminate right wingers like JFK and his ilk.
I have a better solution: Save the $50 million and simply read the pledge. We already know what the anthropologists have to say.
August 15th, 2008
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The gender equity crowd continues its assault facts. Tamar Lewin produced an article for The New York Times arguing that science and math disparities have been disproved.
Three years after the president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers, got into trouble for questioning women’s “intrinsic aptitude” for science and engineering – and 16 years after the talking Barbie doll proclaimed that “math class is tough” – a study paid for by the National Science Foundation has found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests.
Not so fast, says Heather MacDonald. In fact, the study shows something else entirely. Although average scores for girls and boys are roughly equal, scores at the highest and lowest extremes are disproportionately those of boys. So if institutions of higher education want equal numbers of men and women as faculty and graduates in math, they will need to cut out the highest performers and strive for mediocrity.
The same reality-denying feminists are itching to subject college science and math departments to gender quotas. They have already persuaded Congress to require university scientists to perform Title IX compliance reviews – a nightmare of bean-counting paperwork – coverning everything from faculty composition to lab space. Misleading reporting like Lewin’s will only strengthen the movement to select cancer researchers and atomic engineers on the basis of their sex, not their abilities.
The brave new world of Title IX for math and science is just the most recent effort to replace education with ideology. The mediocrity that has infected the humanities will spread to the hard sciences with devastating consequences.
Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average, will likely lose government funds, but it will offer a better education in math than you can get at Harvard.
Photo: Math on the Wall by alist (Creative Commons)
August 8th, 2008
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Chad Orzel confesses his ignorance of art and music. He then turns the tables and lambastes his fellow liberal arts professors for routinely excusing their ignorance of math and science.
Intellectuals and academics are just assumed to have some background knowledge of the arts, and not knowing those things can count against you. Ignorance of math and science is no obstacle, though. I have seen tenured professors of the humanities say – in public faculty discussions, no less – “I’m just no good at math,” without a trace of shame. There is absolutely no expectation that Intellectuals know even basic math.
The liberal arts, those subjects formerly deemed essential to the education of free men, include both music and math. Orzel justifiably points out that people need basic math skills. That some otherwise intelligent people lack mathematical aptitude doesn’t make math irrelevant. His fundamental complaint is that his deficiency, artistic ignorance, is frowned upon while theirs is tolerated. So he suggests heaping opprobrium on them until they squirm:
Sadly, I don’t know what other solution there is. It simply should not be acceptable for people who are ignorant of math and science to consider themselves Intellectuals. Somehow, we need to move away from where we are and toward a place where confusing Darwin with Dawkins or Feynman with Faraday carries the same intellectual stigma as confusing Bach with Beethoven or Rembrandt with Reubens.
For Orzel, there just isn’t enough intellectual stigma to go around. He suffers ridicule at parties, so it’s only fair that others suffer, too. Such are the solutions that life in academia fosters!
Perhaps those of us who live outside the Envy-Covered Halls can come up with a better solution for Prof. Orzel. First on the list would be this:
Stop whining about the ignorance of others and fix your own problem. Go to concerts and museums; read a book about music; take an online course in art history; listen to Professor Carol’s podcasts.
Then, when Prof. Orzel says “I don’t even like classical music,” we can at least give him credit for knowing what it is he doesn’t like. And then when he calls us ignorant for not knowing enough math, he’ll have a point.
August 4th, 2008
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Take the American Civics Literacy Test and compare your score with both freshmen and graduating seniors at America’s colleges.
The Anchoress inspired me to take the test today. I matched her score of 56 out of 60, or 93%. Oh well, you can’t know everything.
But then I didn’t go to Harvard where the graduating seniors had a mean score of 69.56%, which was the highest of all the schools.
The test is administered by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities. It tests American history, political thought, market economy, and international relations.
The average senior failed all four subjects, scoring less than 60% in each. Among the findings:
- Seniors do not know basic facts of American history. Only 45.9% know that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution.
- Seniors do not know the basic timeline of American history. Only 47.7% know that Fort Sumter came before Gettysburg and that Gettysburg came before Appomattox.
- Seniors do not know America’s founding documents. Only 45.9% know that the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” comes from the Declaration of Independence.
- Seniors do not know the rudiments of America’s historical relations with the world. Only 42.7% know that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion.
The results tend to be worse in the most prestigious universities.
Colleges that do well in popular rankings typically do not do well in advancing civic knowledge.
- Generally, the higher U.S. News & World Report ranks a college, the lower it ranks here in civic learning. At four colleges U.S. News ranked in its top 12 (Cornell, Yale, Duke, and Princeton), seniors scored lower than freshmen. These colleges are elite centers of “negative learning.” Cornell was the third-worst performer last year and the worst this year.
- Surveyed colleges ranked by Barron’s imparted only about one-third the civic learning of colleges overlooked by Barron’s.
How do you “unteach” history and civics to college students? I don’t think it’s very hard. One method would be simply to ignore those subjects entirely and rely on the students to forget what they have learned. Another would be to fill the students’ heads with enough mumbo-jumbo that they can no longer discern the facts. Another would be to design a curriculum around how students “feel” about civics and history. Another would be to teach history only as it relates to gender and sexual preferences. . . .
We could go on.
July 21st, 2008
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Jean-Alix Miguel murdered his wife, a crime that earned him a paltry 7 years in prison. When he got out of prison, he got a job teaching school in Montreal. It took the school board 6 years to do a background check on Miguel, and when they discovered his murder conviction they fired him – not for being a confessed murderer, but for failing to disclose it on his application.
Not weird enough for you? Well, Miguel took his firing to arbitration, and won. It seems that the arbitrator didn’t agree that the school board fired Miguel for lying on his application. No, the arbitrator thought that was just a ruse, and that the school board actually fired Miguel for being a murderer. Can’t have that! Miguel was reinstated.
Wingless has this story of murder discrimination.
July 16th, 2008
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It has been a while since we featured the ongoing work of feminist professors in what they like to call “intimate labor.” Felicity Shaeffer-Grabiel reminds us that there remains much scholarly research to be done in important fields such as sex trafficking and victimology. She explains:
In this paper, I explore the ways Latin American women who marry U.S. men via the cyber-marriage industry complicate their popular rendition as either manipulative “green card shards” (and thus criminals of the state) or as having to prove their innocence as victims of heterosexual marriage, global patriarchy and/or the sex trafficking trade. . . . Furthermore, while others have made important contributions in making visible the policing of sexualized, gendered, and racialized bodies that are deemed excessive (and thus threatening) to the (normative) state – such as in the case of lesbians, gays, sex workers and terrorists who attempt to migrate across borders, there has been no discussion about the opening of the erotic as central to migration and citizenship claims.
Those Latin American women sure can complicate things, especially when they marry rich white (patriarchal) dudes in the U.S. In times past, guys would just go down to Juarez to admire some visible (gendered) bodies – sometimes excessively – and then return home alone, somewhat poorer, and hopefully having avoided the police. Now these women are branded criminals (not just the run-of-the-mill kind, but criminals of the (normative) state) for being tricked into marrying someone of the opposite gender. What will those (cyber) patriarchs think of next?
Felicity is too modest in giving credit to others. She has managed to combine homosexuals, prostitutes, and terrorists into one general category, probably offending all of them simultaneously. This is the kind of stuff that merits tenure.
Next time you cross the border, remember to discuss the opening of the erotic, and have a laugh on Felicity.
July 5th, 2008
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Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust received high marks for honoring Harvard’s ROTC graduates. She did not attend the ROTC commissioning ceremony last year and had indicated that she use her attendance this year to denounce the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
The chairman of the Advocates for Harvard ROTC, Paul Mawn, welcomed Ms. Faust’s tone. “It was a motivating speech. . . . There was nothing in it I took any offense in,” said Mr. Mawn, a 1963 graduate of Harvard who served as a captain in the Navy.
President Faust did remark, however:
I wish that there were more of you. I believe that every Harvard student should have the opportunity to serve in the military as you do and as those honored in the past have done.
Of course, some Harvard students don’t have the opportunity to serve in the military for a variety of reasons, including their citizenship or residency, age, physical disability, or unwillingness to take the oath. But let’s look on the bright side. The president of Harvard showed up at the ROTC graduation ceremony to honor the newly commissioned officers, and that’s a positive sign.
June 6th, 2008
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