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February 23, 2005
What's Troubling Harvard
Elizabeth Anderson: February 23, 2005
The current troubles of President Summers remind me of a conversation I had with my dissertation advisor, John Rawls, nearly 20 years ago. No two great Harvard scholars could be more opposite in intellectual temperament: Summers the supremely arrogant; Rawls, the supremely modest. (Whenever a student offered a misguided criticism of his work, Rawls would blame himself for not expressing himself clearly, rather than the student for failing to read him correctly.) Yet even Rawls had a blind spot for Harvard's faults, which is shared by Summers today. In that conversation long ago, Rawls told me of his recent visit to Oxford University, warning me not to accept an offer to teach there until I was securely tenured somewhere in the U.S. Oxford was too obsessed with rank, he said, happy to treat the likes of him as royalty, but terribly snobby to not-yet-established scholars, who could expect to be treated shabbily. While I appreciated his kind advice, it was almost too much to keep from laughing. Here I was at Harvard, an institution that bent over backwards to make distinctions of rank invidious--even to the point, in those days, of putting their "folding chairs" (Assistant Professors on terminating 3-year appointments) on a common party line, instead of giving them the dignity of individual office phones! (When I arrived at the University of Michigan to take up a tenure-track position after graduating from Harvard, the atmosphere felt so egalitarian by comparison that I felt like Orwell arriving in Catalonia. My feeling didn't last, but neither did Orwell's.)
Now that the senior faculty have been getting from President Summers a dose of the humiliating medicine so many of them have happily doled out to the lower academic orders for decades, they are in revolt. But is the revolt aimed just at restoring the prerogatives of rank undermined by President Summers' arrogance, or is it aimed at undermining the institutional arrogance of Harvard itself, so that it can undertake the critical and humbling self-examination it so desperately needs? There is rot in the system, all right, but I fear that neither President Summers nor the faculty are jointly prepared to confront the full dimensions of it. Consider some of the recent newsworthy events at Harvard:
1. President Summers berates Cornel West for grade inflation, supposedly declining scholarship, and supporting Al Sharpton's campaign for President. Professor West leaves in a huff for Princeton. What's wrong with this? Comments like this one on the substantive merits of Summers' opinion of West miss the point. Grade inflation is a serious issue well within the province of the President. But it is ludicrous and demeaning to single out West on this count, given its pervasiveness at Harvard. Systematic problems demand systematic and impersonal solutions, not arbitrary Presidential second-guessing of the grading patterns of individual faculty whom he holds in contempt. The same point applies to concerns about scholarly productivity of tenured faculty members. What may be a legitimate form of institutional accountability and standard-setting in an impersonal, publicly vetted, and universally applied system of rules becomes an imperious violation of academic freedom in the hands of a President who applies privately tailored standards at his personal discretion. As for West's extra-curricular political activities, these are none of the President's business. My concern is not only with contract feudalism (see here and here). It's with political correctness. Those who hailed Summers for taking down West, a supposed practitioner of political correctness, should have excoriated Summers instead, for presuming to dictate to faculty what political affiliations are correct for a Harvard professor to have.
2. President Summers, in the wake of criticism of Harvard's poor record of tenuring women in the sciences since he assumed office, suggests that women are innately deficient in high aptitude for these subjects and would rather spend their time having babies, and relegates hypotheses about sex discrimination and differential socialization to a distant third. The issue here is not the legitimacy or possibility of exploring the hypothesis of innate sex differences in valued attributes and motivations. Contrary to claims that feminist agents of political correctness have driven such research out of the academy, research into such hypotheses is active, as Lynn Sanders reminds us. Nor did Summers' critics call for censorship of such research. They did question the intellectual merits of Summers' selective consideration of evidence (see, for example, here). Despite his avowals that he wished to be proved wrong in the relative weights he assigned to genetic and social causes, his rhetorical assignment of burdens of proof belies his prejudice. The evidence is far from sufficient to shift burdens of proof for or assign relative importance to any of the hypotheses Summers considered. But this is not the fundamental issue, either. Research scientists are entitled to their biases, in the sense that science can't get underway without people willing to place their bets on sometimes controversial hypotheses as yet unproved, and can't succeed unless people are free to vigorously pursue such hypotheses even in the face of rival hypotheses claiming their own empirical support. The issue is rather that Summers was not speaking as a research scientist in the fields in question. He was speaking as the President of Harvard University. In that capacity, Summers' deployment of his biases could not function in the fruitful way biases often function among research scientists. They functioned instead as lame excuses for a poor institutional record of tenuring women. (Lame, because they can't explain declining rates of tenure under Summers' leadership.) A less arrogant Harvard would have borrowed a leaf from MIT, which subjected its own treatment of women faculty to empirical scrutiny, discovered problems, and took action to correct them.
3. Several Harvard-affiliated faculty have engaged in plagiarism, including Lawrence Tribe (Law School), Charles Ogletree (Law School), Ali A. Sultan (formerly of the School of Public Health), and Doris Kearns Goodwin (Harvard Board of Overseers). {Alan Dershowitz (Law School) has also been accused of plagiarism, although he vigorously disputes the charge.) In view of the rash of plagiarism cases, I wrote a letter to President Summers on October 7, 2004, arguing that the pattern suggested a systematic problem with the use of research assistants:
It would be ludicrous to suppose that the authors in question were trying to pass off, as their own, the published works from which they plagiarized. These works were too famous to make that supposition credible. Plagiarism of published works is but a symptom of wholesale plagiarizing of texts submitted by research assistants. The offending authors failed to recognize that the passages from published works were not in their own voice, because their method of "writing" books by assembling and editing minimally referenced memos drafted by research assistants is inconsistent with having a voice. . . . Disciplining the offending faculty is not enough. To prevent future violations of this sort, Harvard must review the roles of research assistants and lay down strict standards for how they may be used. I suggest, for starters, that faculty be forbidden from using research assistants to draft any part of what they publish under their own names.
President Summers replied to my letter in November:
The University, as a matter of policy, does not comment on individual
reviews of the conduct of faculty members. Rest assured, however, that we
take these matters very seriously.
The reply rather misses my point, which was not to inquire into the punishments meted out to individual faculty members, but to urge a change in a research culture that appears to facilitate these abuses. When a pattern of abuse emerges, it's time for systematic change. I'm still waiting to see whether Harvard can overcome its institutional arrogance, view itself clearly and critically, and adopt necessary reforms.
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» The case against Summers from Majikthise
Ideologues are spreading misinformation about Larry Summers' dim future at Harvard. They are trying to paint him as a martyr to academic freedom, a visionary leader who fell on his sword to "stimulate open debate." In fact, Summers' controversial remarks [Read More]
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HARVARD AND LARRY SUMMERS....Over at Left2Right, Elizabeth Anderson has an idiosyncratic look at the whole Larry Summers flap. Her overall position seems to be that the real problem is "rot in the system" at Harvard, not Summers per se, but... [Read More]
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HARVARD AND LARRY SUMMERS....Over at Left2Right, Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy and women's studies at the University of Michigan, has an idiosyncratic look at the whole Larry Summers flap. Her overall position seems to be that the real ... [Read More]
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» Harvard and Larry Summers from Political Animal
HARVARD AND LARRY SUMMERS....Over at Left2Right, Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy and women's studies at the University of Michigan, has an idiosyncratic look at the whole Larry Summers flap. Her overall position seems to be that the real ... [Read More]
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Comments
Posted by: Tad Brennan
Good post.
1&2 look a little different from 3, no? 1&2 do a good job of showing why the faculty revolt against Summers has nothing to do with trying to subject his views to a test of feminist orthodoxy. His infractions are against rules for good faculty management on one side, and the scientific method on the other.
I suspect 3 is a problem endemic to law-schools, per se, and built into the way legal scholars have been trained to work (i.e. too fast, and through the exploitation of their assistants). Any special Harvard slant on this problem? Perhaps magnified because there are more writers there, and what they write is more likely to be scrutinized? Brian Leiter has posted a number of items related to legal research and legal publishing on his site.
Agreed, there is one common thread: Harvard is the epicenter of self-satisfied complacency. But do we only fuel the complacency by focussing on the place? I liked a comment over at Brad DeLong's site, that maybe what happens at a handful of elite institutions is less important than we are making it.
Posted by: Tad Brennan | Feb 23, 2005 7:53:18 AM
Posted by: Don Herzog
Ouch: this law professor has never even hired a research assistant. I know plenty of law professors who use RAs to read up on cases and commentary for them, but wouldn't dream of asking RAs to draft prose for them.
Posted by: Don Herzog | Feb 23, 2005 8:14:11 AM
Posted by: Bill Gardner
I share your concern (point 3) about the decline of scholarship and accountability associated with the misuse of research assistants' work. The biomedical world has been struggling with ethical issues about the authorship of research papers for some time (see, for example, http://www.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/rcr/rcr_authorship/winResources.html). You suggest "that faculty be forbidden from using research assistants to draft any part of what they publish under their own names." I would restate this to require that authorship credit be given to every person making a substantive contribution to the text. Drummond Rennie (a JAMA editor) and his colleagues put forward a standard that requires all JAMA authors to provide a footnote defining their specific contributions to a text (Rennie D, Yank V, Emanuel L. When authorship fails: a proposal to make contributors accountable. JAMA 1997;278:579-85). I would further propose that we forbid contracts for RAs in which the RA gives up authorship rights.
Finally, as an alumnus, I agree wholeheartedly with the criticism of Harvard's culture.
Posted by: Bill Gardner | Feb 23, 2005 8:20:15 AM
Posted by: Ken
Liz:
I don't want to take issue with the substance of your post. And I'm really reluctant to enter these discussions about what Summers said and whether his critics are just knee-jerk anti-nativist leftie loonies or something. The whole thing has been much too breathless for my tastes. Plus I respect you as a thinker and philosopher enormously. So I wouldn't want you to take anything I have to say the wrong way. But I do have to say that I think that you are not being entirely fair in your characterization of Summers when you say:
President Summers, in the wake of criticism of Harvard's poor record of tenuring women in the sciences since he assumed office, suggests that women are innately deficient in high aptitude for these subjects and would rather spend their time having babies, and relegates hypotheses about sex discrimination and differential socialization to a distant third.
As I read Summers, he didn't state or imply anything that can be fairly characterized by the provocative phrase "innately deficient in high apptitude for these subjects." In fairness to you, since there is no quantifier attached to your characterization -- no 'some women', 'all women', 'most woman', 'many women' -- it's hard to know exactly what you think he meant even from your own words. Anyway, I read him as having said that even if the mean scores for women and men on various measures of various presumably relevant appitutdes are roughly identical, there is still the question of how men and women cluster about those means. He claimed -- and I don't know if its true or false -- that women and men scatter differently, with men clustering more at both the low and high extremes and women clustering more between the extremes. I don't see how that translate into "women are innately deficient in high apptitude." Moreover, he said that even at the extremes we're talking only small differences in the scatter pattern. He made the further, and important claim that these small differences can have enormous consequences for men and women in high end professions. He didn't really explain why he thought that or what the "non-linearizing" mechanism might be. I suspect that there is really quite a lot to argue about here. I don't really see what the non-linearizing mechanism could be myself, especially if you control for his other two factors. That's relevant because his non-linearity claim was about the independent contribution of differential variability between men and women.
Anyway, my only claim is that you haven't fairly characterized his claim about the biological stuff.
Also he didn't say that "women would rather spend their time having babies." He didn't say anything so straightforward or simple, as I read him. I read him as pointing to what he sees as a collision between the dynamics of family life in contempory culture, especially family life for highly educated, highly skilled, men and women and the dynamics of work life for those same men and women. And he seemed to be saying that the biggest cause -- I got the impression he thought "by far," but that's not explicity -- of the disparity between men and women in high end professions is the clash of these two dynamics. Paraphrasing this as "women would rather spend their time having babies" again seems at best a gross oversimplification. His claims, if I understand them, are arguably true. Having children does have a differential impact on the lives of men and women in our culture. We could and should certainly try to work toward arrangements of all kinds that diminish the difference. Summers in fact seemed to be inviting an inquiry into how best we might do that, if you ask me.
About discrimination being a distant third. I read him as restricting those parts of his discussion to Harvard's search procedures. If that's right, it wouldn't be surprising if he thought that discrimination was the least significant cause. I mean if in this day and age Harvard is still deploying either overtly or covertly discriminatory practices that have a MASSIVE effect on the composition of its professoriate, then they are in really big trouble. It's not that one expects no such practices to be still in place, but you would think with the vigilance that universities tend to bring toward such issues, they would be much much less impactful than they were in an earlier day.
Socialization is another matter. You're right that he did downplay socialization, but mainly by saying that we're not so good about spotting what's due to socialization and what isn't . I think that's correct. Plus I think that parent, schools, the goverment overestimates the role of the "old" generation in socializing the "new" generation. But that's a long, long discussion.
Anyway, it's not my intention to get involved in the merits of these issues right now. I don't know enough about Harvard to even contemplate even wanting to dispute your core claims. And I think there are much better settings to discuss biology vs socialization vs social dynamics etc and their consequences for explaining differences between the lives of men and the lives of women. So I won't get into that here either.
Posted by: Ken | Feb 23, 2005 8:49:49 AM
Posted by: S. Weasel
Ohhhhhh...that explains it! I had wondered how people in high places could possibly find themselves plagiarizing text. I thought it was a lunatic moment, like rich people caught shoplifting.
I'm not much reassured to learn they use verbatim chunks of material dug up by assistants, but at least I don't have to imagine Doris Kearns Goodwin hunched over a Google search, CTRL-C'ing and CTRL-V'ing with mad abandon.
Posted by: S. Weasel | Feb 23, 2005 9:21:15 AM
Posted by: Andrew
Ken,
"I mean if in this day and age Harvard is still deploying either overtly or covertly discriminatory practices that have a MASSIVE effect on the composition of its professoriate, then they are in really big trouble."
No one "deploys" covert discrimination - the whole point is that you don't mean to be discriminatory but you just can't help it, eg through unconscious bias, social structures, etc. A department full of male professors, even if they have the best of intentions, often tends to have unconscious and subtle biases against hiring women. And these subtle, small biases can, summed up over an entire lifetime, combine to have a massive influence on the number of women who stay in science. (Death by a thousand pinpricks, etc.)
"you would think with the vigilance that universities tend to bring toward such issues, they would be much much less impactful than they were in an earlier day."
In fact, they are less impactful - note how the number of women getting PhDs and faculty positions in hard sciences has been rising in recent decades. But who's to say that they've already reached zero impact? Declining discrimination is perfectly consistent with continuing substantial discrimination.
Posted by: Andrew | Feb 23, 2005 9:31:00 AM
Posted by: Mona
Interesting insight into Harvard by Prof. Anderson; like S. Weasal I've been pretty freaked as to how these stellar authors could possibly be plagiarizing, given how stupid and unnecessary it should be for them to do so.
I do want to quiblle with Prof Anderson that the MIT study on women was properly empirical, or even worth that much. You can read what Cathy Young has to say about it in Salon here.
Posted by: Mona | Feb 23, 2005 11:04:51 AM
Posted by: Emender
A minor correction: do you mean "belied" his prejudice (midway, near the Sanders cite)? Or betrayed, revealed, exposed, something like that?
Posted by: Emender | Feb 23, 2005 12:00:29 PM
Posted by: ken
Andrew:
You say:
In fact, they are less impactful - note how the number of women getting PhDs and faculty positions in hard sciences has been rising in recent decades. But who's to say that they've already reached zero impact? Declining discrimination is perfectly consistent with continuing substantial discrimination.
Sure, it's true that declining discrimination is consistent with substantial discrimination. But the former doesn't entail the latter. And you can't argue from a possibility to a reality.
So, I would think that this is a purely empirical question, about which one should have an open mind.
You don't have to be completely open, in the sense of assigning no prior probability to the hypothesis that despite declining real discrimination, there is still substantial discrimination. But what's more interesting are not the priors, but what the data show and how they drive us to update our priors, if you catch my drift.
Anyway, I was only making the point that it wouldn't be surprising if the President of Harvard thought that Harvard had by now made enough progress in refining its search procedures and was vigilant enough about enforcing fair search procedures that his priors for the proposition 'discrimination in our search procedures is a major cause of disparity" were pretty low.
Posted by: ken | Feb 23, 2005 1:42:37 PM
Posted by: Iconic Midwesterner
"Those who hailed Summers for taking down West, a supposed practitioner of political correctness, should have excoriated Summers instead, for presuming to dictate to faculty what political affiliations are correct for a Harvard professor to have."
No one actually believe this do they? Look I'm as much for theoretical niceities as the next person, but I don't have a problem keeping neo-Nazis or David Duke style racists off of University campuses (which academia has been, thankfully, doing very effectively now for decades.) My only complaint is that Universities dont keep out left wing extremists quite as consistently.
Now, I'm not saying that Cornel West was fairly targeted as being such an extremist. What I'm saying is that it is ok for Harvard (or any other school) to say, for example, "You cannot belong to an anti-Semitic poltiical party and be a Professor here." Hell, I for one would not just say that was OK, I'd DEMAND they say that.
Posted by: Iconic Midwesterner | Feb 23, 2005 2:41:10 PM
Posted by: Tad Brennan
Suppose we approach this blog in line with its original intentions, and think of it as the front-porch of academic liberalism, where we sit on a summer's evening facing the public thoroughfare with a sense of ease and a smile of welcome, willing to share our beliefs with utter strangers, and eager to hear their beliefs in exchange.
What does this post tell the conservative world about the liberal world, or about how the world looks to liberals? How does it contribute to that mutual understanding that is so important for our unity as a nation?
Well, I think it does one thing well. Passersby have heard a lot of loud noises coming from our parlor window, noises that sound like a large group of academic liberals ganging up to strangle another of their kind. Here he is, an Eastern elite liberal academic, a former member of the Clinton White House fer god's sakes, apparently being lynched by other liberals in the very bastion of Eastern liberal elitism. Passersby are understandably puzzled, alarmed, and affronted. That does not look like a house to go into.
It is important, for that reason, for a post like this to make clear why the hullabaloo you are hearing is not the sound of a lynch-mob at work. Neither the treatment meted out, nor the rationales behind it, are such as would make this interaction count as a lynching. This is not an hysterical mob taking irrational revenge on an innocent victim; instead, the issues are much more complicated and the grievances more real.
That's an important point to make clear to the passersby, and there is no way of making it other than as Elizabeth Anderson does, i.e. carefully distinguishing the real issues, showing exactly wherein Summers was out of line, showing what are the sources of the faculty's discontent, and so on.
With that point recognized, I am still left thinking--oh hell, why do we always have to embarrass ourselves to the public this way? Some of them looked friendly--some of them might even have been willing to sit around and chat. Might have been nice to make a few more friends--you never know when a few more friends will come in handy, or even just a familiar face to help you out when you're in a jam. Come to think of it, we're already in a jam--this country has a lot of problems facing it, and we need to work together to face them.
I'm left thinking--after we have made our excuses for the hullabaloo, can we go back to putting our best foot forward, here on the front porch, and talking about issues that might interest the passersby, instead of frightening them off? Issues that can show how much common ground there is, and how willing we are to reach out to people outside the house, instead of merely excusing the ruckus inside?
Posted by: Tad Brennan | Feb 23, 2005 2:55:50 PM
Posted by: john t
President Summers------"poor record of tenuring women---since he assumed office". Post hoc ergo propter hoc??
Posted by: john t | Feb 23, 2005 3:28:41 PM
Posted by: noahpraetorius@hotmail.com
Problem is that is does look like a lynching when Hopkins describes her nausea at Sommers remarks and then weeks later we get to read what so upset her. Appears that reasonable people cannot disagree at Harvard to the passersby.
This post appears to be an effort to put Summers in a bad light in order to save the reputation of the institution.
Posted by: noahpraetorius@hotmail.com | Feb 23, 2005 3:37:11 PM
Posted by: noahpraetorius@hotmail.com
And alas you will need to recruit some new posters if this idyllic "front porch conversation" metaphor is to be pursued. Tad, I suggest that you volunteer your services!
Posted by: noahpraetorius@hotmail.com | Feb 23, 2005 3:46:22 PM
Posted by: Don Herzog
Noah, Elizabeth's post says that Harvard itself is corrupt: hard to see how that could amount to blaming Summers to save the institution's reputation.
john t: At Harvard, you might want to know, the president has an independent review at the end of the tenure and promotion process. (I know of no other school that does that.) And some people make it all the way through the process -- through the department, through the college, and perhaps (that is if Harvard does this; I don't know) through the provost, and then get turned down by the president. I have no idea whether Summers himself has been turning down a disproportionate number of women candidates. Nor would it follow that if he had he was doing so for bad or misogynistic reasons. But there is more reason to be concerned than post hoc propter hoc suggests.
Posted by: Don Herzog | Feb 23, 2005 4:08:34 PM
Posted by: noahpraetorius@hotmail.com
Don,
All human institutions are corrupt to some extent...no great revelation that Harvard is among them...if the recollections of UM by Jay Nordlinger @NRO are accurate then you have problems too.
It seems tho that the post places most of the blame for the current kerfuffle on Summers but the more I think about the actual content and implications of his remarks, he has done Harvard and the academy in general a great service by generating this debate.
Posted by: noahpraetorius@hotmail.com | Feb 23, 2005 4:52:20 PM
Posted by: Brian Leiter
Since I, obviously, agree that Larry Summers is not entitled "to dictate to faculty what political affiliations are correct for a Harvard professor to have," it is perhaps worth stating that I can recall nothing in the NY Times Magazine article (which I referenced) on that subject; indeed, this is the first I've heard of that. My recollection, perhaps inaccurate, was that Summers primarily chastised Cornel West for making rap albums and pursuing supreficial rather than scholarly projects. Academic freedom does not encompass freedom from being chastised by administrators. It would, however, protect West from formal retribution, such as loss of his job, or loss of pay and professional privileges and the like. There was, of course, no indication of such a threat, and, in any case, the idea that an academic celebrity such as West was vulnerable on this score is, of course, a bit silly, as his decampment to a no doubt equally (perhaps more?) attractive position at Princeton shows.
This is minor, in any case, and does not detract from your more central points.
Posted by: Brian Leiter | Feb 23, 2005 6:00:36 PM
Posted by: noahpraetorius@hotmail.com
And I might add as I am wont to do that it is a much greater blight on Harvard's reputation to see the sordid spectacle of a corrupt faculty pursuing a liberal perspective like a pack of howling wolves.
Posted by: noahpraetorius@hotmail.com | Feb 23, 2005 7:03:49 PM
Posted by: noah
Correct the last comment to say:
sordid spectacle of a corrupt faculty pursuing the holder of a decidely liberal perspective like a pack of howling wolves.
A bit over the top...maybe...basically true probably.
Posted by: noah | Feb 23, 2005 7:19:58 PM
Posted by: v
This post was very nice. It is not surprising that the culture at Harvard is so bad. They have an unhealthy policy of treating tenure track faculty badly and simply buying off faculty from other universities for senior, tenured positions. On this count, I think Prof Summers did realize this problem and at least claim to do something about it.
Personally, I believe that a lot of the outrage at Harvard is an excuse to settle scores with him over other issues. It is, however, greatly entertaining to see a bunch of faculty get treated the way they treat others. And when people like Prof Hopkins put on the show they did, it is hard to feel that it was not deserved.
On the larger issue of women in sciences, I think Prof Summers was wrong and mistaken in speaking as he did, especially given his position. I don't think, however, that he is the first President of Harvard to hold these views. I think the smartest thing that the faculty at Harvard could do now is to let him continue as President and use his weakened situation to improve the situation for women in the university, though I doubt that this is what would happen.
Posted by: v | Feb 23, 2005 7:44:13 PM
Posted by: john t
Don H Thanks for the correction.
Posted by: john t | Feb 23, 2005 10:35:34 PM
Posted by: Lee Scoresby
"Interesting insight into Harvard by Prof. Anderson; like S. Weasal I've been pretty freaked as to how these stellar authors could possibly be plagiarizing, given how stupid and unnecessary it should be for them to do so"
I can't say for sure about all of these professors, but many of them have a reputation for not being stellar writers. In other words, for years RAs have been writing their work, or at least editing incoherent jumble into actual prose.
In all due respect, I think Elizabeth's claim that we should focus on abuse of the RA system misses the point: under any reasonable academic definition, assembling a book or paper with significant sections written by RAs is an act of plagarism. They produce, more or less, what academic honors systems refer to as "assembly papers." The fact that this was a case of double plagarism only makes it worse. None of these people should, if the facts are consistent with what is being discussed here, be affiliated with Harvard or any major research university. Students who engaged in even half of the activities they are accused of would find their positions in serious jeopardy. Superstar academics should be held to the same standards.
Posted by: Lee Scoresby | Feb 24, 2005 11:44:31 AM
Posted by: Don Herzog
I'm emphatically with Lee, though I've occasionally been told it's naive. If plagiarism is presenting another's work as your own, and an RA wrote the actual prose, and you publish it under your name, you're plagiarizing. QED.
But I think Elizabeth is also with Lee: I think she's claiming that using RAs for prose production is abuse.
Posted by: Don Herzog | Feb 24, 2005 11:47:06 AM
Posted by: oliver
What do you call it when clerks write judicial opinions?
Posted by: oliver | Feb 24, 2005 1:21:05 PM
Posted by: David Handelman
Another point that should be made on the supposed arbitrariness of Summers singling out Cornel West for criticism is that Prof. West was not just an ordinary tenured professor, subject to direction and oversight from the head of his department, but instead one of a handful of interdisciplinary "University Professors" officially reporting to the president of the university. Of course in practice that tends to mean total academic freedom, but the point is that Summers was specifically within the rights of his office to take it upon himself to tell Cornel West what to do.
Of course there was no way to do that without it coming across as an insult likely to push West to leave, not that Summers apparently even tried. But then again with West's recent lack of *any* "serious" academic output (and sure there's a great debate to be had on the merits of public vs. ivory tower intellectual activity), and especially with that so-called "rap" album (which is really more spoken word/R&B, but more to the point is so pathetically bad, almost beyond belief), he really had left himself in a vulnerable position. And I say this as a former student of Dr. West's who was actually quite impressed with his teaching abilities and commitment to undergraduate education, and sad to see him go.
Posted by: David Handelman | Feb 24, 2005 1:21:52 PM