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Sunday, December 02, 2007
Assembly Line Scholarship Among Harvard Stars
Bruce Jackson summarizes an article from 02138 (A Million Little Writers):
Some of Harvard’s celebrity academics publish books, articles, op-eds and everything else at a dazzling rate. How do they do it? A few are geniuses, who really do knock that stuff out in their own, which is why they are at Harvard. Some, particularly in the Law School, plagiarize, which saves a huge amount of time, if you don’t get caught doing it. And some have perfected the system favored by some Renaissances artists, using lot of little elves who do the bulk of the research and sometimes the bulk of the writing as well.
If that’s how it’s done among the best and brightest in American academia, is there any point to propping up such a corrupt system?
Comments
It’s said that in the traditional way of doing things in German universities, the professor has a presumptive ownership of anything done by his grad students—including seminar papers. That doesn’t make the practice appealling, necessarily, but it would seem to indicate that Harvard profs are not alone in so using grad students.
No. But I would say that.
Adam: As an advanced student at a German university I have to disagree. No professor here holds presumptive ownership over seminar papers or anything like that by tradition.
I’ve had something similar happen to me, though it was more subtle. My supervisor was working on a similar area to me and I submitted a thesis plan with one of my core arguments laid out. I’d checked all the usual places, it was a new idea.
A while goes past and it’s known that “Jonathan’s working on X” then all of a sudden my supervisor adds a chapter to a book she was writing putting forward a very similar point and it’s “Oh sorry… I’m about to publish so by the time you finish your thesis the idea will be out there”
I had to completely (and I mean completely) rethink my PhD topic. I changed supervisors but needless to say, the book has yet to appear.
Having said that, I think this type of behaviour is more prevalent is America where there’s more of an apprenticeship vibe to grad school (unlike the UK where it’s now “you’ve got three years to complete… go! don’t stop for anything!") and in the experimental sciences where grad students do properly assist their supervisors.
And of course I would say what John E. said. But I also hear an annoying little (well, dressed in black to hide his bulk) Harry Lime voice caressingly repeat “like the Renaissance artists, old boy....”
Jonathan M,’s horrific story doesn’t sound all that subtle to me.
Back in the olden times, I used to have to explain to instructors why open access made successful plagiarism by students less likely ("I know how to Google too, friend"). Jonathan M.’s anecdote might indicate similar positive sides to grad-student blogging....
I think once upon a time German profs used to assign topics to their doctoral students, and they certainly picked things that interested them or would aid their own research goals. That doesn’t happen much anymore here, at least in the humanities. And I have never heard of a case of a German professor just “picking up” a student’s ideas. However, a lot of humanities research is done in SFBs and DFG projects, in which case the researchers are collaborating a great deal of the time and a number of general ideas are shared. They are supposed to fertilize the individual projects, just as the individual projects in turn fertilize the larger project. This sort of research model is not familiar to me from the US, but it is also different from what the 02138 article describes.
As someone who used to have a 02138 ZIP code and was not associated with Harvard, I’m mortified to see that as the name of a campus/alum mag.
Harvard dysfunctions aside, I’m wondering what system we’re propping and how. Few humanities scholars produce scholarship in a collective way, the research assistant notwithstanding for senior faculty. There are good reasons that science and social science has a bureaucratic team structure, too - we can point to abuses of that setup and we can see a particular research university as dysfuncitonal. But is this not simply a battle between humanities and science culture?
I’m surprised that Theodore Streleski isn’t better known than he is.
This is definitely not the prevalent model of research in the humanities anywhere other than Harvard. The people I know there do not do this either; I think it is only a few celebrity-style “public intellectuals.”
I’d love to collaborate with other scholars, but it doesn’t happen all that much.
(N. B. Different person from the “Jonathan M.” posting above)
Well, if its an effective method for producing research, the only issue I would see is making sure that all the contributors are recognized for their efforts. Trying to put all the credit into one professor for the sake of boosting rep - now that seems pretty ridiculous.