Beyond vanitas

No idea why I'm blessed with free copies of the Harvard fanzine, 02138. However, as a compulsive reader, I crack it open to see what my most self-involved classmates and fellow alumni most desire in flattery.

The November/December issue (not online yet but presumably destined to show up here) does have a significant story in it, "A Million Little Writers", by Jacob Hale Russell. It explains why there have been so many recent plagiarism scandals at the self-appointed capitol of American intellec-, uh, power elitism (and I say that with the greatest affection).

The long-time practice in the natural sciences has been for grad students to do the experiments but for their professor the principle investigator to be primary author on all publications. I've seen this up close from a responsible scientist who was significantly involved in steering research and in editing resulting papers. I've also known many grad students who resented a system built on expropriation of their work.

The article makes it clear how widely this practice has spread to the social sciences and humanities. Charles Ogletree's accidental theft of verbatim paragraphs from a Yale professor (how embarrassing!) happened because of the mistake of an assistant. Ogletree acted as manager of the team that wrote "his" book but put his own name alone on the title page, having consciously taken ownership of someone else's words, thinking they were written by a research assistant.

It's hard to see how putting your name on someone else's words is not plagiarism just because you hired that person for starvation wages. Yet that seems to be how the academy treats it.

Ogletree, by the way, is by no means the only Harvardian to succumb to this temptation. The story also names Alan Dershowitz, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Roland Fryer.

In business, this is nothing new. Vice presidents who share credit are as rare as CEOs who share their multimillion dollar bonuses. After all, sharing is regarded as weaknesses among executives and would-be CEOs.

Not that individual artists haven't tried this before. When I read The Executioner's Song, what, 30 years ago, it seemed to me a poorly constructed pastiche of the work of research assistants. It hadn't even been effectively edited, which would have helped immensely to improve a book that had about half as much to say as it actually put into print. And of course, there's the "atelier phenomenon" of Renaissance artists, as Dean of Arts and Sciences Harry Lewis is quoted describing the story's subject.