Tuesday, 16 May 2006

I Know, I Know, Academic Freedom, But...

[Via Scott Jaschik]

Were a panel of my peers to find that I “had committed falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, failure to comply with established standard regarding author names on publications, and a ‘serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research,’” I would expect to find a pink slip in my box.  Academic freedom shouldn’t protect the falsifier, the fabricator, or the plagiarist from dismissal, should it?  Or is this one of those cases in which we defend the worst for fear of future actions against respectable but politically unpopular scholarship? 

Looking over the biographies of the committee members and the examples of patent plagiarism included in the report—available here [.pdf]—it doesn’t appear Ward Churchill’s work has been unfairly impugned by ideologues.  A committee of this sort would want to seem politically neutral, of course, but the one which indicted Churchill at least appears to be.  (Those more familiar with the scholars can speak to this, perhaps.) My reservations stem from the fact that the committee was launched after his inflammatory comments about 9/11, which makes this process an indirect attack on academic freedom.

Still, had Ward Churchill not been a falsifier, a fabricator, or a plagiarist, the committee wouldn’t have called (however tentatively) for his dismissal.  Other, more informed voices care to pipe up?  (Or is everyone else equally confused?)

[X-posted to The Valve.]

May 16, 2006 3:52:06 PM | Academia

3 Comments

Robert L Bell

Dude, If a friend mentions the dating site True.com, tell him to take a cold shower and go downtown to find a hooker. The gangsters as True.com will swindle him out of his identity.

Posted by: Robert L Bell | Tuesday, 16 May 2006 at 09:25 PM

Simon

A glance suggests he is guilty. Sadly, I fear that such scrupulous investigation would reveal similar activity going on elsewhere. In the case of the last 60 years of history of Israel/Palestine, the scope of fabrication is stunning, although as far as I can see, pretty heavily weighted in one direction (Norman Finkelstein's "Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict" carefully takes some of the more influential pro-Israeli inventions to pieces, although I have my doubts about his interpretation of sources in Chapter 1).
Every once in a while, I have the urge to look up as many footnotes as possible in something I'm reading... it's a rather frustrating and depressing activity - the level of carelessness and outright misrepresentation that prevails is enormous compared to what it ought to be. Worse in more politically charged cases, but often extremely lazy elsewhere. But academics have less time on their hands than ever for research - who has time to check every footnote?

Posted by: Simon | Wednesday, 17 May 2006 at 10:30 AM

Doctor Memory

I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that if you are going to make of yourself a professional (if not necessarily productive) irritant to those in power, you should have your house in order personally and professionally for when the inevitable counterpunch starts flying toward you.

I will note that Noam Chomsky appears to have a very secure job, still. There's probably a lesson in that.

Posted by: Doctor Memory | Thursday, 18 May 2006 at 10:53 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Miami Vice As Literature, Er, Literary Phenomenon [Auto-X-posted from The Valve.] Reading a lovely, Morrissey-evoking post on Hollywood’s decision to strip-mine the ‘70s and ‘80s for film ideas, it struck me that Michael Mann’s remake of Miami Vice could be quite the unusual beast, textually-speaking. (Whatever would a remake of Airwolf totally be?) When Heat was released in 1995, a number of critics noticed some familiar dialogue: Mann had recycled some scenes from his script for the Miami Vice (1984) pilot. (Would Roger Ebert have called that “an uncommonly literate screenplay”?) As the IMDB Heat Trivia attests, Mann frequently borrows from his own work. (It doesn’t note this particular connection.) In a televised interview Sunday, Mann claimed that he based the screenplay for the new Miami Vice (2006) on the pilot. Which means, hypothetically, that the same scene could be in the ‘84 pilot, Heat, and the ‘06 remake. What, then, would be the status of the text and the characters’ relation to it? Would Vincent Hanna (Pacino) or Neil McCauley (De Niro) be slyly alluding to an episode of Miami Vice? Would they be presciently anticipating a scene from ‘06 remake? Or would Crockett (Farrell) or Tubbs (Foxx) be alluding to Heat, a film which one can reasonably expect a detective in the Crockett or Tubbs mold to favor? And what about Jimmy Smits? I know you don’t come to Valve with the expectation of it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, but as someone who works on authors who are serial self-plagiarists—I see you back there, Mr. London—I’ve a keen interest in the interplay of borrowed to original text when the same person is responsible for both. This isn’t an interest I’m particularly articulate about, nor one that I’ve thought through rigorously, so I’d be interested to hear what you would make of the situation described above, or of any similar ones with which I may be unfamiliar. [Note: Because of the current internet pervasiveness of “Miami Vice” and “Michael Mann,” I can’t track down any links for this, nor do I own the first season of Miami Vice, so I can’t check up on it myself. But I don’t think my memory’s that bad. Yet.]
PREVIOUS POST
The Genius of Little Men plus Darwin's Wizard Work Maurice Thompson's "The Domain of Romance" (1889) forwards an unusual argument about Darwin’s relationship to realism and romance. According to Thompson, the “little realists” took down the last historical romantcer, Victor Hugo, then proceeded to yelp like jackals around the great man’s knees as he lay dethroned, and the burden of their barking was: “Give us commonplace; we are tired of heroics.” They could not see that out of a mass of commonplace Darwin had wrung the romance whose significance filled the whole area of life. The epoch-interpreter had spoken through the “Origin of Species” and the “Descent of Man.” The petty analytical fictions and the smooth verses of mediocrity fell dead-born. But some one may suggest that the world has not taken the works of Darwin for romance. Well, the world has not, but that goes for nothing; it remains true that they are romance; nor does this impair their scientific vale. Truth is not less true because it satisfies the imagination. If Darwin’s theory is true, it is so because it satisfies the imagination; the missing links of facts are many and important. Darwin comes no nearer absolute proof of the conclusions arrived at ini his masterly romance of the rocks, plants, and animals, than Hugo comes to proof of those reached in “Les Miserables.” In the far future the most valuable significance of the theory of evolution will attach to the fertilizing effect it had upon the imagination of the age... There’s too much to parse in there, but needless to say, it interests me that—contra the conventional accounts of the relationship of evolutionary theory to literature—Thompson claims that Darwinism will murder realism and revivify romance. To wit: What wonder is it that, just at the time when science was thus flowering forth in a mighty raceme of romance, the smaller fry of geniuses should make the mistake of realism? They saw nothing of Darwin’s wizard work save his lucid catalogue of facts and his half-repressed statements of conclusions; but they shrewdly guessed that the world was hungry for fiction of the Darwinian sort. It appeared very easy to satisfy public appetite by writing novels on the scientific plan. They overlooked the central secret, the romance inclosed in Darwin’s work, and they refused to see that the world adores wonders. They saw Darwin’s petty analyses; they failed to see his grand synthesis, the work of a colossal imagination. The time is past for any novelist to redeem the error. Darwin has forestalled realism. While not quite so spectacularly wrong as, say, the JV basketball coach who cut Michael Jordan because he thought His Eventual Airness lacked potential, that’s still pretty spectacularly wrong.

Scott Eric Kaufman

The Typepad Team

Search

Become a Fan

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments