I think there is a tremendous amount of pressure on academics to increase their research output--another example of the corporate mentality penetrating into every corner of modern existence. (Even the terminology is corporate: output and productivity are words that get slung around my academic workplace way too much for my taste.) One response to this is to grind out so much work that (usually) inadvertent plagiarism is almost bound to occur. Another way to go (rampant in economics, my discipline) is to generate variation after pointless minor variation on some obscure and generally uninteresting theme. Plagiarism gets a lot of attention, but the other response is just as destructive of the intellectual culture.
Tenure is often defended on grounds of preserving academic freedom for politically unpopular views, but I think now it might be more useful as a device for protecting scholars who want to undertake reflective research that takes time and may not pan out. What's really sad, and hard to understand, is that people who ARE tenured will either curtail or cease their intellectual activity (they're burnt out rather than liberated by tenure) or continue grinding out huge quantities of trivial work (they've bought into the "more is better" mindset). The former phenomenon is more common at second & third tier insitutions, the latter at more prestigeous universities.
I feel lucky sometimes to working at a decent but less prestigeous university where there is pressure, to be sure, but you aren't expected to have two major-league publications a year, and lean years, when you're recharging your mental batteries, are judged against reasonable standards for research activity when you do publish. My work tends to come in spurts--some years with a good number of publications and other years with very little. An untenured faculty member would encounter real problems if he or she exhibited that sort of pattern in publication output.
Gary
----- Original Message ----- From: Doug Henwood To: lbo-talk Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 7:04 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] plagiarism epidemic
[It sure seems that there's an epidemic of plagiarism afoot. Is that just one of those "news spasm" artifacts - or is it easier to detect now - or is it that people are under more pressure than ever, and more likely to steal others' words?]
Chronicle of Higher Education - September 14, 2004
Plagiarism by Design? MIT Press Seeks Recompense From McGraw-Hill for Copying in Architecture Book By SCOTT MCLEMEE
MIT Press has demanded compensation from McGraw-Hill for infringing MIT's copyright on Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect, by Meredith L. Clausen, a professor of architectural history at the University of Washington. Portions of Ms. Clausen's monograph are reproduced, without acknowledgment, in Structures of Our Time: Thirty-one Buildings That Changed Modern Life (McGraw-Hill, 2002), by Roger Shepherd, a professor of fine arts at the Parsons School of Design, in New York.
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