At 02:43 PM 5/27/2006, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>I'm overposted, but the error rate you're talking
>about is probably due to sloppiness, in the main, not
>deliberate fraud and misrepresentation, which are most
>serious charges against WC. (Or scholarship is in big
>trouble.) And We have to do better than average, a lot
>better than average. Average gets you David Abrahamed.
> The standards are higher for us, you can b&M all you
>like that that is unfair. It's not a bad thing,
>actually -- keeps us honest. Unless we are WC, it
>seems.
Actually, I thought it was a good example of how this kind of footnote fraud works. Examining how it works, belies the claim that this is about a Platonic ideal of The Professional. Integrity is what we owe to each other, as leftists, not what we owe merely so that we will not come under attack by the right. By upholding integrity among us as a standard we expect of one another because it's important _for us_, the bonus is that it helps insulate or work from attacks by the right. However, it is not _the_ reason why we uphold these ideals. Here's why:
Let's say Yoshie had bluntly made the claim that there is evidence that WC's behavior is the norm in academia. She didn't say that, but let's say she did.
Next, she drops citations to back up her claim: see, footnote errors like WC's happen _all_ the time. Given that it happens so frequently, it's likely that some of you are subject to the exact same attacks. Better watch out, you might be next or one of your intellectual heroes might be next.
You trust Yoshie and Perelman to represent the facts accurately and run of to a general political discussion board or a blog and repeat what you read. Someone says: "Prove it."
You copy-cut-paste the information and say, "Yoshie, editor of MRzine, and Professor M Perelman, both of whom should know, said that this is a good example of how the stuff WC did happens all the time. See all those citations! The citations show that it happens with great frequency. It's really no big deal. In fact, I'd wager a lot of right wingers do it, too! Ha ha ha."
Your interlocutor reads a couple of abstracts at ERIC and says, "Hey, stupid fuckwit leftist. You have about as much integrity as WC. And that Perelman fellah and Yoshie? They are just as bad. These citations don't prove that what WC did happens all the time. They only show that typographical and surface errors happen frequently. There is ONE article that says that 15% of authors in a study provided footnotes that don't support the claim. And, apparently, some of those can be exlained by legitimate errors."
Meanwhile, people following along who are sympathetic to leftish views and are there because they want to learn more see that and think, "Woah. That leftist who dropped those citations is a real turkey. He seems to hang out with a bunch of lefty wankers who do the same thing. Guess these lefties are full of shit. I'll keep my distance, thanks."
Since we have limited amounts of time, the scholarly community --and the left more broadly -- must rely on integrity of their peers. When you read the references Y cited, something cheaters are hoping you wont' do, the citations don't support the claim, as you can see with the links, below.
Now, of course, I've only left links for y'all. Kind of like citations right? _I_ could be lying. _I_ could be counting on human laziness to, in fact, lie to everyone here in order to make my point. (Which _IS_ what WC did)
But, of course, my point is, not to demonstrate what WC did but to say that this is why integrity matters because if everyone's dishonest, then you can rely on no one. Building "the left" that Carrol continually enjoins us to create is not possible without some semblance of trust among us or at the very least a commitment to it and willingness to uphold the ideal. Those who 'free ride' on that trust -- by cheating to score points in debates, left journals, scholarship -- attack the very thing that we need to built a left: mutuality, trust, a sense of shared commitment to something bigger than our egos. [1]
If you don't have that, you have nothing.
At 04:55 PM 5/27/2006, Miles Jackson wrote:
>For my money, the more dangerous problem here--the thing that really
>deserves our indignation and political response--is the precedent of
>calling for investigations of a scholar's work based on his political
>beliefs. Practically speaking, the academe can deal with the problem of
>scholarly misconduct; we have formal and informal peer review processes
>that marginalize and stigmatize "deviant" scholars. As Carrol argues, the
>most serious issue here is not WC's dubious scholarship; it is the fact
>that his work was singled out for investigation because of political
>pressure from outside of the academic community. This action
>fundamentally undermines the guiding principles of academic inquiry (e.g.,
>freedom to express and analyze unpopular viewpoints), and unless we nip
>these kinds of politically motivated investigations in the bud, left-wing
>scholars (actually, any academic scholars who advocate unpopular ideas)
>are truly fucked.
>
>Miles
:) My partner always used to find it curious when he'd compare a mainstream
political discussion list with what was discussed here. He'd say, "Wow, not
one person is in an uproar over X at LBO, but they're going crazy about it
over at all the other political discussion lists. What gives?
I always said: "That's because what matters to the left isn't what matters in the mainstream. Where we see problems, those guys think we are nuts. Where they see problems we say, "Yawn." The things we'll argue over are going to be completely different than the things mainstream folks argue over.
IOW, you and Carrol overlook the very thing that makes disagreements possible at all: a shared substrate of tacit agreement. What you both expect in this conversation is what doesn't happen ordinarily at all. We don't freak out in outrage over the things that everybody is outraged about. That's because we agree. There's no use in turning this place into an echo chamber where we hurl great gobs of cliche at our mutual preconceptions -- to rip of Cockburn. The list would last for 10 minutes or, rather, it's be as interesting as watching grass grow. "I don't like the neocons" "Me neither" "count me in on that" "Yeah, me too." "Neocons sucks."
Second, as Doug said, who is "we". We did what "we" can do when we raised hay before this happened. "This" was out of our control and "this" remains out of our control. "We" didn't nip it in the bud to begin with. Pony's trotted out of the gate and we're stepping around the doo piles and watching to see if his tail lifts so we can get out of the way.
What "we" should be doing is engaging in a massive letter writing campaign to denounce the situation. The scholarly community doesn't end at the campus grounds, it doesn't end at the borders. Indeed, even the AHA thinks the scholarly community involves people with an avocational interest in history and _students_ of history.
But more troubling to me: no one here has actually articulated what academic freedom means and why it exists and why they think it's important. Thomas Fast articulated his horror over the Attack on AF (TM) by saying that the university is shit to begin with. Yoshie implies as much by suggesting "everyone does it."
Um. OK.
If 30-40% of the university is composed of liars, who gives a flying fuck about it? With all the talk I hear around here about how useless academia is to leftist struggles, with all the talk of how where it's really at is in building "the left" that doesn't yet exist, with all the talk of the importance of activism ... really, who cares?
Is the university just a way to secure lefties a relatively secure job for life? Nothing wrong with that, but concerns over the sanctity of AF (TM) ring hollow if you basically think everyone in academia is a bunch of liars anyway. It rings even more hollow when you play the methodological dualism game: I have a can of shit, can you open it. (imperial teen)
Except with Dennis and Miles, I don't get the sense that anyone who's spoken to the Attack on AF (TM) actually gives a shit about academia. And why should anyone really. AF (tm) and academia are just another bourgeois institution, like voting or freedom of speech -- and we've often been told on this very list that both are a bunch of hoo ha.
Outrage over the attack on academic freedom by folks who don't normally evidence much of a concern about academia to begin with .... seems like a figleaf to cover up a hard on that's pointing somewhere else entirely.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org
[1]
"Incorrect Citations: A Comparison of Library Literature with Medical Literature." http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=225731&blobtype=pdf (You can read it yourself)
Title:Accuracy of References in Ten Library Science Journals. http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=RecordDetails&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ457993&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_accno&objectId=0900000b8003481a
"A Sixteen Journal Study of Accuracy of Direct Quotes and Associated Reference List Entries." http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=RecordDetails&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED331079&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_accno&objectId=0900000b8004c5ae
"Direct Quote and Reference List Entry Faults and Errors in a Sample of Articles from the American Educational Research Journal, Compared with Findings from Previous Research."
"A Ten Journal Study of Reference List Inaccuracies." http://www.eric.ed.gov/sitemap/html_0900000b8004c5af.html
"Errors in Bibliographic Citations: A Continuing Problem."
"Do Authors Check Their References?: http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/77/8/1011
(This one comes close, noting that 15% of the citations in the 150 journals they checked contained footnotes that did not say what the author contended)
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org