[lbo-talk] Mom, what's academic freedom?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 5/28/06, info at pulpculture.org <info at pulpculture.org> wrote:
<snip>
> 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."


> "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)

<blockquote>American Journal of Public Health, Vol 77, Issue 8
1011-1012, Copyright (c) 1987 by American Public Health Association

JOURNAL ARTICLE
Do authors check their references? A survey of accuracy of references
in three public health journals

P Eichorn and A Yankauer

We verified a random sample of 50 references in the May 1986 issue of
each of three public health journals. Thirty-one per cent of the 150
references had citation errors, one out of 10 being a major error
(reference not locatable). Thirty per cent of the references differed
from authors' use of them with half being a major error (cited paper
not related to author's contention).
<http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/77/8/1011></blockquote>

The point is that 30% of the references differing from authors'  use
of them and half of them being unrelated to authors' contentions is
NOT the sort of fact that a political investigation takes into account
AT ALL.  If some professor regarded as a leftist achieves some kind of
notoriety, a university investigates his works in response to
political pressures, and finds several major problems, it doesn't
matter if the said professor's rate of minor errors is just 7% and his
rate of major errors is only 0.05%.  No one (except Michael Perelman)
will say, wow, he's so much better than the average!  Most will say,
whoa, what a crook!

If a university wants to check its professor's footnotes and the rest
of her works thoroughly, check every professor's, as a matter of
routine safeguards for quality of scholars' publications, and take
appropriate actions -- e.g., not giving her tenure -- if problems are
found.  But a university shouldn't single out and investigate a
professor in response to the governor's, FoxNews's, and others' calls
for her head.  This shouldn't be a difficult point to understand,
unless one can't see the forest for the trees.

-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>