Never Make Mistakes Journalists Can Understand
Job security through obscurity
The story of the moment in academic social media is the resignation of Harvard’s President, Claudine Gay, after various investigations revealed a bunch of places in her published academic work where she appears to have copied text nearly verbatim from her sources. This exploded into a large argument about whether this should really count as plagiarism, mostly because the people who dug up the examples are unpleasant right-wing provocateurs and nobody wants to hand them a victory.
I think this is pretty dumb because 90% of the folks arguing that it was merely careless would at least threaten to flunk an undergraduate who they caught turning in a paper with this level of text duplication. Which means it’s a terrible look for the president of a major university. Is it lose-your-job terrible? Coming on the heels of that disastrous Congressional hearing— which I think was at least an offer-your-resignation-and-have-it-declined-by-the-board level of fuck-up— yeah, probably. Being a president at any university is a massive privilege, and had this been uncovered five years ago, it almost certainly would’ve disqualified her from the job. Combined with the flop before Congress, this is two months of wholly avoidable bad press, and trying to hang on was only making it worse. She needed to fall on her sword.
The angle on this that I think is a little more interesting is captured in this tweet by Alan Cole:
Cole is referring to Dan Ariely, a psychology (of course) professor at Duke (of course), who has been fairly credibly accused of academic misconduct at a level vastly beyond what Gay did, but is hanging in there. Ariely has faced multiple claims that papers he wrote were based on data that was sloppily managed at best, and wholly fictitious at worst. But he’s still got a job, and a prominent platform from which to write and speak.
The combination of these two reminded me of the Jonah Lehrer affair back in the ScienceBlogs era. Lehrer, for those who don’t remember, was a pop-psychology writer and speaker who rapidly rose to TED-level prominence writing about current research in a bunch of places (including a blog at ScienceBlogs), and then precipitously fell after his newest book quoted Bob Dylan saying some things that Bob Dylan never actually said. In the subsequent investigation, it was also found that he had committed “self-plagiarism,” re-using blocks of text in multiple places, and he was basically drummed out of the business.
The resonance with the Gay story is pretty clear, but it also holds a parallel to the Ariely story. That is, a number of people in the psychology field— most notably my then-colleague Chris “Invisible Gorilla” Chabris— had been pointing out for quite a while that Lehrer’s summaries of research were glib and oversimplified to the point of misrepresenting the actual state of research. Those complaints, while well-founded (to the best of my ability to assess social-science research) basically fell on deaf ears, because much like Ariely’s alleged misconduct, they were kind of technical. It took a bit of expertise to understand what he was doing wrong, and as a result journalists without that expertise tended to ignore the complaints, and even defended Lehrer.
It wasn’t until the fabricated quotes and copied text came out that the science-writer community turned on Lehrer, because those were offenses that they clearly understood. A dispute between a scientist and a writer, or between two scientists, was easily waved off as just a two-sides-to-every-story kind of deal, but there’s no mistaking two nearly identical passages of text sold to two different outlets.
So, to be a bit flippant, the lesson here is clear: if you’re going to be shady, make sure you’re doing it in areas and ways that journalists won’t readily understand. The more opaque you can make your fraud, the longer you’ll be able to bring in those sweet, sweet five-digit speaking fees…
I would’ve sworn I wrote something along these lines for ScienceBlogs back in the day, but Google is failing me and I have class to teach this morning. If you want to see whether I manage to dig it up, here’s a button:
And if you want to argue about any of these situations, the comments will be open:
"Lehrer’s summaries of research were glib and oversimplified to the point of misrepresenting the actual state of research"
I thought that was all of pop-psych, and much of pop-science.
What's your reply to Drum's "this is exaggerated"? https://jabberwocking.com/most-plagiarism-is-a-nothingburger/
he seems to admit more recently that there might have been more plagiarism than he understood in Gay's case and that tribal feelings might have something to do with his initial (lukewarm) support for her keeping her job.
personally, I want her to go b/c I agree with Bill Ackman latest tweet. DEI and this oppressor/oppressed BS ideology are a blight on the Left and its intellectual traditions, its philosophies and political goals and they need to be eradicated.