Yeah, that was interesting, though the tone was a bit off-putting, and reminds me why I don’t read much on Substack anymore.
I agree with the overall point, that academic integrity is more important than scoring political points. And that guy’s probably about as close to an expert as we can get.
It also confirms my feeling that the way these universities try to brand themselves and what they actually stand for are two different things.
That was a really interesting article, and I plan to click around the rest of that guy’s site to see what else he talks about. Scientific integrity is such an important issue (especially considering the public’s already tenous grasp of scientific principles).
Out of pure curiosity, could you elaborate on this? Like I said, I enjoyed the article, but I’m not too familiar with Substack.
Well, it’s not like I’ve read every Substack out there, but I followed a few journalists who were cancelled and so set up shop on Substack. They had some interesting takes on issues that you wouldn’t really see in any media outlet, but they were needlessly hostile and aggressive in their tone, not to mention constantly grinding axes about things nobody besides them should really care about, and it eventually made me feel bad and I unsubscribed. Also, their comments sections were batshit insane which made me realize that even though they were “independent” journalists, they were still feeding the right-wing reactionary machine. When that’s your base, I look askance at you.
I also followed Jonathan Haidt who is the guy all up in arms about teens and cell phones, but his logic was often poor (he appealed to Pascal’s Wager at one point) and he recently wrote a stupid reactionary piece about the Penn/Harvard fiasco and how it’s all those damned progressives. It’s good if you want to hear a different POV but I am really sensitive to the attitudes with which people deliver information, even when I agree with them.
I do still follow a friend’s Substack and my husband likes Your Local Epidemiologist for COVID analysis. There are probably some good things out there but I haven’t looked lately.
How I read this, is that you’re saying the easiest portion of her work was the acknowledgement, and she copied it, but that’s OK. She’s lifting someone else’s work when the task was easy but we’re sure she’s on the up and up when the sledding gets difficult?
What an odd way to read it. I’m saying it doesn’t reflect on her academic integrity, not that it’s the easiest part of her academic work. It’s something separate, and I don’t expect the same rigor to be involved.
Right. The link provided compared it to hearing someone’s wedding vows, really liking them, and using them at your own ceremony. Not particularly original, but presumably still heartfelt—and most important, having zero to do with anything within the boundaries of formal writing.
IOW, really, really weak tea as an example of a lack of academic integrity.
Interesting. In my business, we have a phrase that says "if I can’t trust you to do the easy things right, how can I trust you to do the difficult things when I’m not watching? That’s the bin I put this in. YMMV, and clearly does in this area.
To the extent that that saying applies to this situation, I think it fundamentally misunderstands human nature, and specifically our tendency to compartmentalize.
Years ago I had a friend who was a bona fide genius at math. Like got his doctorate in an obscure branch of chaos mathematics studying “bouquets” created when graphing certain functions that incorporated exponents of imaginary numbers or something, I never understood exactly what it was.
It was the nineties, and one day we were walking along the road shooting the shit about Pat Robertson and the 700 Club, and he said, “Sure, they call it the 700 Club, but if you take 44 from it, what do you get?” and I shot back, “The Six Five Six Club?” I was teasing him because this enormous mathematical genius forgot to borrow from the tens place.
If I couldn’t trust him to do the easy things right, how could I trust him to do the difficult things–is that how it goes? Well, easy. I know he wasn’t putting much effort into his throwaway comment. He was compartmentalizing, treating it as a dumb joke with a friend, not as part of his professional academic work. Given his enormous success in his field, I am confident he didn’t leave mistakes like that in his thesis.
If someone messes up the easy bit that’s peripheral to their central work, that has little to do with whether they mess up the hard bits that are central to their work.
But also, i don’t think there’s anything wrong with using a phrase you like in an acknowledgement. It wasn’t enough words to be a copyright problem.
Several years ago, a friend wrote me a condolence note that i really liked. It rang true. It turns out his was a riff off a standard thing that i just hadn’t seen before, but at that moment or was new to me, any more importantly, it said what i needed to hear from a friend.
I have used the same language ever since. I’ve never given attribution. Because nobody gives attribution for that kind of thing. Because the point of condolences, or acknowledgements isn’t to be original. It’s to express common sentiments in a meaningful way.
She got the easy thing right. She thanked people who supported her in a meaningful way.
I’m still of the mind that the plagiarism stuff was an offense that was only job ending in context, but this seems like a horrible comparison. Your friend and you yourself are not publishing your condolences. No one is upset if a friend quotes song lyrics without acknowledgment in best wishes to a friend, or lifts from some poem. Publishing something as your own creation is not comparable to that. She knew that when she plopped others’ verbiage in as her own.
I get lifting verbiage for an acknowledgment is minor compared to lifting verbiage in the academic meat of your work which is minor to falsifying data (which apparently is not as uncommon as I would have hoped). Gay’s is in the greys. But your take seems excessively dismissive.
What does it mean to “publish”? The comment i lifted was written in Facebook.
I guess i just don’t see acknowledgements as a form of publication that makes any claim about being original. They mostly read pretty much the same. I feel strongly that they should be heartfelt.
I’ll probably regret showing how dense I am, but I don’t get it……?
666 i.e the sign of the beast
Ah! Got it…