I just want to say before I start that I wrote this whole post by myself, and the parts I didn't write are correctly attributed to the proper sources.
Jacob Hale Russell, writing in 02138 Magazine (Harvard's alumni magazine), discusses some disturbing trends in academic writing. Specifically, he takes on the modern practice of employing numerous research assistants to essentially ghostwrite works for publication.
In 2004, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree issued a statement apologizing for plagiarism in his book All Deliberate Speed, plagiarism which he didn't know about, and which he promptly blamed on one of his harried research assistants.
It was a curious admission. In other words, at least some of Ogletree's manuscript was sent to his publisher without having been read by the person supposed to have written it. Yet to Ogletree, the crime was not that someone else had written the material, just that it wasn't the person Ogletree expected to write it.
I really recommend reading the whole thing, but if you're time-pressed there are extensive quotations and my comments below the fold.
Ogletree was reprimanded, but according to "a student familiar with Ogletree's writing process on a current book" nothing substantive has changed. Still with the army of research assistants, still with the attaching his name to work he has not written.
Russell compares the practice of academic ghostwriting to the more unsurprising varieties: athletes who don't write their own autobiographies, famous novelists who publish with incredible prolificacy, sometimes even postmortem. Does anyone really expect that Posh Spice wrote her whole 500-something page autobiography herself?
One might think that the ivory tower should and could resist such commercialism. If nowhere else, the provenance of an idea ought still to matter in academia; the authenticity of authorship should remain a truism. After all, one of the reasons scholars are granted tenure is so they can write free of the commercial pressures of the publishing world, taking as long as they need to get things right. And, whether in the sciences or the humanities, the world of scholarship has always prioritized the proper crediting of sources and co-contributors.
That image of academia may be idealistic, but most scholars still profess allegiance to it, and it is held up to undergraduate and graduate students as the proper way to conduct their own research and writing, reinforced by strict regulations regarding student plagiarism. As the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Handbook states, "Students who, for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, and ordinarily required to withdraw from the College."
Students--but not professors. Because, in any number of academic offices at Harvard, the relationship between "author" and researcher(s) is a distinctly gray area.
No one claims that this phenomenon is unique to Harvard--incidences of academic fraud have been reported in numerous outside cases. Even Stephen Ambrose (whom I love for both his work and the fact that he did it in New Orleans) felt the sting of plagiarism discovered. Nor does anyone deny that this practice is as old as can be. Comparisons have been drawn between modern professors and their research students on the one hand and Renaissance painters and their "ateliers" on the other. The ateliers were assistants to the great masters, capable of imitating their style and enabling the popular painters of the time to increase output (and income) by filling in, usually on bits of commissions that were not the main visual focus.
Some wonder, though, if Harvard shouldn't bear greater responsibility than other institutions in preserving academic idealism. As Lawrence Velvel (Dean, Massuchusetts School of Law) says, "Harvard sets the tone for the university world. When you get people at Harvard doing these kinds of things, it sets a horrendous example for other people."
Beyond its obvious practical consequences, such as incidents of plagiarism, the research-assistant-driven culture raises questions about the core of the academic enterprise. Outsourced work is partly a response to time constraints; it allows a professor to both produce more--more books, more op-eds--and have more time for non-research work, such as appearing on television, taking on pro-bono legal cases, and starting research centers. With such aims, a professor is often pursuing fundamentally different goals than the pursuit of knowledge: The frequent publication of quickly written popular books generally has more to do with the pursuit of fame and material success.
One could argue that the ghostwriting of pot-boiler popular work is the price we pay for having such brilliant and talented individuals in academia in the first place. They wouldn't be in such prestigious positions without having written (on their own, presumably) significant work advancing the state of knowledge at some point in their career. If they choose eventually to trade off on the "Harvard Professor" brand, well, shouldn't we be just be glad we had them at all?
Perhaps, but what happens when the practice starts trickling down the food chain?
The "atelier" is no longer the privilege of the long-tenured professor, though. One of academia's up-and-coming darlings is Roland Fryer, an assistant professor in the economics department who began teaching at Harvard just last year. Fryer is a media star: He has appeared on CNN and been written about in the New York Times, Esquire, and this issue of 02138...Fryer's group, the American Inequality Lab, works on a half-dozen or more major research areas at a time. To do so, Fryer now employs seven full-time "project managers", mostly recent college alums, and works with dozens of others. The students...each manage a research project, from designing the methodology to collecting data and running the numbers. Fryer writes the final papers, for which he is accorded primary authorship. "It's him casting a vision, us working through the details, and him correcting it," [one of his students] says. "Everyone can run the regression; it's really the idea that counts."
This struck me as very similar to the way (I imagine) a lab works in the natural sciences. You've got your P.I., who is mainly charged with the general direction (intellectual and practical) of the lab, and you've got your guys on the bench, who do most of the pipetting (and gel-electrophoresis and feeding rats fruit loops and...), and these may in fact be the guys who design the experiment and write up many of the results. In the end, the P.I.'s name is first on the list of authors. The difference between this scenario and some of the scenarios described in the article, though, is that the bench guys do get their names on the paper, which doesn't always happen in other subjects.
And it seems that no one really minds.
What's perhaps more surprising than professors' reliance upon student researcher/writers is the general lack of outrage or even concern the habit generates...
Not only does Harvard not seem to prohibit, punish, or even frown upon the use of academic researcher-cum-ghostwriters, sometimes the university even subsidizes it. The Office of Faculty Development and Diversity...employs a "research assistant" named Mae Clarke whose publicly available job description sounds strikingly like that of a ghostwriter. The diversity office website says: "Ms. Mae Clarke serves as the primary Research Assistant for Dr. [Evelyn] Hammonds who is working on a manuscript of the history of race in medicine and science in the United States. Ms. Clarke's responsibilities include organizing, drafting, and editing materials for the preparation of the manuscript and related papers. She will serve as copy editor for drafts of chapters. Ms Clarke also supports production of other written works."
Clarke is on sabbatical and couldn't be reached for comment, and "through a spokesperson" Dr. Hammonds declined to comment. In other words, Hammonds used a ghost-speaker to avoid answering a question about her ghostwriter. (emphasis mine)
Okay, so fair enough, a lot of research isn't all that fun. I can think of few people who get their jollies by transferring exactly .5 mL of something into 300 test tubes, or by cleaning data and running regressions, or by entering bibliographic information. And at some point, I think it's reasonable to say that you've graduated out of having to do the tedious stuff. That's why research assistants are there--so that the guy whose time is better spent coming up with new ideas or pondering the results of an experiment or a regression can spend his time doing that.
But how do you know where the line is between legitimate research assistance and ghostwriting? Where is the demarcation between receiving help and putting your name on top of something that you didn't produce? Is this a necessary facet of academia, or just a self-perpetuating outcome of the massive cults of personality surrounding the top researchers in a field? The more you publish, the more you are expected to publish, the more you rely on others to write some of it because there's so damn much, the more you are expected to publish etc.?
I know that many of the people in this forum are involved in academic research, in all different fields. I'm curious as to how the perception of ghostwriting varies among disciplines, as well as how prevalent it is across the academic spectrum. In the meantime, I've got to go do my (own, individual, solitary) work.
Hat Tip: C.B. Buente
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Even in the commercial world, the ghostwriter frequently gets credit. Often, you will see a book along the lines of "The Autobiography of Big Cheese", where the authorship is credited as "Big Cheese (with I. B. Ghostwriter)". In that situation, you know that Mr./Ms. Ghostwriter did most of the actual writing. So there is no excuse for academics to not give credit to their assistants who do the actual writing.
In the physical sciences, it is not always true that the lab leader gets to put his name first on the paper. Usually, the person who did the most important part of the work (as well as most of the actual writing) is listed as first author, even when that person is a student. The authority figure will usually be listed second or third (in some disciplines, he will be listed last).
In psychology, the professor generally assumes the last name on the author list. In fact, I would probably avoid joining a lab if the professor is always at the head of each publication, since this implies that you'll never get to run your own projects (or even worse, that someone else will take the primary credit for your work). I don't imagine that it would look very good for post-grad and other applications if you've only ever published as a co-author.
I have no idea if there is concrete evidence, but back in the early '60s there were numerous rumblings that the prolific writings of Isaac Asimov, particularly much of his non-fiction, were primarily the work of a stable of "research assistants." At least one of those, "The Brain," was panned in the trade press as being based on out of date sources and containing inaccurate information.