The duty of college professors is to transmit and create knowledge and truth by practicing, and honoring, the time-tested rules and procedures of the knowledge-making enterprise.
Because knowledge and truth can offend and threaten--and provoke suppression and retaliation--we professors have claimed, and have been granted by society, privileges and immunities that protect our socially important endeavor. As we know, "academic freedom" allows us to research, write, and teach within our area of scholarly competence without fear of reprisal from internal or external forces. "Tenure" enables us to pursue truth wherever it might lead--and no matter whom it hurts--by protecting us from being fired without due process and good cause. And "peer review," by allowing colleagues familiar with our area to knowledgeably evaluate and critique the quality of what we produce, frees us from the threat of having our scholarly work judged by noncomprehending outsiders.
"Academic freedom" and "peer review" work together. Academic freedom does not provide immunity from the dutiful scrutiny and judgment of one's peers, nor does it release one from the obligation to scrutinize one's peers. Peer review--accountability through self-policing--requires us to identify professors who do not perform to minimal standards, or who violate the highly effective procedures and rules of evidence and argumentation that have evolved over centuries to enable us to differentiate knowledge and truth from ignorance and error.
This policing function is especially important, for any form of academic dishonesty represents "an abandonment of principle, a betrayal of essential purpose" (Lewis 11). If widespread enough, violations of academic integrity could threaten to undo the bargain we have made with the larger society, which grants us privileges and immunities only as long as we remain honorably committed to transmitting and creating knowledge and truth.
There are signs that commitment to this academic creed is wavering, if not collapsing. Growing numbers of academics--still, perhaps, only a significant minority of the 900,000 instructors in higher education--play fast and loose with the rules and procedures that allow the knowledge-making enterprise to winnow truth from error. They overlook wrongdoing, deny it, or defend it, and some even go so far as to intimidate and suppress colleagues who dutifully uncover violations of the academic creed. While there are few statistics that illuminate the scope and depth of the problem, an anecdotal tour through the academic landscape reveals a serious erosion of professorial commitment to basic standards of academic integrity (1).
Plagiarism comes from the Latin verb plagiare, to steal. Edward White, a professor of English at California State University, reminds us why plagiarism is a grievous offense against the academic honor code: "Plagiarism is outrageous, because it undermines the whole purpose of education itself: Instead of becoming more of an individual thinker, the plagiarist denies the self and the possibility of learning. Someone who will not, or cannot, distinguish his or her ideas from those of others offends the most basic principles of learning" (A 58).
Yet, college students across the country are plagiarizing "like there's no tomorrow" (Clayton 17). When caught, some glibly blame their frauds on hard professors, but it would be closer to the truth to blame them on "soft" professors.
What was once the most iniquitous of academic sins is quickly becoming--in the eyes of these professors--a miscue not serious enough to warrant much of penalty. Growing numbers of professors who catch students cheating or plagiarizing ignore the event, grading students as usual and passing them on (Schneider A8). For example, one law professor decided to not file cheating charges against a student after the student filed a grievance about the professor's inquiry into the student's cheating (Ibid.). Another in the sciences didn't file charges against two students who cheated on a lab report because he was afraid other students wouldn't like him (Ibid.). A writer covering this story observes, "Preventing and punishing cheating languish at the bottom of most professors' 'to do' lists--if they make the list at all" (Ibid.). This "soft" attitude about plagiarism, of course, does little more than encourage even more students to do it.
More and more professors regard cheating and plagiarism as trivial events not worth their valuable time to monitor or punish. Of course, some plagiarism is trivial, even accidental, and should be dealt with quietly. And sometimes "plagiarism" is hard to differentiate from "failure to attribute" or other academic miscues. Yet, even in cases that are flagrant, many scholars are willing to play fast and loose with scholarly ideals and ethical values. According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, many professors simply "don't see the pursuit of academic honesty as part of their job descriptions...Others prefer to devote their energies to the 300 students in their class who care about learning instead of wasting time on the three scofflaws who don't" (Ibid.).
And still others are just too busy to care any longer about academic integrity. As one busy academic puts it, "Most professors at a place like Northwestern can't be bothered. They're not rewarded for teaching; they're rewarded for research. There's no future in pursuing cheating from the standpoint of a professor's self-interest" (Ibid.). In short, some professors--how many, no one knows--are simply refusing to monitor compliance with those ethical standards upon which their professional lives, and the edifice of knowledge, are based.
One notorious plagiarism case--involving, sadly, Martin Luther King, Jr.--illustrates that some professors not only ignore plagiarism but excuse it.
In 1991 a panel of scholars at Boston University ruled that Dr. King plagiarized parts of his 1952 doctoral dissertation at BU by "appropriating material from sources not explicitly credited in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally and at some distance in the text from a close paraphrase or verbatim quotation." A careful analysis of King's dissertation by Theodore Pappas revealed that over sixty percent was copied from an earlier dissertation. Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, and professor of history at Stanford University, found additionally that King's student essays and published and unpublished addresses and essays all contain "numerous instances of plagiarism and, more generally, textual appropriation."
When the charges became public, some professors--both black and white--rushed to palliate or deny King's wrongdoing. The most bald-faced effort came from the Acting President of Boston University (October 1990): "Dr. King's dissertation has, in fact, been scrupulously examined and reexamined by scholars...Not a single instance of plagiarism of any sort has been identified" (in Pappas Plagiarism 68). Taking a similar tack, the committee of BU academics found "no blatancy" in the plagiarism despite the fact that King appropriated page after page from other works.
Others tried to palliate the offense by saying it was the result of "carelessness" (despite the fact that King had taken a graduate course in thesis writing). A few, like Keith D. Miller, an English professor at Arizona State University, notoriously argued that King merely had drawn on the oral traditions of the black church in which "voice merging"--the blending of the words and ideas of those who spoke before--is commonplace. A somewhat conflicted Professor Carson went further, describing King's "pattern of unacknowledged appropriation of words and ideas," which he does label "plagiarism," as a "legitimate utilization of political, philosophical, and literary texts" that allowed King "to express his ideas effectively using the words of others" via a "successful composition method." And Professor George McLean praised King's plagiarized dissertation as "a contribution in scholarship for which his doctorate was richly deserved" (in Pappas "Life and Times" 43). As Theodore Pappas points out, to say that [King's] doctorate was "richly deserved" when 66 percent of his dissertation was plagiarized is "absurd and dishonest" (Ibid.).
But "absurdity" and "dishonesty" now often trump adherence to the academic creed. When confronted with irrefutable proof of plagiarism, what did many notable scholars do? In the words of Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Research Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida:
They lied, they told half-truths, they made up fables, they did everything they could but address facts; three enlightened individuals even threatened [Pappas's] life. In the face of their own university's rules against plagiarism, Boston University's academic authorities and professors somehow found excuses for King's plagiarism. They found extenuating circumstances, they reworded matters to make them sound less dreadful, they compromised their own university's integrity and the rules supposedly enforced to defend and protect the process of learning and the consequent degrees. They called into question the very standing of the university as a place where cheating is penalized and misrepresentation condemned (in Pappas, I 1).
Postmodern theory contends that all texts owe their existence to earlier texts, so, by definition, there is no originality or plagiarism. Or, as Kernan puts, it "We are all plagiarists now" (193). Why has this sophistry been embraced by academics? It justifies and encourages the ruthless exploitation of already published texts, thus allowing academics to fatten their CVs by weaving other texts into their own with careless disregard for noting the source. A bit guilty about what they've done, perhaps, they at least refuse to play the hypocrite by hounding others who have done the same thing.
While there are no firm statistics about how prevalent plagiarism is, a couple of scholars in comparative education say that "academic fraud" now plagues education around the world. Surveying 2,000 faculty members and 2,000 doctoral students in departments of chemistry, civil engineering, microbiology, and sociology at major research universities, they found that eight percent of the faculty and seven percent of the students said they observed or had direct knowledge of plagiarism by faculty members in their own departments. Moreover, nearly one-third of the faculty members had first-hand knowledge of student plagiarism (Swazey, Louis, and Anderson A24).
According to another researcher, cheating, the falsification of credentials, and plagiarism have reached "epidemic proportions" throughout higher education (Desruisseaux). Cases where established scholars "appropriated" the material of their graduate students and research assistants (under the theory that professors own the ideas of their bright students and research assistants) suggest that the problem is more widespread than anyone dares to imagine. "Considering how many graduate students write excellent research papers, turn them in and never follow up on the subjects, one can only guess how many of those papers are being recycled without attribution..." (Wagner). There will be no appetite for establishing clear international standards for different degrees of plagiarism (and related offenses), as Michael Davis urges (107), as long as doing so would inhibit promoting one's career.
On every campus in the country students are given some sort of "Guide for Understanding Academic Integrity" that defines "plagiarism" and explains to them why academic integrity matters. In the future, if trends continue, that same brochure may have to be given to faculty members too. It is the duty of professors to guard and protect intellectual integrity: someone has to say how things are, without bias or cunning. If the professors on Dr. King's committee had done so responsibly, they would have served him far better than they did and prevented the scandal now swirling around his memory. They should be shunned and shamed, not the people who established and revealed the truth.
Our commitment to integrity, professional ethics, responsible scholarship, and freedom of thought cannot be contingent on our politics, self-interest or humanitarian sympathies. Society has accorded us unusual security and privilege because it expects in return the benefits from our objective criticism and truth-telling. If we cannot supply those things, we cannot claim any more moral authority than tel-evangelists or fight-promoters, and do not deserve, because we do not really use, the privileges and immunities that society has granted us.
Although our knowledge-making enterprise encourages creative mistakes--even outlandish notions--as a productive way of generating new and invigorating ideas that will furnish the truths of tomorrow, it does not encourage--nor should it tolerate--intentionally fraudulent claims and consciously falsified data. Not only would such behavior testify to the claimant's contempt for the very ends of liberal science--truth--but, since not all error can be detected, some bogus data will inevitably slip through, not only injuring the integrity of the system but perhaps harming people as well. Do we want Boeing engineers falsifying flight-test data?
Unfortunately, in today's ethically challenged universities, the fabrication of data is troublingly common, more common, perhaps, than plagiarism. A survey of 469 researchers and administrators of the American Association for the Advancement of Science revealed the surprising fact that 27 percent--124 people--believed that they had come across or witnessed plagiarized, fabricated, or falsified research over a ten-year period (Strauss).
Since the early '80s a fair number of cases of scientific fraud have made headlines. Barry Garfinkel, a psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota, was convicted of falsifying data in a study of anti-depressants; Stephen Breuning, a psychologist specializing in drug treatment for the mentally retarded, invented many of his findings (Dolnick 59; Bell 105-109). Robert A. Slutsky fabricated data in 13 of his papers. John Darsee fabricated nearly every paper that he wrote (Bell, 112). Roger Poisson falsified data for an international breast cancer study (Taylor; Gorman). Another scientist committed suicide (with her husband) after being accused of fraudulent research practices (Ratelle). Bernard Fisher falsified data in a federally financed study of breast cancer treatments (Pappas "All" 25). An audit of 120 institutions in a national breast cancer research project found falsified reports in eleven of them (AP, 16 June 1994).
As anyone who has been tracking this problem knows, I have listed only a smattering of cases; there are literally thousands more. Each issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports yet another accusation of malfeasance leveled against an academic researcher, almost always in the sciences. Faced with this problem, higher education has tried to deal with it characteristically by denying it. "The editor of Science went so far as to claim, on the basis of no visible study whatsoever, that the incidence of scientific fraud was extremely small. University administrators have echoed the sentiment, while paying lip service to the need to correct whatever problems occasionally occur" (Dong A54). "Leading science journals have characteristically closed their pages to papers exposing fraudulent research. Science refused to publish the work of Judith P. Swazey and her colleagues [who are quoted in this essay], whose survey results offer a serious challenge to its editor's Panglossian position" that 99.9999 percent of scientific reports are fraud free (Lewis 132).
In Betrayers of the Truth (1982), written before the problem mushroomed, two journalists, William Broad and Nicholas Wade, were forced to come to some sobering and disturbing conclusions: 1) that fraud in science (primarily physics, biology and medicine) is common; 2) that the belief that fraud in science is uncommon is the result of self-deception, not evidence; and 3), that the much-vaunted guarantees of scientific accuracy and honesty are myths (especially Chapter 12; Davis 49). "Read a stack of such stories and there seems no escaping the conclusion that science is just another corrupt enterprise, as rife with scandal as Congress or the used-car business or the savings and loan industry" (Dolnick 60).
Springing from the academy's overweening righteousness, the denial of wrongdoing can only increase the incidence of academic malpractice and intensify the corruption of academic purpose (Lewis 131). When scholars willing to violate rules realize they have nothing to fear from their colleagues or employers, they will proceed without fear. If scientists and academics do not do more to discourage fabrications, falsehoods, and other kinds of academic fraud, the advancement of knowledge will be seriously undermined, as Philip Campbell, editor of Nature, fears: should this moral decay continue, he believes, science will be brought "into grave disrepute with politicians and the media, waste large amounts of research funds, and divert significant energy into judicial investigation" (CHE).
Although the fabrication of data occurs most commonly in the hard sciences. it also occurs in the social sciences and humanities. In the early '80s, Robert Maddox, in The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War, accused a host of historians of gross scholarly frauds and evidence-faking to advance their ideological agenda. After tracking down footnotes, Maddox concluded: "These books without exception [emphasis in the original] are based upon pervasive misusages of the source material" (10).
At Princeton, an assistant professor was recommended for tenure despite the fact that his book not only misquoted archival material but silently changed its documentary sources (Kernan 195). A prominent Harvard historian (Simon Schama) described his books as historical novellas and works of imagination, not scholarship, and boasted that they include passages that are pure inventions, "purely imagined fiction" (in Kernan 195). Kernan points out that Schama's public acknowledgement indicates "the extent to which such concepts as fact and originality" are losing their force in the academy (Kernan 196).
The recent and notorious case of Rigoberta Menchu and her somewhat fictionalized autobiography reveals just how shallow the commitment of many humanists to fundamental scholarly values actually is. Menchu, a Quiche Mayan from Guatemala, wrote an autobiography entitled I, Rigoberta Menchu:An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1983), which quickly entered the multicultural canon and won her the Nobel Prize for Peace (1992). The autobiography is popular on American campuses (2) because it presents a harrowing tale of class, gender and ethnic oppression under the right-wing Guatemalan army, and recounts the political evolution of Rigoberta from an ignorant peasant girl to a Marxist agitator for the rights of indigenous peoples and women. Her life is "an explicit indictment of the historical role of the West and Western institutions" (D'Souza 72-73).
The only trouble is much of Rigoberta's autobiography, including some of most moving claims of oppression, is fabricated, filled with ties and half-truths, according to David Stoll, an anthropologist, in Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999)(3). Yes, she told some important truths (the Guatemalan army did commit many atrocities), but Rigoberta's account is so distorted, according to Stoll, as to obscure many crucial issues, such as why the violence occurred in the first place, how the peasants reacted to it, and what they really thought about the local Marxist guerrilla movement.
But my interest is not with the lies, distortions and half-truths of this celebrated "autobiography" but with how professors reacted to Stoll's findings (which were checked out, incidently, by The New York Times). Not surprisingly, her supporters have leapt to her defense, concocting sophisticated, and elusive, explanations for the "discrepancies" between Rigoberta's published account and the documentary record (ix, 189-194). Since Stoll has dealt with these already, I want to focus on the claim that the validity and accuracy of Menchu's material simply should not concern professors committed to finding the truth.
As Wellesley's Marjorie Agosin famously declared, 'Whether the books is true or not, I don't care" (Wilson "A Challenge" A14). "This controversy does not inauthenticate Menchu's book," explains Timothy Brook, a Stanford professor. "The controversy not only will not lead me to cut the book from the reading list, but might in fact induce me to move it up from secondary reading to required text." When I asked a colleague at MSU to review Stoll's book, he replied that he wouldn't touch it; "I prefer the myths to the truth. If it isn't true, it should have been." Many instructors who now teach the book say that it doesn't matter if the facts in the book are wrong, because "they believe Ms. Menchu's story speaks to a greater truth about the oppression of poor people in Central America" (Ibid.).
This defense suggests that a new standard of truth--"new" since the sixties--is gaining ground in the humanities and social sciences. As Cynthia Ozick puts it, "Scholars are nowadays calling historiography into radical question; history is seen as the historian's clay; omniscience is suspect, objectivity is suspect, the old-fashioned claims of historical truthfulness are suspect...(23). To the old left-wing argument that since there is no objective history, the past should be exploited to achieve ideological goals in the future, is added the postmodern notion that there is no such thing as truth, only rhetoric. So some scholars place more emphasis on voice, narrative, and story than on truth (Leo). One of the outside evaluators of the manuscript for Pappas's Plagiarism and the Culture War advised the publisher not to print it because "such honesty and truth-telling could only be destructive" (in Pappas Plagiarism 174).
When a senior appointment's committee dutifully refused to award tenure to a scholar who fabricated material and silently changed archival sources, his colleagues railed against "facticity" and "the tyranny of facts" (Kernan 195). Eleven professors joined to defend the author in an issue of Radical History Review (March 1985).
Ironically, postmodernists and "scholars of the left" have a renewed respect for facts and truth when talking about, let's say, Jefferson's alleged fathering of children with one of his slaves; then DNA evidence is accepted as incorrigible proof. When evidence and proof work against their politics, they evoke political expediency: "Yes," they respond, "the work is full of lies, deceptions, and fabrications, but they serve a good cause." Indeed, the Tawana Brawley syndrome--lying for a noble or "higher" truth--recently discredited in court, now has found a comfortable roost in the universities, where growing numbers of "well-intentioned" students fabricate "racist" incidents to drum up support for "diversity" (Gose).
To assert that certain lies are good, as Menchu herself has declared, is dangerous and illogical. Take, for example, one of her own deceptions. By transforming of a squalid dispute between family members over a parcel of land into a drama of indigenous victims and evil invaders, she fed "dangerous illusions" and created "easy pretexts for violence" (Schwartz). Moreover, if facts, validity, and truth don't matter, how can we defend beneficial laws and policies or talk about "human rights?" If it's all "interpretation," why establish "truth" commissions after bloody civil war? How can we oppose totalitarian murderers like Stalin? Or honor real victims?
In Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, Jonathan Rauch presents a trenchant and lucid explanation of how Western Civilization makes knowledge and generally resolves questions of intellectual authority. This system, which Rauch calls "liberal science" (the term embraces all disciplines and many intellectual endeavors), creates knowledge and expertise by subjecting every truth-claim to vigorous independent checking by people motivated to detect error. Fact-checkers, fault-finders, and whistle-blowers play an crucial role in our knowledgemaking system, and should be honored for their contributions to establishing the truth.
But because of the climate that now prevails on most campuses, they seldom are. In fact, these people are more likely to be shunned, sued, or slandered than applauded, one more sign of the breakdown of the academic creed.
Professor Stoll, for example, is unpopular in the academy (Wilson "A Challenge" A16). Early on he was warned not to pursue his investigation because to do so "would violate the right of a native person to tell her story in her own way." He has been accused of conducting a "Kenneth Starrstyle" investigation motivated, predictably, by "racism" (Wilson "A Challenge" A15).
Ted Weiss, who chaired the House Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee, conducted hearings into scientific misconduct and found that "retaliation against the whistle blower involved to be a rather commonplace occurrence."
Walter W. Steward and Ned Feder, the "fraud busters" at the National Institutes of Health, were denounced as "zealots," "vigilantes," and "self-appointed policemen" (Dolnick 56), and eventually sent "into scientific limbo" and forbidden from investigating misconduct during working hours (Doinick 58; Grossman). When Robert Sprague charged, correctly, that Stephen Breuning falsified research findings, he lost his funding (Taubes 50).
An associate professor at Montefiore Medical Center accused her division chief of plagiarism when he photocopied a published book chapter and replaced her name with his own. The medical center fired the complainant and then charged her with scientific misconduct for not giving adequate credit to her division chief when she published her work (Weiss). Five hundred thousand dollars later she had the expensive pleasure of having a court substantiate her charges. Two former officials at Texas State Technical College at Marillo sued when they were fired for blowing the whistle on a criminal money-making operation on their campus; they were awarded over thirty-five million dollars.
Not all court cases turn out so well for the whistle-blower, or the profession. When Mark Feldman, an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Mathematics, proved that a new hire had fabricated some claims on her CV, he was fired (and the new hire given tenure). He sued and won. But the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit overturned the decision on the grounds that whenever a faculty member at a state university is fired for raising a question about possible deception in another faculty member's credentials, the courts must take it as a fact that the university believed that the fired faculty member made an unsupported charge. That fact, the Court also held, cannot be altered by evidence or the findings of a jury (Feldman).
Two former university administrators at the University of North Alabama were fired after revealing violations of NCAA rules (Ambrose); an independent investigation of the allegations confirmed their claims. Brian J. McMahon was fired from El Camino College when he blew the whistle on the college's practice of enrolling phantom students in classes to attract more state and federal funds to keep classes open despite low enrollment (Reynolds). And two tenured (white) professors were literally hounded out of "historically black" Cheyney University of Pennsylvania when they opposed the appointment of an Asian-American applicant who was unqualified. In this case, the two whistle-blowers were suddenly, and deceitfully, accused of making racist remarks, missing classes, failing to show up for lab sessions, and even of stalking and attempting to rape the woman who had originally pressured them to vote for the Asian-American applicant. Even students were enlisted in this campaign of harassment and vilification. Eventually, the two were awarded $2.2 million, although the two who had led the attack against them remained on the faculty and were not charged with wrongdoing (Schneider, September 1998).
When Fordham professor Jere Crook accused a student of plagiarism, and she complained to administrators, his contract was not renewed (Campus Report 13.3 [March 1998]: 2). Andras J.E. Bodrogligeti, who has taught languages at U.C.L.A. for 28 years, said administrators refused to discipline 30 students caught cheating and then punished him for turning them in by canceling his 13-year-old summer program and investigating him for misconduct (Wilson "Professor" A9; Schneider "Why" A9).
To explain why they don't officially charge more students caught cheating, professors often cite the fact that administrators do not support them and often undercut their efforts: "Scholars claim they're getting shafted by the system. Guilty verdicts are being overturned. Administrators, fearful of lawsuits or bad publicity, back down when challenged by litigious students. Professors who push to penalize cheaters somehow find themselves tied to the whipping post" (Schneider "Why" A9).
Punishing whistle-blowers has had its intended effect:
A study carried out by June Tangney found that less that 50 percent of faculty suspecting fraud in the research of their colleagues did anything to verify their suspicions, let alone file a formal complaint. Nor should it be surprising that Swazey and her colleagues found that while many faculty members claimed to endorse an obligation to report research misconduct, they were reluctant to do so. In both studies the message expressed with undeniable clarity is that whistle-blowing can be personally costly, it is simply better not to know whether or not your colleagues are proceeding honestly in the execution of their research efforts. (Lewis 133)
Steward and Feder say that over the years they have heard from hundreds of researchers who believed they had witnessed fraud but were afraid to report it, and others who had made allegations of fraud and wished they hadn't (Taubes 50).
The research of Swazey and colleagues found that:
Fear of retaliation for reporting suspected wrongdoing is a key problem in the way that ethical problems are dealt with in universities. More than half of our student respondents believe that they could not report possible misconduct by a faculty member without retaliation, and 29 per cent also would expect sanctions for reporting another student. Faculty members also are concerned about the consequences of whistle blowing: Only 60 per cent believe that they could report a graduate student and 35 per cent that they could report a colleague with impunity. In our interviews, some faculty members and students told us that when they did confront or report someone they believed was engaging in ethically wrong or dubious research practices, their concerns often were ignored, they were penalized for their actions, or the incident was covered up. (A25)
After listening to testimony about how administrators and colleagues attempted to silence and punish those who exposed error and fraud, Congress established rules forbidding universities from punishing those who make accusations, even when the accusations aren't true. But these rules proved ineffective, so a federal commission proposed the "Whistle Blower's Bill of Rights," which would dictate how universities must treat those who expose scientific wrongdoing at research institutions (Burd). That such a Bill of Rights has to be imposed on universities in the first place is a disturbing indication of the decrepitude of the academic creed, for there can be no greater perversion of it than punishing those who speak the truth.
For peer review to actually work, every faculty member at every stage of the review process has to be a responsible fact-checker, fault-finder, and, if need be, whistle-blower. But, as one might assume from the material I've presented, on campuses nowadays these are risky things to be. Thanks to fear of reprisal, there may be less serious peer accountability on America's campuses than anyone wants to admit (Lewis 48).
To be fair, peer review, especially within departments, always contains the threat of retribution; the people we critique today often have the power to critique us tomorrow. But what has been happening in higher education for over a decade goes beyond this person-to-person conflict. Now even fault-finders and whistle-blowers who are right--factually and legally--are routinely pressured and punished--by colleagues and administrators who should be defending them--for doing what the academic creed requires--exposing academic wrongdoing. How many of us are going to stick to our expert guns when we know that our principled stubbornness will only offend people we have to face day after day after day, and who could hurt us?
One might describe the mood that prevails in most departments and professional interactions today as "chummy permissiveness" (Lewis 128). This chummy permissiveness is encouraged by the way that most professors now define "academic freedom." The term has come to mean, "I get to do my thing and you get to do your thing, without interference." In essence, the term interdicts "what would otherwise be normal curiosity about the work-related behavior of one's colleagues," shielding it from peer reviewer. In essence, "academic freedom," as functionally defined by the professoriate, legitimizes a sort of convenient blindness to what is going on around us, for if we are oblivious to wrongdoing, we do not have to do anything about it, the professorial version of "plausible deniability." "No harm, no foul, and therefore no need to blow the whistle" (Lewis 16-17).
The more serious the offense that confronts us, moreover, the more urgent the need to deny its existence, for the worse the wrongdoing, the more danger in exposing it. These carefully cultivated habits of denial, of expedient blindness, relieves us of the costly obligation to expose and repudiate the transgressions which in fact occur around us with some regularity. For twenty-five years, administrators and colleagues at Boston College turned a blind eye to the fact that Mary Daly excluded males from her feminist theory classes, in violation of Title IX and of the ethics of the profession; it was only when a student threatened to sue that her faculty members and superiors noticed anything.
Thanks to this perverse dynamic, peer accountability, according to one academic, often amounts to "the hollowest of rhetorics and a set of superficial procedures that too often amount to nothing more than bureaucratic ritual" (Lewis 47). A recent study supports this view. "Only 13 per cent [of the 2,000 faculty members surveyed] believe that they and the colleagues exercise substantial responsibility for each others' professional behavior," with personal autonomy taking "strong precedence over a norm of collegial self-governance" (Swazey, Louis, and Anderson A25).
If we cannot police ourselves, others will do the job for us. There is already talk of establishing a government agency to investigate accusations of plagiarism and determine the validity of published scientific data (Walker "Scientists").
The majority of professors, I believe, do not plagiarize, or condone it, and do not fabricate bogus data, or protect and defend those who do. But too many of us stand by, silent, when one of our own is set upon for exposing plagiarism, fabrication, or other wrongdoing that plague--and threaten to discredit--higher education. We gaze at these hapless victims like cud-chewing wildebeests watching one of their own go down to hyenas. The bravery of tenured professors cannot be underestimated. But the real scandal is that bravery is now required of those who expose error and deceit in what is supposed to be the bastion of unbiased knowledge and truth.
Many academics have an exalted view of their integrity, and feel it is up to them to save the world from itself; fine, but perhaps we ought to clean up our own profession first. We might start by comparing how malfeasance blithely tolerated and sometimes championed by academics is dealt with in the real world. When The New Republic discovered that one of its writers fabricated parts of stories, they fired him and apologized to its readers (TNR). In England, a British television station that faked scenes in a documentary was fined a record $3.2 million. In the real world, the perhaps naïve distinction between fact and fabrication is apparently taken most seriously indeed, and it would be unwise for professors--especially in tax-supported institutions--to not do the same. When we exonerate ourselves from all wrongdoing, we "make more ordinary work venues seem ethically superior by comparison" (Lewis 33).
Our dishonest denials call into question the privileges and immunities we have been granted by society to create and teach knowledge and truth. Of course, the professoriate can always renounce those benefits, along with its claim to elevated specialness, but this renunciation is exceedingly unlikely since it would require a sense of integrity that, if it existed, would have precluded the ethical tension in the first place.
Assuming that enough professors still care about the integrity of the academic creed, what can be done to thwart its undoing? First, the professoriate should engage in a very spirited and public debate of the issue on campus and at national and regional conferences. Right now, such a debate, and such conferences, do not exist, because the profession does not want to acknowledge the problem, for acknowledgement makes convenient blindness to wrongdoing more difficult.
Second, departments with graduate programs should discuss the issue locally. Swazey and her colleagues found that while 88 percent of faculty and 82 percent of students believe that "ethical preparedness" training should be an important function of their academic departments and universities, "only a minuscule proportion (4 per cent of faculty members and 3 per cent of students) think that their departments actually take a very active role in this area" (Swazey, Louis, and Anderson A25). But they need to, since few graduate students work closely enough with mentors or advisors to learn about the complexities of research ethics, and the stringencies of the academic creed, through example. And if they do not learn these values, they will more likely add to the problem in the future (McGee). Indeed, one reason for the erosion of ethical behavior in higher education that we now have is that the large number of people who came into the profession in the 1960s and '70s were not thoroughly initiated into the moral stringencies of the academic creed.
"To give explicit instruction to students on these matters, most faculty members themselves will need explicit instruction, through seminars and other means...[about] how ethics should be taught...Faculty members and administrators must find ways to incorporate explicit attention to research ethics into their departments in ways that go beyond the occasional 'brownbag lunch' or guest speaker" (Swazey, Louis, and Anderson A25).
The moral decay that can so easily be found in the institutions of higher education is now being transmitted to the next generation of teachers and scientists. Until this mess is cleaned up, the holier-than-thou moral superiority that comes so easily to many academics and their institutions is as fraudulent as the growing mounds of research piled on innocent colleagues and citizens.
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