Tar and Feather with the Same Black Kettle

Whatever mixaphors you want to come up with, it seems worth describing this article as, at the very least, problematic:

Male Humanities Professors Are Only In It For The Adulation

I should admit, I appreciate hearing some of the stories about professors', administrators', or colleagues' misdeeds.  Because, quite frankly, of all the Forewarned-Forearmed scenarios I've contemplated, having a colleague "accidentally" play porn at me just hadn't made the list.

And now I know.

Now I have an exit strategy for just that scenario.

But the rest of the article didn't seem terribly helpful to me.  Aside from the ludicrously attention-seeking over-reach in the article's title (which I'm willing to set aside only for the sake of all my journalist friends who insist that the writer never chooses the title), the conclusions don't seem warranted from the evidence, and the whole thing seems an exercise in scorn.

Overrepresenting the number of assholes in academia really doesn't do anyone any good.

Generalizing the behavior of idiots to all members of a group to which some idiots belong doesn't do anyone any good.

Suspecting the motives of people who have chosen a rather modest career path--one oriented towards helping others--doesn't do anyone any good.

I got into teaching in general, and teaching theology in particular, to do people some good.

I'm willing to believe that men, in general, are biologically programmed to put themselves a bit more on display when potential mates walk in the room.  I'm willing to believe that happily married (or securely celibate) men, in general, are not entirely free of this biological imperative and may quite unconsciously "display" a little more when a pretty girl shows an interest.

But "getting attention from pretty co-eds" really doesn't make the list of reasons to choose academia.  You could be a bartender to do that, and you'd probably make more money.

Watch Those Church Newsletters, Guys

Though I am tempted, I will comment no further on this case, as this writer for Christianity Today has done such a thorough job:

Mark Driscoll plagiarism case

Okay, a brief word, perhaps.

This is yet another instance of how the anti-intellectual strand that pervades evangelicalism can hurt the very evangelical witness they want to give.

Evangelism should, first and foremost, be truth-telling.  Once again, academic standards of citation are not, principally, about protecting ownership of original material (that's copyright).  They are about truth-telling: acknowledging when our thinking has been helped by someone else's, acknowledging when we find someone else's way of expressing our thoughts to be more helpful than whatever we could formulate, tipping our hat to our intellectual and spiritual parents.

It's really not that hard to drop a footnote and say, "Hey, isn't it cool how so-and-so said this?"

But an evangelicalism that mocks and derides academia cannot learn from it even those forms of truth-telling that can only help its witness to the truth.

Why You Should Care, or Project Plagiarism Matters

I keep forgetting to show my students stories of why and how academic citation matters "in the real world."

I'm going to start collecting them here, so that I have somewhere easy to point to.

I've spoken before about why I think plagiarism--or, rather, the habits of academic honesty that plagiarism violates--is a big moral deal.

It certainly is a big deal in academia, and the big deal that it is can properly be called a moral deal because the procedural standards are oriented toward properly moral goals--honesty, diligence, courtesy, etc.

Whether it is a big deal, moral or otherwise, outside the academy is worth pondering.  I don't believe that my students believe my insistence on proper attribution does them any good outside of the classroom or has any goal not restricted to the "academic" part of academic integrity.

I came across several examples this week that might be useful for Project Plagiarism Matters.  Just one will have to suffice for this post, however.

I wouldn't have noticed this one but for my colleague at Huntingdon, Dr. Jeremy Lewis, who reminded me that students are protected, as well as imperiled, by proper citation.

When College Students Plagiarize You, You Must Have Said Something Worth Saying

Yes, it's the college student who got in trouble here, but the person whom he plagiarized is a writer, who has a stake in having her work acknowledged.  She also has a stake in having her work benefit herself, rather than some privileged white dude.  ("Lord, prosper the work of our hands!")

It seems worth reminding students that they might some day write for a living--incidentally to whatever employment they find or as a substantial part of their careers.  They learn proper citation now as part of a system of proper attribution that protects writers from having their work stolen for others' benefit.

This system is especially important for those of us in the essentially charitable enterprise of education.  We accept a modest salary in exchange for bettering the lives of others by passing along ideas that we have learned from others.  There are only a few concrete ways we can augment that modest salary, and almost all of them have to do with generating ideas worth sharing and publishing them in income-producing ways.

But even for those of us outside academia, the protection of our intellectual and artistic work--enacted legally by copyright protection, but morally by accusations of plagiarism--still matters.  My students might not go on to be researchers or authors, but they might go on to be bloggers.  Many of them are already users of content-sharing social media--instagram and such.  They might go on to be technical writers of some kind.  They might be speech writers or website designers or nurse-educators or anybody else who would create something with words.

They might like to know that some fussy old fuddy-duddy of a professor like me is training those who come after them not to plagiarize them.

The Living Christ in Memphis

Surprising and lovely story this morning on NPR (yes, NPR):

Memphis Churches Leading The Way in Disaster Relief
(Red Cross cautiously pleased. "It's not necessarily a bad thing.")

Aside from my amusement at the Red Cross spokeswoman's clear unfamiliarity with the legitimacy and efficacy of interfaith cooperative efforts, this story prompted two thoughts.

First, thank you, Memphis churches for offering a clear witness to the gospel. Thank you for being the Body of Christ right there in your hometown.

Second, I've been receiving some criticism from my evangelical friends--or rather, from my evangelical friends who tend conservative on political matters--about my public statements to the effect that, if the church does not feed the hungry, heal the sick, and bring relief to the poor, I'm happy for the U. S. government to pick up the slack.

I want to state clearly and unambiguously that the day news stories like the above are no longer news--the day NPR says, "Churches are solving the poverty problem? So what? That's not news," the day Red Cross has no choice but to say, "Well, of course churches are providing the bulk of the shelter/food/clothing here. They always do"--is the day I start campaigning vigorously for an end to all government aid to the needy.

Any and every tax cut you ask me to vote for, I will.

Any and every government program you want to cut, I will be your fiercest lobbyist.

Seriously.

Go ahead. Get busy.

Instantly Erroneous

I've been perusing the usual news sites last night and this morning, along with news sites I don't normally visit, thanks to the furious barrage of links and comments and speculation on my friends' facebook pages.

I've discovered that Fox News was reporting that Usama bin Landen [sic] was confrimed [sic] dead. Half an hour later, someone thought to become a professional and the two misspellings were corrected.

I've seen several websites (including wikipedia) announce confidently that Osama has been dead for a week; most of those sites now report that he was killed on May 1, 2011.

Some sites are currently reporting that Osama has been buried at sea, citing Islamic tradition and a general disinclination among the world's leaders to pollute their soil with his remains. Other sites are reporting that the US is maintaining its custody of his body in order to ensure acceptance of its claim to have killed him. I'm sure when an official statement is made as to the disposition of Osama's body, everyone will revise his website accordingly.

Some of my friends, especially those disinclined to trust anything with a liberal provenance, are already generating conspiracy theories to account for the discrepancies between Obama's official announcement and the maelstrom of unsubstantiated "facts" that overtook cybernews outlets while we were all waiting for that announcement.

Peace, be still, my friends.

There is no need for such speculation.

The explanation is far simpler and far more troubling.

The intentional impermanence of cyberspace combined with the demand for incessantly instantaneous news has created an ethos of irresponsibility in online reporting. Getting it out trumps getting it right.

In print media, the error abides; it gazes up at one, accusingly, preserved in library archives (what is the new microfiche?) for posterity. The penance only perpetuates the failure: the necessary published retraction ensures that there are two artifacts instead of one. The damage to the reporter's and the paper's reputation was tangible.

There is no failure in online reporting. There is no retraction, no mea culpa. There is only perpetual revision. Reputation need not matter.

And, of course, affiliation counts for more than accuracy these days anyway, doesn't it? One's political leanings (whether implied or avowed) are far more important for developing a loyal readership than one's accumulated record.

And if there is no more accumulated record? So much the better.

Is It Schadenfreude If They Deserved It?

I never take joy in the suffering of others, even when that suffering is deserved.

But . . . sometimes . . . I allow myself a hearty nod of approval when someone is given the gift of logical consequences:

Paper Mill Ghostwriter Loses His Law License

Twitter, Thomas, and the Tipping Point

I love when my dissertation topic makes news.

Twitter, Facebook, and social activism: newyorker.com

"Um, Sarah? It doesn't mention you or your dissertation anywhere in that article."

I know. Malcolm Gladwell probably has no idea that he's talking about my dissertation topic (or one of them) in the above piece, but he is.

The above is a wonderful explanation of the difference made in social activism by the quality of social ties among participants. "Weak-tie" connections--that is, your acquaintances, casual friends, and those third cousins you only see every couple years at funerals and such--are great resources for the kind of social change that depends on large numbers of people doing very little. When all one is changing is fashion, one only needs large numbers of people to create a tipping point.

The kind of social activism that requires genuine sacrifice, that depends on well-organized and well-trained members, that risks grave danger, that drives substantive, long-term change cannot make use of these "weak-tie" connections. The Civil Rights Movement, Gladwell says, could not have happened without "strong-tie" connections--genuine friendships, the kind that foster trust, mutual encouragement, and solidarity in the face of challenge. The kind of leverage required to "tip" centuries of injustice toward something different does not come from a mass of loosely connected people doing nothing more substantive than throwing their spare change at a problem.

Twitter, Facebook, and other emerging social media cannot create the latter kind of ties, and only where such ties are maintained by many other means can they participate in the strengthening of them. (My parents love seeing pictures of their grandchildren on my personal blog, but if that was all they had of their grandchildren, it would be a severely attenuated relationship.)

Gladwell probably doesn't know it, but he is thinking right along with Thomas Aquinas.

For Thomas, there is a difference between the passions and the virtues. The passions are immediate, pre-rational responses to the world: the instinctive cringe when the hand encounters a hot object, the smiling warmth when a mother sees her beloved children after a day apart, the burning tension when a co-worker's insult is overheard. These passions can be misguided, of course (as when a new neighbor prompts the breathless energy that ought to be reserved for one's wife), but they can also be entirely wholesome and good (as when a stranger's distress prompts an easy gesture of assistance).

Passions are entirely different than virtues, however. Virtues require reasoned intentionality--they are the deliberate and conscious analogues to well-ordered passions. The mother who smiles at her sleeping child is instinctively recognizing the goodness of her offspring; she loves him with all the ease and warmth that the passions inspire. The mother who speaks gently to her tantruming child, who changes the third set of vomit-stained sheets that night, who haunts the cold and impersonal principal's office until the bullying is addressed, who cooks her nine thousandth family meal with the same care she did her first, that mother is loving her child with something more morally significant.

That kind of love is harder. It takes determination; it takes reflection; it takes character. In some cases, it requires intentionally resisting the passions. Only the mother who knows what is good for her child can do it; only the mother who wants to do good for her child will do it; only the mother who consistently chooses to do the good for her child will find herself capable of doing it even when her instinctual responses are to scream, lash out, give up, or chase happiness elsewhere.

That is the difference between the passions and the virtues: the one is easy, immediate, and instinctive; the other is difficult, sustained, and achieved only with deliberate, long-term intentionality.

And friends--real friends, not the kind that "like" your status updates or "follow" your tweets--are a crucial part of the process of forming the virtues. Good friendships with good people struggling to form the same good virtues ease the journey. They commiserate, they correct with gentleness and persistence, they offer concrete assistance, and they gratefully receive one's own offers of assistance.

Those are the kinds of friends you want with you when you're sitting out on your front porch every evening so that the drug dealers will stop coming around. Those are the kinds of friends you want with you when you file the police report against your corrupt employers. Those are the kinds of friends you want with you when you're trying to find just one more reason not to pick up that needle again. Those are the kinds of friendships you need more of.

"Oh, Sarah, you are so right! I'm going to forward this to all my friends on Facebook!"

Please don't.

Well, okay--yes, do. I like watching my hit count go up.

But then turn off your computer. Go.

Go take your extra zucchini to your neighbors. Or call your mother. Or have coffee with your college roommate. Or make cookies for your children or your co-workers or your grandmother. Or make cookies with your children or your co-workers or your grandmother.

Go do stuff with real human beings. The cyber-beings you've been hanging out with lately won't hold your hand while you're facing down real trouble. Go find the ones that will.

Opinionation

Pace Stanley Fish, who is always worth reading, even when he's wrong, plagiarism is a big moral deal.

Fish offers several cogent arguments to the contrary in his recent "Opinionator" piece, "Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal," the most insightful of which is that professional standards are not the same as moral imperatives.

This resembles the principle that appears in legal theory as the difference between mala prohibita and mala in se: that is, the difference between merely procedural crimes (e.g., driving down the wrong side of the road) and crimes that are morally objectionable in themselves (e.g., murder).

In the latter case, the law recognizes acts of moral significance. In the former case, moral significance (if there is any) is the creation of the law--if there were no traffic law, there would be no moral significance in choosing which side of the road to drive down. This is part of why traffic violations that result in no harm to person or property are minimally punished. They're not a big deal. We punish them only because having a system of traffic regulation is, overall, a good thing, not because there is an eternal moral imperative to drive on the right side of the road.

Fish wants us to view plagiarism as something like a malum prohibitum: something that violates the merely procedural dictates of a self-contained community.

But my language begins to betray me already.

Fish does not use the word "community" in reference to academia--only in reference to golfers. Academia is "our house," a "guild," a "context of practice," a language game which students must learn to play.

It is no accident that Fish does not call academia a community. A community is more morally weighty than a guild or a "context of practice."

Fish's overall point, by the way, is not that plagiarism shouldn't be punished--it is that there is no philosophical warrant for valuing originality. And in this, he is correct.

But codes against plagiarism are not about protecting original work. Standards of proper citation do not exist to protect the originator of an idea. That's the difference between plagiarism codes and copyright law.

Standards of proper citation exist to cultivate habits of worthy discourse within the academic community. (And, yes, I am just silly enough to pretend that something called "the academic community" exists, or at least could.) They exist to train us to participate in the tradition of academic discussion.

Proper citation trains us in courtesy--we acknowledge our intellectual debts both for the sake of our intellectual parents and for the sake of our current conversation partners. In the former sense, our intellectual parents may have a stake in the conversation in which we are quoting them; proper citation courteously invites them into that conversation, as it were. In the latter sense, citing our sources allows our current conversation partners to understand most fully what we are saying. We do our conversation partners the courtesy of aiding their investigation into our arguments.

Proper citation trains us in truth-telling. As the previous point suggests, when we acknowledge our intellectual debts, we allow for the fullest possible understanding of our claims and arguments. This transparency may make our arguments vulnerable; perhaps the scholar whose phrasing we found so felicitous was known for eliding fact and assertion, or perhaps the "varied" studies we are marshaling to prove our points were all funded by the same super-conglomerate. Proper citation is a kind of full disclosure, the kind of openness that is necessary for excellent discourse.

Proper citation trains us in respect. Acknowledging our intellectual debts is a kind of justice--giving someone her due, as Thomas Aquinas put it (more or less, somewhere-or-other). If we have been taught, our teacher has earned something from us--not the recognition of his originality, but the recognition of his generosity in teaching us (however remote or impersonal the mode of teaching).

And proper citation trains us in diligence. Students and scholars who plagiarize are not, in general, trying to claim false credit for original thoughts--they are trying to get out of doing hard work. Charitable description, thoughtful analysis, and persuasive rhetoric are difficult practices to master; proper citation is itself, as Fish acknowledges, a kind of skill that one must master. Anti-plagiarism codes are designed to identify and, yes, even weed out those who do not care to do that work, to learn those skills.

Respect, truth-telling, courtesy, diligence--these are all morally weighty terms. If Fish is right that originality is not a terribly interesting or valuable thing, he misses that it is the least of the things proper citation is designed to cultivate.

Exclusivity

Why is "exclusive" a positive adjective when applied to celebrity wedding locations, clubs, parties, and educational institutions, but not religions?

Even where one suspects that privacy might be a reasonable desire--a wedding, say--no one troubles to be troubled by the substitution of the word "exclusive." A private wedding and an exclusive wedding are two very different things.

Exclusivity in this sense depends on the deliberate cultivation of the desire to be included. That is, it's not an exclusive wedding if no one but the invitees wants to come. It's not an exclusive college if no one applies. Exclusivity requires desirability. One must constantly and conscientiously widen the circle of people who want to be included, even as one narrows the circle of those who are.

Exclusivity in this sense also depends on the opacity and difficulty of the entrance requirements. If it were clear how to dress to get the bouncer's approval, everyone could do it, and then it wouldn't be an exclusive club.

Race, family heritage (often conceived either in ethnic or religious terms), and income level are among the most effective inclusion requirements, because they are easy to evaluate and difficult or impossible to change.

Social connectedness is less straightforward, and it works just as effectively for exactly that reason. If no one with sufficient standing within the community is willing to vouch for a newcomer, he remains on the outside. But "sufficient standing within the community" comes from a complex computation of largely unarticulated factors. Who knows how to become an Important Person, important enough that one's coattails are worth riding?

All of this is frankly disturbing.

But no one is disturbed.

To become a Christian, all one has to do is want to become a Christian. To become an acknowledged member of the Body of Christ, all one has to do is declare oneself willing to follow its head, the Crucified and Risen One, and willing to be called upon to live up to that public commitment.

Christianity is the only "exclusive" group whose standard and method of inclusion is so clear, so straightforward, and so entirely in the hands of the person desiring membership.

And yet its brand of exclusivity is the most vilified.

Children With Home Computers Likely to Have Lower Test Scores

Children With Home Computers Likely to Have Lower Test Scores

The title of the above article is completely misleading and false, so ignore it. A better title might have been "Access to Computers Not a Cure-All; May Even Cause Harm."

The findings of the study are interesting: children from disadvantaged homes who gained access to computers performed measurably worse on end-of-state testing than children from disadvantaged homes who had no computers.

Not only is access to technology not a panacea, it actually exacerbates the educational disadvantage. The researchers were appropriately modest in their conclusions--"In disadvantaged households, parents are less likely to monitor children's computer use and guide children in using computers for educational purposes"--but I think one could reasonably draw several stronger inferences from the study.

1. Parents matter most. Again and again, failed educational reforms and scientific studies have shown that parental involvement is the one factor that can never be ruled out. Any educational reform (I would even expand this and say any reform, because I'm an ethicist and we like to sensationalize like that) that doesn't involve strengthening the family will probably fail.

2. Parenting well requires setting limits. Presumably, the children in the disadvantaged households used the computers as they saw fit. They were wrong. Children do not have infallible instincts for what they need, what is good for them, what will bring them safely to adulthood. Children need parents who guide them not only through positive modeling and suggestions but also through limit-setting. Saying yes to what's good is vital, and parents do well to phrase things as positively as possible. ("Oh, sure, you can play that game--just as soon as your homework is done." "Umm . . . let's find a more appropriate show to watch." "Well, let's make a date for you to play x-box with your friends on Saturday instead of today.") But saying no to what's bad is just as vital. ("You must never, ever surf the internet when I'm not at home.")

3. Technology is rarely the answer. Technology cannot fix injustice, historical or actual; it cannot redress wrongs; it cannot make us more moral people. If we are not already the kind of people who will raise our children conscientiously, who are intellectually curious, who have self-discipline, who are generous with the needy, who will pay a just wage, technological advances will at best fail to alleviate--and will sometimes positively exaggerate--our social failings.

4. This particular piece of technology--computers--comes pre-programmed, as it were, with a tendency toward harm. The irony is too delicious not to enjoy: information technologies tend to make us less intelligent. Absent some sort of external, imposed structure (a parent's insistence that we finish our homework first, a determination to balance our checkbooks by hand anyway, a conviction that "some things just shouldn't be blogged"), we are worse off with computers than without. It behooves us, then, to develop and pursue practices of restraint with regard to their use and proliferation.