“I would love for [Chris[ Christie to put a hot poker to Obama’s butt.”
—Former RNC chair and ex-Mississippi governor Haley Barbour.
(Thanks, Gawker.)
The Republicans just can’t help manifesting their latent desires about what they’d like to do to an African-American president….
After being forced to resign from the New Yorker, fabricator Jonah Lehrer has now been fired by Wired, which just finished a review of his work.
According to HuffPo,
More than a dozen Lehrer posts — chosen both by Wired editors and Seife — reportedly contained examples of recycling, press-release plagiarism, outright plagiarism, “issues with quotations” and other factual problems.
The author of Wired’s report tries to contextualize Lehrer’s actions by talking about the lack of senior people to mentor him, ethically-speaking:
….I can’t help but think that the industry he (and I) work for share a some of the blame for his failure. I’m 10 years older than Lehrer, and unlike him, my contemporaries and I had all of our work scrutinized by layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word got published. When we screwed up, there was likely someone to catch it and save us (public) embarrassment. And if someone violated journalistic ethics, it was more likely to be caught early in his career—allowing him the chance either to reform and recover or to slink off to another career without being humiliated on the national stage. No such luck for Lehrer…Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him.
This is kind, but far too generous. None of those people are necessary to know that you don’t make stuff up. (And as Stephen Glass has shown, none of them will inevitably catch a fabricator.) That’s a “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten” kinda rule: Don’t lie.
As far as saving Lehrer, what would there be to save? His work is riddled with corruption that isn’t about not knowing journalistic standards, it’s about making deliberate choices to be dishonest. There’s not a copy editor in the world who could do anything about that.
Incidentally, Charles Seife, the author of the report, published it on Slate after Wired decided not to publish the whole thing. Not sure exactly how ethical that is. If Wired gave him permission to do so, I expect it wouldn’t be a problem. But in his Slate article, Seife is less than direct about the issue.
“Our country is under attack…” says Chuck Norris and his weirdly robotic wife in this anti-Obama message. Then Norris goes highbrow, kinda, quoting Edmund Burke on how “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men and women do nothing.”
“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny…or [we face] a thousand years of darkness,” robo-wife says.
“Please stand with us,” Norris adds. He may conclude with “see you at the polls,” but how many right-wing nutjobs out there will take a very different message from this video?
Harvard grad Eric Kestler tells ABCNews.com that a “culture of cheating” exists at the university, making the current investigation into mass cheating the rule and not the exception.
“When I was a student there, I definitely noticed there was a culture of cheating there,” Kester [author of this book about Harvard] told ABC News today. “There’s a lot of pressure internally and externally to succeed at Harvard and when kids who are not used to failing feel these things, it can really bend their ethics in ways I didn’t expect to see.”
Kester said he struggled through a calculus class during his time at Harvard, and at one point was approached by a group of students who were planning to cheat….
Doing just a brief bit of web surfing shows a couple of things about this matter: One, it’s getting a huge amount of attention (no surprise there, given the brand name involved); and two, Harvard is getting off, in a sense, by getting lumped in with students cheating at colleges across the country. While in the short term this conflation may be something of a mitigating factor, in the longer term it does have the effect of diminishing Harvard’s sense of exceptionalism; the idea that it is not like every other college in the country.
I’d posit that it’s possible Harvard is actually far worse than other colleges when it comes to cheating. Here’s why: Students around the country do whatever it takes to get into Harvard, which must take them into lots of grey areas, so why wouldn’t they continue that behavior while they’re there? THe end justifies the means.
Two, academics have long been secondary to extracurricular pursuits at Harvard, so students may feel more comfortable cutting ethical corners than they would at other colleges.
And three, some of the faculty’s most celebrated figures rely on ghostwriters and graduate students to do their work, or, as Niall Ferguson recently showed, pursue work that is more popular and remunerative than credible, and show little interest in traditional academic pursuits such as teaching—so what message does that send?
I’ll admit to stirring the pot somewhat here for the sake of argument. But to me the larger question underneath this discussion is really to what extent scholarship is valued at Harvard, as opposed to the pursuit of worldly success?
As the competition to get in only increases, and the tuition continues to soar, that emphasis on results—money, power, fame—only intensifies. Learning becomes not an end in itself, but a means to an end. And you now have students from ever more diverse backgrounds without a common cultural appreciation for the virtue of scholarship per se, at the same time that Harvard has largely abandoned any teaching of ethics or attempts to shape the character of its students in any particular fashion.
All things considered, perhaps what’s surprising about this cheating investigation is not the size of it, but the fact that it didn’t happen sooner…..
In The Root, the Harvard prof, who will teach Sociology 183 (a “tutorial,” open only to concentrators) this fall, muses on the good life on Martha’s Vineyard:
…I am smiling as I write this piece. It has been a wonderful summer for me. I am very satisfied…
Spending four weeks on Martha’s Vineyard is a magical stretch of time. I biked more than 300 miles. I’ve eaten an embarrassing number of wok-fired lobsters and downed my fair share of fried scallops and fish and chips. I’ve had probably 10 blue fishes [sic] hooked on my fishing line… And every night, I’ve enjoyed being completely surrounded by refreshing ocean air, gin martini in hand….