All in a Don's Day (11 page)

14 February 2010

On Friday evening I gave a Darwin Lecture in Cambridge in a series on the theme of ‘Risk'. These lectures – which happen every Friday in Lent term – have been going for 25 years now and have become something of a Cambridge institution, with a new theme each year (Serendipity, Survival, Identity, Evidence …), and a vast audience. I was in the Lady Mitchell Hall, which takes 500, and then there was a video link to an overflow hall.

My theme was ‘Risk and the Humanities', and most of the lecture was actually about how the ancient Greeks and Romans approached and faced danger – and how and why the ancients didn't have a ‘risk agenda' anything like our own. But in the last five minutes I allowed myself a bit of a rant about how that risk agenda, in the modern sense, had distorted research and teaching in the humanities now.

Grant awarding bodies like the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) are so risk-averse, that when you apply for money they make you specify exactly what your outcomes are going to be, and exactly what your timetable of research is going to be. Not only is this a complete misrepresentation of how humanities research is carried out (you don't know how long it is going to take you to read a book – it all depends how interesting you make it), but it also encourages us all to dishonesty. For the only way sensibly to be able to conform to the AHRC guidelines is to apply for money for research you've already done … that's the dream ticket for risk aversion. There's no problem with the outcomes and you use the
research time they pay for to get on with the next project … then in due course you apply for more money to fund that (even though you've already done it).

After the lecture people told me that was regular practice in lab-based sciences.

But the other poisonous thing about the risk agenda in universities is that it has started to cast risk in the Chernobyl mode – I mean, as a nasty thing that you can be a victim of, rather than something over which you have responsibility and control yourself.

Take plagiarism: it's ceasing to be the crime of ‘cheating' and is becoming an appalling academic disaster that can happen to you unawares, without you even knowing you have done it.

If you don't believe me, check out the University of East Anglia, Anti-Plagiarism quiz: ‘Are you at risk of plagiarism?'

Naively I thought at first that this must mean ‘Are you at risk of
being
plagiarised?' But no, it means ‘Are you are risk of being a plagiariser?' And its 13 questions get over a few key facts on the modern plagiarism/risk agenda. Yes, it is possible to plagiarise without realising that you have. And no, fear of plagiarism should not stop you talking to fellow students about your work, so long as you are sensible. Etc.

It all made plagiarism sound like a nasty disease you might pick up without knowing, but one that shouldn't stop ordinary social contact (so long as you don't share a toothbrush or anything silly like that).

And after all, as one of my colleagues pointed out, ‘plagiarism' actually sounds like a disease; ‘cheating' doesn't.

I don′t think interpreting ′Are you at risk of plagiarism?′ as ′Are you at risk of being plagiarised?′ is naive. That′s what it should mean. For UEA to have intended it to mean ′How likely is it that you might unwittingly commit plagiarism?′ is like using ′Are you at risk of execution?′ to mean ′Might you absent-mindedly execute someone?′

MICHAEL BULLEY

I deal with plagiarising students all the time. The vast majority of them know they′re cheating, those that don′t have missed lectures and tutorials in 1st year, where we explain why it is wrong, and for them we have a system which starts with a written warning for first offenders so they get a chance to mend their ways. Hardly an ′appalling academic disaster′, more a considered response to a real and serious problem in today′s universities.

ROB KNELL

The insurance industry ought to be getting in on this.

PL

In the worlds of ideas and culture (to name a few), copywrong and patents (intellectual property) are far, far more destructive than borrowing humanity′s collective creations and developing them. Emulation, progress, prosperity – they′re all bound and gagged and chained upside down in inaccessible dungeons. (′Inaccessible′ presumably meaning you can′t access the outside, in NewSpeak.)

If a student can present commonplaces better than the last documented presenter then good on her! If not, tough titty and down go his grades.

XJY

Is the fear of being accused of plagiarism why so many authors of academic books and journal articles list, in the bibliography, a set of works it would take ten lifetimes to read?

MICHAEL BULLEY

That might be one reason for the monster bibliographies you see in some academic books. Two other, more obvious, ones are: to thicken the product so it can be sold for more and to back-scratch colleagues who have their own books to flog and will back-scratch (cite) you in return. Typical vices of a command economy.

PL

In
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
, Paul Theroux quotes Pedro Almodóvar as saying: ′Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.′

ROSEMARY MEECHAN

Plagiarism is considered a fine way of getting A-level grades. We were told ′If you can remember what we′ve said about this text, say it in the exam′ as the first rule. Then for bonus points, ′if you can remember who said it first, give their name′. According to people I know doing A levels now, it hasn′t changed much, hence, poor conscientious students writing that ′Teacher X says that hubris is the cause of the hero′s downfall′. Because obviously, Teacher X said it first.

LUCY

In my experience, students are right to be petrified. A friend of mine from university (
c
. ten years ago) committed a minor error: citing a lecturer in an essay rather than the original work that the lecturer had been discussing. Afterwards, she felt uneasy about her actions, so she told the lecturer what she′d done. The lecturer reported her to the undergraduate judicial board – a panel of administrator-selected undergrads. Keen to prove their toughness on ′plagiarists′ in the wake of a major campus scandal, the board suspended – I guess the Oxbridge term would be ′sent down′ – my friend for an entire term.

MARGARET

What about jazz musicians? When we improvise, the music comes from inside somewhere, without conscious thought, but we are influenced by all the music we ever heard.

OURSALLY

I came into this world with nothing, and all I know has been learned from others and from books. I have been reading for 65 years, and hardly bother to read a book′s title or the name of the author, all soon forgotten as the years pass. Plagiarism seems a device of university professors to protect their interests or frighten their students.

BRIAN LEWIS

19 February 2010

This is a little moan about writing references. But let me make one thing clear right at the beginning: evaluating students, ex-students and colleagues is an important part of my job; I'm not complaining about being asked to do it (so no need to feel remotely guilty about asking me) – I'm complaining about the cumbersome, inefficient and sometimes downright obstructive infrastructure.

Let's get the scale of the problem. Although the number goes down at other times of the year, between October and the end of February (the peak postgraduate, milk-round and research fellowship recruiting season), I write on average something like 10–12 references a week; in January this year it was more like 15–16. The time it takes to write and process each one varies – from say an hour and a half if you are writing something from scratch (and it would be longer for a complicated and unusual job) to 15 minutes for something simple for a student whose reference you already have on your computer (whoops, is that or is it not against the Data Protection Act?)

Overall then, it is an average of about 30 minutes a reference, or 8 hours a week at peak times.

Now in the old days when I did fewer (this is a task that naturally gets bigger as you get older and have more ex-students wanting jobs, chairs, research leave, promotion),
the system was a lot more homogeneous. Before email, you would get a written request from the student asking if you would mind them using your name, and you would then get a letter from the employer or the college or department asking you to send it. You would pile these up on your desk and work through them one by one. For even the most untidy or scatty reference writer, it was hard to forget them or mislay one.

Normally, when you had sent the reference off, you got a thank-you letter from the potential employer. I remember that when Henry Chadwick was Master of Peterhouse he used to send beautifully handwritten thank-you cards (which made you feel good, and made you take care the next time).

It isn't like that now. In fact it's a nightmare.

For a start, students email you to ask if you will do it – and as often as not you are supposed just to send the thing off, without any other request from the employer or university. Even if your email inbox is in a lot neater state than mine, the request can easily disappear among all the opened messages and you simply forget about it (not like when it was sitting there looking at you on your
real
desktop). I now say to people who want me to write for them that it is
their
responsibility to make sure that I have done it. But I still panic in the middle of the night that I have forgotten one – and sometimes I have.

The next problem is that many educational institutions now have some version of on-line reference submission. Just occasionally this works a treat. You get a password, it opens up into a clear, easy to use form, you get an acknowledgement when you have finished – and on the best systems the computer sends you a reminder a few days before the deadline.

But not often. Sometimes the password doesn't work. Sometimes the system is ‘down'. Then all you can do is send frantic emails to whatever contact address the system allows
you to have. It took me several days to submit a reference to the British Academy a few months ago – and I only managed it after someone in their office had pointed out that the colon in front of the password I had been sent was actually part of the password (not, as I had assumed, just the colon in front of it). It's all a race against time too. Because if you're late they disable your password and, without a tearful series of begging emails, and a few fibs about having been ill, they won't enable it again.

Sometimes the whole electronic system just seems jinxed (or what they call in the trade ‘compatibility problem with your Mac'). After Christmas I was trying to fill in a Cambridge reference form which the student had sent me by email, and then print it out so that it could be sent, as instructed, in an envelope. I could fill the damn thing in OK, but when it came to printing it out, it simply deleted all I had written. Several times over. That's irritating enough when you are just doing one; when you have another ten in the queue by tomorrow, it makes you cry.

Not that the modern
non
-computerised system is any better. No longer do you often send it off directly to the university concerned. No, that means that they have to employ someone to match up your reference with the student's application. To save themselves money and to maximise your irritation, many departments now have feeble, barely secure systems where you hand the reference back to the student in an envelope, signed across the seal and then covered with Sellotape. It's hardly enough to keep an enterprising applicant with a kettle from finding out what you've written … and the times I've been doing it at home and failed to find any Sellotape are too many now to count.

Nor is there much Chadwick-style personal gratitude on display. The best you can hope for is the automatic computer
message ‘Thank you very much for submitting your reference. It will be most helpful to the college in the selection process.' You are more likely simply to read on the form: ‘As the college receives so many applications, it is impossible to acknowledge individual references.' (Well, actually, I bet it took the well-trained Chadwick several evenings to write all his thank-you cards.) But the ones I really can't stand come from rather brash HR departments. They don't just say, ‘Sorry we can't acknowledge', but they impose an impossible timetable and a measure of blackmail too. Typical would be an email on Monday lunchtime, saying they have just short-listed Dr X and get your reference in by Thursday, otherwise Dr X's chances of the job will be seriously diminished.

But the planet that HR departments inhabit is, as we know, not the same as ours.

This says everything I feel about the worst elements of the ‘internet age'. Mercifully, when I had to write references I did just that and talked to the one requesting the reference in person. I remember Henry Chadwick very well when he was Dean of Queens'. Delightful, kind, a brilliant mind and amusingly pedantic: any ‘Good morning' wished to him at one minute past midday resulted in his reaching into his pocket for his watch and, after a confirmatory glance, ‘Good afternoon!' in response.

RICHARDH

Dear Mary I'm tempted to guess
Of the reference/s you address
There is some certain law
As you write more and more
The jobs they concern all get less.

(/ is my feeble attempt at an accent indicating that the word, for reasons of stress, is pronounced referensez)

QH FLACK

Has anybody actually delayed so long in writing a reference that the student in question most probably didn′t get the job? I was once asked to send a reference for a Modern Languages student so awful that I wouldn′t have employed her as a cleaner. While I delayed and dithered and wondered how to praise her with least faint damn, the deadline passed …