Been reading the Harvard student magazine 02138. I always appreciate ways to stay in touch with happenings in Boston. I still check the Harvard Film Archives and the Brattle Street Theater (which opened in that extraordinary year of 1953) periodically, though my days of watching films there are now long past.
When I was a guest recently over at Mary Dudziak's shop, legalhistoryblog, I wrote a little bit about some research that Stephen Levitt and Roland Fryer have done on the KKK in the 1920s. 02138 wrote up Levitt and Freyer's paper. It was a pretty kind treatment of that controversial paper, IMHO. I might understand that from college students who're enamored with one of their professors. But at other times they're rather critical of some other Harvard faculty--sometimes even of Professor Fryer. Take A Million Little Writers. It's about the ways that Harvard faculty use research assistants to help with their, well, research and writing. Here's a sample:
in any number of academic offices at Harvard, the relationship between “author” and researcher(s) is a distinctly gray area. A young economics professor hires seven researchers, none yet in graduate school, several of them pulling 70-hour work-weeks; historians farm out their research to teams of graduate students, who prepare meticulously written memos that are closely assimilated into the finished work; law school professors “write” books that acknowledge dozens of research assistants without specifying their contributions. These days, it is practically the norm for tenured professors to have research and writing squads working on their publications, quietly employed at stages of co-authorship ranging from the non-controversial (photocopying) to more authorial labor, such as significant research on topics central to the final work, to what can only be called ghostwriting.
Now, these disputes have been kicking around for a long time. Perhaps it's my experience in a law firm (and as a law clerk) coming through. But I don't find the process of using research assistants to help with data analysis or even drafting so odd. Nor do I find it as troublesome.
In fact, the article acknowledges that at Harvard Law School the faculty's attitude is affected by the legal profession's norms:
Dershowitz is, however, notorious on the law school campus for his use of researchers. (The law school itself is particularly known for this practice, probably because lawyers are used to having paralegals and clerks who do significant research and writing; students familiar with several law school professors’ writing processes say that Dershowitz reflects the norm in principle, if to a greater degree in practice.)
I would have phrased that differently: lawyers are used to having lawyers do a lot of work for them; so are politicians; so are business people. Who ever demands that the senior partner write the brief she signs her name to? She supervises the process and sets the broad agenda and may even make substantive revisions to the draft that's handed her. But write every word?
Then there are shots in the article by an anonymous former research assistant, like this:
Several of his researchers say that Dershowitz doesn’t subscribe to the scholarly convention of researching first, then drawing conclusions. Instead, as a lawyer might, he writes his conclusions, leaving spaces where he’d like sources or case law to back up a thesis. On several occasions where the research has suggested opposite conclusions, his students say, he has asked them to go back and look for other cases, or simply to omit the discrepant information. “That’s the way it’s done; a piecemeal, ass-backwards way,” says one student who has firsthand experience with the writing habits of Dershowitz and other tenured colleagues. “They write first, make assertions, and farm out [the work] to research assistants to vet it. They do very little of the research themselves.”
As I said, Professor Fryer comes in for some scrutiny in the article.
Fryer now employs seven full-time “project managers,” mostly recent college alums, and works with dozens of others. The students, generally recent college graduates like David Toniatti, each manage a research project, from designing the methodology to collecting the 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,” Toniatti says. “Everyone can run the regression; it’s really the idea that counts.”
The article raises some important questions--though I disagree with a lot of what the author has to say about the appropriate use of research assistants. The author at one point acknowledges that heavy reliance upon research assistants is appropriate in certain areas: "Different fields have different customs; what wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the economics department might raise havoc in English." But then she goes on to pose a critical question for post-tenure scholars--not just at the super elite schools like Harvard, but at many places. She asks should faculty "simply churn out the one or two serious books necessary to get tenure, and then ignore the writing of such books to focus on opportunities that bring more exposure and money? After all, writing scholarly tomes is probably the least glamorous and least lucrative of the many opportunities open to a Harvard professor, and thus one of the easiest to either outsource or abandon." I would not say that writing serious scholarly books is one of the least glamorous (though it may very well be one of the least lucrative) opportunities available to a tenured professor. In fact, one of the great pleasures of my life is sitting down and writing serious scholarship. Wish I did more of it!
One thing that is troublesome--and I find this every time I work with students, no matter how smart they may be--is that students just don't have the breadth of knowledge of literature, law, or writing that I'd want if I were going to rely in large parts on someone else's work. But I'm puzzled by the amount of moralizing that goes on around the practice of relying on research assistants. In this world of number crunching and case crunching and just plain on research-intensive scholarship, it's necessary to rely on the work of others. Are legal academics to be left working in a cottage industry, fashioning shoes by hand, while others use machines to mass produce Nike sneakers?
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