The current affair, which extends far beyond the pages of Vivarium, raises the traditional concerns of academic plagiarism, as well as some novel considerations. As with many cases in the past, the theft of material denies the rightful author of the credit deserved and unfairly gives the pretending author an advantage in an increasingly competitive market. As editors, we are bound first and foremost to maintain the integrity of the journal, and that requires us to document, clearly and extensively, cases where that integrity has been compromised. At the same time, the practice of academic stealing is constantly evolving alongside the countermeasures deployed to catch it, and making public the methods and techniques used in contemporary cases of unattributed copying should help future editors and scholars identify the cases that we collectively missed.
We do not enjoy performing our duty. For marginal fields such as those served by Vivarium, we have seen from experience that the damage wreaked by plagiarism extends to institutions, bringing vulnerable positions, departments, and institutes to the attention of administrators eager to let the rationale of collective punishment direct the evisceration of budgets in Social Sciences and the Humanities. Our colleagues in adjacent fields will seize upon public cases of misconduct as an opportunity to reallocate scarce resources in their favor, thereby ensuring that those who previously lost out to plagiarists in competition for fellowships and positions lose out once again. Yet we believe that it would be worse for the field were we to ignore the accusations, cast doubt on the charges, and claim that the damage done were minimal.
For these reasons, we present examples of what we know about the incidents of unattributed copying in Vivarium.-- The Editors of Vivarium "Notice The Retraction of Articles Due to Plagiarism" 256-257 [emphases added; see also: Dailynous]
Let me start with a note of appreciation. The editors of Vivarium, C. Schabel and William Duba, were contacted in July this year about the suspicion of plagiarism of papers in the journal. It is a good thing that, despite all the strains of the pandemic, they quickly decided to investigate, to take action, and to report. Their clearly written report leaves no doubt that retraction was merited. In fact, since they limited themselves "to verbatim copying of material available to us in digital form" (256) it stands to reason their report understates the problems they found or could have found.* I am grateful for their speedy and forthright Notice. As a regular reader of retractionwatch, my impression is that this is not always the norm, alas.
Their Notice reveals that two of the retracted papers were re-published (now retracted) in a collected volume of papers, The Instant of Change in Medieval Philosophy and Beyond, co-edited by the plagiarist and published at Brill (the same press that publishes Vivarium). This volume also includes a chapter by one of the co-editors of Vivarium. While these details do not justify the claim that the field is (and now I use the editors' language) "marginal," they do give a sense of some of the relatively narrow overlapping circles in the field. While I think of myself as being in an adjoining field, I did host the author of these plagiarized papers in a seminar series back in 2015.
In the emphasized part of the Notice, the editors of Vivarium present the zero-sum, cut-throat nature of academic life in incredibly stark terms of political economy. In fact,they convey the thought -- I think (and hope) unintentionally -- that their decision to publish the retraction and the details of the case as itself the product of cost-benefit analysis of alternative possibilities ("it would be worse for the field were we to ignore the accusations, cast doubt on the charges, and claim that the damage done were minimal.") I assume they primarily acted from duty.
Even so, the editorial notice is also a missed opportunity. For, this is the second major plagiarism case (see also here) to hit the field in less than a decade. Back in the day, I blogged quite a bit about the earlier case (e.g., here). At the time I noted that given its egregiousness, "the referee process is broken in rather serious fashion." As several high profile hoaxes, and the pages of retractionwatch, suggest refereeing is unlikely to catch all forms of fraud. But it is less likely to catch it, I fear, in a field that feels itself under threat in a low trust environment (as the editors describe) and with relatively small and potentially competitive networks that do not just compete for status and journal space, but also for scarce positions.
In particular, since scholars in the field must have familiarity with an enormous span of history of primary and secondary sources in multiple languages, it stands to reason that staying on top of the field is very difficult. Since referees are themselves stretched for time and, if my experience is anything to go by, swamped with referee requests (while writing this blog post I received two!), I wonder if I could catch the plagiarism or am myself stretched too thin to miss it. (I have often suggested in my reports that papers are ungenerous to others, but I do not recall catching outright plagiarism as a referee whereas as a teacher it is not uncommon, alas.)
The issue is structural, and it is not just overworked referees or the side-effects of possible journal capture.
In particular, my university has incredibly fine-grained book-keeping for my 'output.' It also tracks my hours spent on teaching, admin, and research. (Yes, really. It's meant to be a fairness issue so that we all do our fair share.) But refereeing goes almost entirely uncredited in this system. (Stateside it may count a bit as service to the profession.) Even though in many ways universities, and not to forget grant agencies, which play a huge role even in the Humanities in Europe, free-ride on the evaluative judgments of anonymous journal referees (and less anonymous, editors) in a lot of their decisions. One often feels that judgments of quality are largely outsourced to referees of, especially, high status journals. That itself tells you quite a bit (go read Trust in Numbers) about how low-trust the environment is.
I have mentioned grant agencies in the previous paragraph. These greatly amplify the zero-sum nature of academic life in European humanities. Since grant funding in the humanities (and social sciences) is incredibly tight (with very low chances of success and with a tendency to reward bullshitting), these agencies pick winners whose careers get an enormous boost (jobs, invites, more research time, etc.), while those that are passed over find themselves without resources to pursue ordinary research. For much of the past decade, there was also a clear bias toward quantity of publication. (Supposedly that's changing.)
So, the credit structure of the academy is a very steep prestige and economic hierarchy where the agencies most responsible for accelerating one's move up or down the hierarchy farm out the evaluation of the 'input' into their analysis (journal publication) to the nearly uncredited work by overworked and anonymous referees. And these referees often have an indirect incentive to promote the work of people they trust and admire and who enhance their own work/states or their network in the field. This predictably leads to possibly unfair rejections and, perhaps, too much benefit of the doubt in other cases. In the past I have offered suggestions to improve the process, but with little noticeable effect. So much for political economy.
In a famous piece, Agnes Callard claims, drawing on a paper by Brian L. Frye that I have not read, that "in academia the immorality of plagiarism is one of the few principles everyone converges on." Not unlike Seneca, Callard wants to reject the (what she calls an "extralegal") principle or "convention." With Callard I agree that it is a mistake to confuse this principle/convention with morality. And I am open to the idea that in some areas of intellectual life, things might go better without giving credit. As a scholar I am familiar with robust practices of anonymous and pseudonymous publication (and I have been very uneasy about recent practice of unmasking pseudonymous publication in instances where the only fraud is the fake name.) And, not to put too fine point on it, these Digressions are all written not just without advertisement, but also without attribution (although I have never made it difficult to guess my identity).
Callard has a tendency to treat the norm (that she rejects) against plagiarism as a violation of intellectual property, which is another feature of the political economy of higher ed. (Brill is a for-profit press.) And she points out that this sits uneasily with university life more generally which she, not unfairly, treats as a deformed honour culture. And in fact she offers a tempting genealogy of error: "We academics cannot make much money off the papers and books in which we express our ideas, and ideas cannot be copyrighted, so we have invented a moral law that offers us the “property rights” the legal system denies us." In her genealogy of error, the norm (mistakenly treated as moral) against plagiarism is correction to a kind of market failure ("cannot make much money").
Perhaps Callard is right about this for much of academic life. But some areas of intellectual life, especially those influenced, in part, by (of course evolving norms and standards of) philology, are constituted by scholarship and the art by which one conveys that scholarship. And plagiarism is, then, not, as it were, a second order effect of market failure, but a violation of the rules that do not merely constrain, but constitute the field. It's not just cheating (breaking the rules) or disrupting the market in ideas and the wider academic credit economy, but one has decided to play an altogether different game or to act in a different play.
To put the point I am driving at by way of analogy. Lots of philosophers think that argument is constitutive of philosophy. I have protested this, but I know I am in the minority. If there is no argument there is no philosophy. This is why much wisdom, or insight, or intellectual history is not treated as philosophy by professional philosophers.
So, much the worse for professionals, Callard might say, and for good measure she might make fun of Max Weber, too. It's clear she thinks, and again this echoes Seneca (who undoubtedly is echoing true sages), that what matters in one's intellectual life is not the proper apportioning of credit. She suggests plausibly that to appropriate is to change one's identity, possibly, for the better. Philosophically and morally that's often true.
But it is not true in scholarship. For all I know none of the functional arguments for proper citation can withstand scrutiny. Perhaps scholarship would be socially more productive and less dangerous for the psyche if competitive emulation (recall my response to Hitz) that characterizes it would disappear. I certainly recognize that intellectual fraternity is made difficult by oligarchic organization of academic life today.
But true scholarship owes nothing to anybody; its allegiance is to truth and to the standards of excellence, including beauty, that constitute it. And these standards allow one to escape, in thought, the political and cultural economies that condition it materially and, simultaneously, experience the recognition by and, more commonly, one's recognizing of the skill of fellow scholars.
And if time permitted me I would offer you a proof of all of this in the margins of this Digressions. Sure, given the challenges facing humanity, it is comical to demand, as an existential matter, proper footnoting.
At this point the reader, if still awake, may suspect something religious. And, as is well known, footnoting has, as scribbling in the margins, or hyperlinking, a complex relationship with revelation, that is, scripture. And this, in turn, has been well deployed and satirized by Bayle and Swift (among the magisteria). Herman Hesse wrote a long, irritating and oddly moving novel, Glass Bead Game, -- which (recall) I read because of a suggestive footnote in Hugo Drochon's Nietzsche's Great Politics (see here), -- to try to convey even hints of this to a culture that cannot bring itself to confront such religiosity.
I mentioned Zina Hitz, who is better equipped than I am to talk about religiosity, because she criticizes, not unfairly, the academy (and now I simplify) for its surrender to a fundamentally base political economy. And when one reads the vocabulary of the editors of Vivarium -- "countermeasures" -- it is easy to think she is right--that something essential has gone missing. That we have lost sight of what truly matters.
But this is a mistake. Philology, with its roots in love of logos, expresses this love, in fact, from the start by the unmasking of forgery. It is because we recognize that human nature is weak, and that even extremely modest details might matter, sometimes greatly, to the life of many communities that we rest our faith in civilization, in part, by securing the integrity of the small print.
*I do not just mean that there may have been copying of material unavailable to them in digital form, but also the possibility of uncredited rephrasing and other important distinctions.
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