Read 'Em And Weep For Harvard

Different fields have different customs; what wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the economics department might raise havoc in English. But across the academic board, the celebrity culture poses a dilemma for young scholars: Should they 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.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the natural case study for this question. Gates does hugely significant work at Harvard, running the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, fundraising, and helping to build the department of African and African-American Studies. But he may be even busier on non-university business, whether it’s producing documentaries for PBS, writing for the New Yorker and the New York Times op-ed page, serving as a judge for the Pulitzer Prizes, chairing a foundation, traveling and lecturing around the world, serving on the boards of nine museums and cultural institutions, even helping the United States Postal Service pick its stamps.

As a young academic, Gates wrote two books, Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey, revered among literary scholars for their theoretical insights on how to study and analyze African-American literature. Those may well be the last important scholarly books Gates will ever write. His literary work now tends to be more cursory—introductions, overseeing the production of an encyclopedia backed by Microsoft, publishing his PBS work. No one seems to care: In October 2006, Gates was named the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor—a university professorship being the highest honor Harvard awards its scholars. The endower of Gates’ chair, Alphonse Fletcher Jr., is also the endower of the foundation that Gates chairs, the Fletcher Foundation.

For better or worse, Gates’ career, and the huge rewards that he has reaped from it, send the message to young scholars that scholarship is not an end in itself but a means to an end—to easier work, better-paying gigs, greater mainstream acclaim. At which point, the tough grind of academic writing can be farmed out to other, more-junior scholars—and possibly lesser minds—pulling their way up the academic ladder.

Many student researchers wouldn’t discuss their research work for this article, even with guarantees of anonymity, because they fear jeopardizing a professor’s future support. This secrecy, combined with the fact that the line between research and writing is often fuzzy, keeps the system obtuse and subject to abuse. Except where it produces outright plagiarism, it’s essentially unregulated by Harvard policy—and even implicitly sanctioned, as Bok’s quote about Ogletree’s case suggested. Yet if the undergraduates doing this research attempted the same outsourcing of written work in their term papers, they’d face disciplinary proceedings, and several student researchers told me they felt uneasy about this cognitive dissonance between expectations for their own work and that of their professors.

What’s perhaps more surprising than professors’ reliance upon student researcher/writers is the general lack of outrage or even concern the habit generates. Even students who work for the most notorious professorial slackers told me that they appreciate the opportunities to work with faculty, to see how a book is written (or, perhaps more accurately, produced), to get paid and receive a recommendation letter. There’s a cachet to putting words in a famous professor’s mouth. “It’s really cool to say, ‘Hey, I wrote that paragraph that ended up in the Times,’” says one student who works with one of the most prominent Harvard faculty members. “I don’t need the byline—I can tell my friends.”

Not only does Harvard not seem to prohibit, punish, or even frown upon the use of academic researcher-cum-ghostwriters, sometimes the university even subsidizes it. The Office of Faculty Development and Diversity—created in the wake of the controversy surrounding Lawrence Summers’ comments on women in science—employs a “research assistant” named Mae Clarke whose publicly available job description sounds strikingly like that of a ghostwriter. The diversity office website says: “Ms. Mae Clarke serves as the primary Research Assistant for Dr. [Evelynn] Hammonds who is working on a manuscript of the history of race in medicine and science in the United States. Ms. Clarke’s responsibilities include organizing, drafting, and editing materials for the preparation of the manuscript and related papers. She … will serve as copy editor for drafts of chapters. Ms. Clarke also supports production of other written works.”

Clarke is on sabbatical and couldn’t be reached for comment, and—through a spokesperson—Dr. Hammonds declined to comment. In other words, Hammonds used a ghost-speaker to avoid answering a question about her ghostwriter. It’s no wonder some students get cynical about the manner in which they research and write their own work.

The quality of academic work often suffers in correlation to the prevalence of ghostwriters and other literary assistants. Many of the books produced in this way just aren’t as good as they could be had their “authors” not fobbed off so much work on research assistants. As appears to be the case with Dershowitz, many scholarly books that are collectively researched and written aren’t designed to last; they hit the remainders table quickly, and are rarely cited in other academic works (a conventional metric of a book’s scholarly significance).

In that sense, these authors are capitalizing on the Harvard brand without respecting its deeper value: They’re using the name as a keyword in their bio to make a book sell better, but they’re ignoring the fundamental mission of a research university—the creation and exploration of significant, durable knowledge. “We [in the academic community] are afraid of making subjective judgments, so page counts and books-per-year provide nice, objective substitutes,” says Harry Lewis. “People are rewarded for writing a lot even if it isn’t very good or even very academic.”

Changes in academic publishing have also contributed to the rise of the research assistant. Over the past decade, academic presses have significantly decreased the number of books they publish, and several have shut their doors altogether, a decline due in part to financial pressures on publishing generally. Much of what professors write these days is published by popular presses and intended to be sold at Barnes & Noble. In contrast to the multiple peer reviews done by academic publishers, these trade presses don’t vet books with much rigor. They worry more about libel than factual accuracy, and so manuscripts are read by lawyers, not fact-checkers, who would be more likely to spot plagiarism and other sloppy work. Trade presses also discourage extensive end matter and footnotes, making it easier for scholars to cut corners on the research. “They are more worried about spelling than about sources,” says one Harvard research assistant. Inevitably, mistakes are made.

Harvard professors writing quietly and alone have penned some of the most significant books of the last century. At 538 pages of dense prose, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, first published in 1971, could hardly have been designed to be a bestseller, but his concepts, like a “veil of ignorance,” have permeated modern politics and law. Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, published in 1977, before he left Harvard for the Institute for Advanced Study, is now in its fourth edition and stands as one of the most significant ethical analyses of war.

More such great and lasting books will surely emerge from Harvard. But will we really know for sure who wrote them?

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