academia

Nicole D. pointed out an interesting post on boingboing about plagiarism and status. Somehow or another someone noticed that large parts of the dissertation written by William Meehan, president of Jacksonville State University, were lifted word-for-word from an earlier dissertation by Carl Boehning; both men got their Ph.D.s from the University of Alabama. Here is an image indicating the extent of the copying–all the highlighted sections are exact replications of Boehning’s words (this does not include passages that were paraphrased without citation from his dissertation):

You can get a look at the actual documents if you’d like: Boening’s work, Meehan’s dissertation, and an index of the plagiarized sections.

Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art says,

Neither the University of Alabama (which granted Boening and Meehan their doctorates) nor Jacksonville State University, where Meehan is president, has chosen to take up the obvious questions about plagiarism that Meehan’s dissertation presents. As another recent story suggests, plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer’s status rises.

The “recent story” he mentions is about how a paragraph from Talking Points Memo ended up in a Maureen Dowd column, uncited and without quotation marks.

I find this beyond infuriating. I am, admittedly, hardcore about plagiarizing. I check every paper for it and I immediately give a 0 on any assignment where I find plagiarizing for a first offense; if it’s a second offense, I fail them in the course (I’d really prefer to fail them for the first offense, but we aren’t allowed to do that). I also turn in every instance to the college student ethics committee so the record will be on file. But, as Leddy says, apparently if you can rise high enough, then later discovery of your plagiarism–of the document on which a person’s entire Ph.D. is based, no less–won’t be held against you (though it did dim Joe Biden’s career for a while when he, or his writers, plagiarized part of a speech years ago).

Given that universities increasingly make statements about the importance of academic honesty, it’s an interesting position for JSU to be in–how do you tell your students they can’t plagiarize but admit that the president’s dissertation was largely copied? Perhaps they are using it as an illustration to students of how status, power, and privilege combine to protect some people more than others.

American workers have lost power relative to their employers since the heyday of unionization during the industrial era. One way in which employees gained was through the extension of benefits to full-time workers: salary, relative job security, health insurance, sick pay, paid vacation, parental leave, etc.  Full-time jobs, however, are being replaced by part-time jobs, and with them have gone much of the power and most of the benefits that workers were able to gain through unionization.

You would think, though, that jobs that require a high level of education and training might be immune from these trends. Perhaps not.

The American Federation of Teachers released a report that included data on the percentage of employees at U.S. colleges and universities that are full-time tenure-track professors, full-time non-tenure track, adjunct (part-time) professors, and graduate students.  As you can see, the percentage of full-time tenure-track professors is decreasing and we are being replaced by other types of employees who cost the institution much less (graphs borrowed from MontClair SocioBlog).

This is a problem from a labor perspective in that it strips power away from employees, putting it squarely back into the hands of employers.  It may also be a problem in terms of the quality of education.  Adjunct professors are often terrific, but anyone who is overworked and underpaid is likely to invest less in their product.  I wonder, too, if this impacts the rate of scientific research (fewer full-time tenure- track professors= less research).  Any other thoughts on this trend?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

I guess sociologists are off the charts!

Here, via The American Virgin.

I am teaching Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street in my Introduction to Sociology class, and I have found that an excellent supplement to the text is the “Street view” of Google Maps. With a simple internet connection, you can type in addresses into maps.google.com and show students the places Anderson describes in the book.

Anderson begins the book with a descriptive tour of Germantown Avenue, starting in the wealthier and middle class neighborhoods and continuing through the ghettos described throughout the book.  As you read the introduction, you can follow his description of the street with Google maps.  The “Street view” allows you to “drive” up and down the street, look all around, and actually see how the ghettos are different from the middle-class neighborhoods that are his comparative foil.

The entire street is not photographed in this way, but much of it is.  You can detour off Germantown Avenue as well, following other major arteries and smaller streets through the city.

Here are the instructions and some screenshots. I don’t know much about Philadelphia; this is only based on Anderson’s descriptions.  Perhaps those more knowledgeable than I can fill in some details?

Go maps.google.com and type in the following addresses. Then click on “Street view” and navigate up and down the street as you desire.

“8500 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA” takes you to a little shopping district in Chestnut Hill, the upper-middle class nighborhood that Anderson starts out with. You can go all the way up to about 9500 or so.

“7600 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA” transitions into the Mt. Airy neighborhood, a more racially mixed middle class neighborhood. The street view ends at 7200.

“4600 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA,”  Here the Street View starts up again and goes for a few blocks before turning off on Windrim Ave.

“3700 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA”–Corner of Broad St, “one of the centers of the North Philadelphia ghetto”

“2900 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA.” Here, you start to see the empty lots, barred windows, and shuttered buildings.

“1000 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA.” Where the street ends under the interstate:

———————

Peter Hart-Brinson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He is a cultural sociologist and is working on a dissertation about gay marriage.  His post is inspired by Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street… so it’s for serious sociological nerds.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

These images capture the Columbia University class of 1909 posing as “Zulu Savages” (found here thanks to Penny R.)  We may not be so surprised to see such mimickry of blacks in 1909, but I think that when compared to these pictures of college students at race-themed parties in 2007, it might make for some interesting discussion of humor, mimickry, racism, and the notion of progress… especially as Halloween approaches.

In a New York Times article today, Patricia Cohen describes the changing demographics of the American professoriate. It had two main points:

(1) Profs are WAY OLDER now then they used to be.

(2) The older ones appear to be more liberal than the younger ones, so we can expect academia to be more moderate as the older profs retire. This table shows how “liberal,” “moderate,” and “conservative” professors report being by age and academic field (click to enlarge so you can see it better).

Cohen summarizes this table as follows:

‘Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,’ they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.

I’m not sure I buy it.

First, notice that they’re comparing two groups (26-35 and 50-64) and making a claim about a trend instead of a claim about group difference. You can’t do that. Look at the data on the age group between them (36-49), they are all over the place, not neatly sitated between the age groups that sandwich them. (This also points to the always interesting question of how the data looks if you chop up your continuous variables–in this case, age–differently.)

Second, if you stick to group differences, they are comparing the youngest group and the second to oldest group in their data. Why? If you compare the youngest to the oldest group, the data looks a bit different.

Third, their interpretation of the overall “trend”–that is, the average difference across all fields–is obscuring some really interesting variation by subfield! So maybe the overall interpretation works for the social sciences, but wow look at the physical and biological sciences! Again, here we see a choice about reporting that obscures one finding in favor of another. The choice to emphasize averages/means/medians versus ranges/variety has consequences for how we understand our world.

Finally, there is the possibility that what it means to be “liberal,” “moderate,” and “conservative” differs in a systematic way across age groups. The reporter doesn’t address this at all.

There’s are also some really interesting assumptions about what counts as “political” in the article. Cohen points to the fact that quantitative research is somehow thought to be inherently less ideological than pure theory or qualitative research. And she quotes Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright saying: “in the late ’60s and ’70s, the Marxist impulse was central for those interested in social justice.” “Now,” Cohen adds, “it resides at the margins.” But it seems to me that it is Cohen who is assuming that quantitative research isn’t justice-oriented. Her example of a not-so-politicized younger professor is Sara Goldrick-Rab, also a sociologist, who says, “My generation is not so ideologically driven.” But whose projects, detailed in the story, include college opportunities for low-income students and the way that welfare reform decreased college attendance by the poor. Goldrick-Rab also complains about the lack of support for women academics who are also mothers. Those all sound damn political to me. But Cohen writes, partially quoting Goldrick-Rab: “They [older professors] want to question values and norms; ‘we [younger professors] are more driven by data.’ ” In this sentence, Cohen puts values and data on opposite ends of a spectrum. (It’s also interesting how she opposes Goldrick-Rab’s quote to her own words, we have no idea what Goldrick-Rab meant to oppose to being data-driven.)

I am troubled by the reproduction of the binary between “objective” and “normative” “science.”

I love, however, seeing the places and people of my alma mater described! Go Wisconsin!!!

The graph below, from the New York Times, challenges a stereotype about Asian-Americans and their choice of major in college.  The author writes:

The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences or humanities, not in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math.

The article also discusses the way in which the category “Asian-American/Pacific Islander” makes invisible the dramatic discrepancy between the educational attainments of Asians who’s families immigrated from different places.  For example, they write:

…while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.

The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.

And, to a great degree, the success of a given Asian immigrant group in this society is correlated with the wealth of the nation from which they immigrated.

For our sociologist and sociologically-inclined readers:

As Wicked Anomie asks, “Sociologist and American are mutually exclusive categories?” Who knew!

She also notes:

…did you also notice that bit about “real issues,” and how they and racial/ethnic issues are mutually exclusive? So, we have the broader category of issues, then we have subcategories of racial/ethnic and “real.”

Indeed.

Via contexts crawler.