Daily Routine

Today, from an email to a trusted friend and colleague of many years asking when I might be coming to visit and re-starting our collaborative research:

An “ideal-typical” day for me probably looks like this:

6:15 am  Rise

7:30 am  Depart house, bring kids to school

8:20 am  Arrive office

6:00 pm Leave office

6:30 pm Dinner

7:00 pm  Bring kids to bed

8:00 pm  Talk with Nicola

9:00 pm  Start work

1:00 am  Bed

Office time is mostly spent with teaching or teaching preparation on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.  Thursday is usually catching up on administrative issues, or engaged in meetings.  I am also involved with managing work of the team at my Chair including 3 academic staff, 3 additional funded PhD students (now increasing to 6 students), and running a monthly study group.  Friday is “journal day” working on Socio-Economic Review and the British Journal of Industrial Relations.  Another variation involves leaving the office earlier to help the kids organize themselves or transport to their afterschool lessons or activities.  If I endeavour to do any research work, this is usually limited to Saturday and Sunday at the expense of family time. 

After two years of doing this, I am exhausted and finish most days feeling like there is more new things to-do than have been completed.  What makes the working time so ineffective:

1. Too many commitments (strategy: do one small thing after another, do it well)
2. Lack of administrative support (observation: every form that is filled out and sent somewhere will come back to require more work... at least twice)
3. Time slots are too short to complete the tasks, so things get postponed, dropped, left for later completion (rule: every time a task is stopped and restarted, an additional 50-100% energy must be reinvested to re-establish the starting point and move beyond it)
4. Fremdzwang als Selbstzwang or the problem of external agenda setting to raise funding or succeed in competition for other resources 

Here one of my favorite GC aphorisms applies: The necessary is possible, the optional is expensive, the unnecessary is unlikely.)

 To be continued....

Letter to a student engaged in plagiarism

Dear Ms. X,

Thanks for your letter.  Unfortunately, I cannot accept you as a student on the scholarship program.  I would like to explain the reason behind my decision.

Your research idea is potentially interesting, and I admire your knowledge of fuzzy set mathematics.  You also conducted the interview very well.  However, when reading your published article and then reading your proposal again, I came to the conclusion that many parts of these writings are “copied” from other articles.  For example, in your article on measuring CSR, the entire discussion of the CSR definitions is taken from the article from Carroll.  The text is shortened, but it is an identical copy in terms of the structure and wording.  Similarly, your PhD proposal has material copied extensively from the Cho and Hambrick article.

I am sure that you are aware that this way of using material is not acceptable scientific practice.  Your papers cite these sources, but they use the exact words and ideas from these other papers as if they were your own.  Under these circumstances, I cannot have confidence in the integrity of your writings.  You might also know that the German foreign minister, Mr. Guttenberg, had his PhD title revoked and was forced to leave his position in government for plagiarism – the copying of sources in his PhD.  In the UK, I have expelled MSc students from university on similar grounds.  In your case, sending me plagiarised material as part of your application has simply wasted both my time and yours. 

If you decide to embark on an academic career elsewhere, I would urge you to take this as a warning signal.  Spend time to familiarize yourself with proper ways to attribute ideas and use citations to scientific literature.  Even more importantly, you will need to develop your own original thoughts and write in your own voice.  I can imagine possible reasons why someone might be tempted to copy material -- the challenges of writing in a foreign language, time pressures, competition to be successful, and so on.  Science is based on a community of trust based on commonly accepted methods and honest reporting of research findings.  If we begin to doubt the integrity of scientific work, the very foundations of our common enterprise is lost.    If you are not committed to these standards with your whole person, then this career path is not the right one for you. 

I wish you the best of luck in moving forward,

Gregory Jackson

Plagiarism Cases

Last week, I discovered that four students in my class of 60-odd people had plagiarized their coursework essay.  The essay was based on the careful reading of two texts that students selected from a list, and engaged in a compare and contrast of different theories of corporate governance.  I discovered these cases through one of the usual plagiarism software packages.  Interestingly, all of the cases seem to involve cutting and pasting passages from the very documents that the students were supposed to discuss in their essay.  Some of these students were exchanage students on the Erasmus program, but some were regular students studying in my program.  One gentleman was in his 7th semester of studies. 

 I wrote on the students feedback form: "The main problem with your essay is that much of its content has been inappropriately copied from other sources.  Please see me during my office hours."

The final lecture of the course today was on the topic of "corruption."  Do people behave corruptly because of their individual moral failings, or does the social structure that they inhabit create pressures and temptations that systemically produce corrupt behavior?  These questions apply equally to the small bribes of petty businesspeople or the acquisence to moral wrongs of totalitarian regimes. In the university, we see this from the 2,000 words of cut-and-paste lies from students to the systematic deception of Guttenberg's PhD.  Understanding the answer to our corruption question requires us to take account of both the "agency" and the "structure," whereby agency can include the self-deception of both the individual or group.  I didn't know that this was dishonest because everybody is doing it!  Or it was imperative to achieve the result, so I just did it!  Or I knew it was wrong, but I did it for the good of someone else!

Following the corruption lecture, I held office hours: two of the four students that plagiarized their coursework indeed came to see me. One guy claimed that this was his first time doing academic writing, and did not understand how to use citations and quotations. The other guy said that he had never written in English before, and wanted the quality of academic language to be just as high as the original text that he was summarizing (most of his term paper was cut and pasted from the article that he was "summarizing").  An interesting perspective!  This student seemed to be aware that copying the passages was "wrong."  But he rationalized taking the words in an inappropriate fashion and pretending these were his own as a means to the end of a "better" paper.  Is it the results that count, isn't it?  While the aspect of human agency is clear, what is the structure around us that brings this student into the moral dilemma in the first place?  I find it interesting how changing the rules of the game from the dominant more of testing students on factual knowledge (often which can be memorized) toward critical thinking (and showing one's line of reasoning in relation to different sets of values) exposes the very fragile foundation of learning. 

On another front, I also discovered that one Chinese PhD student with top marks from a top university has plagiarized her English language published paper based on a CSR article from Caroll.  The entire literature discussion was cut and pasted in from Caroll, whereby the direct quotations and citations are also pasted in (minus the quotation marks).  The whole section is a kind of abridged version of the original.  Her PhD application was also plagiarized by cutting and pasting large sections from an article from Hambrick and co-authors.

Already back around 1994, an undergraduate student under my supervision at Columbia University wrote a fantastic BSc honors thesis on  "cheating." She interviewed fellow students and found that cheating was rampant at that time.  I was most impressed by her evidence that certain "fraternities" had computers with a database of all term papers written from past alumni that were regularly re-used, recycled, and combined into ever new term papers from the next cohort of students.