Friday, September 23rd, 2011
KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 7

IN THE SEVENTH issue of KindleReads for DragonWeb I have collected two articles that present views on Digital Humanities (William Pannapacker's essay in two parts), one that talks about the problems of academic/higher educational administration costs and their relevance to the quality of education, and another one which is about the use (and misuse) of popular plagiarism catching software in academic environments. As usual, I hope you find this small collection worth reading, and if you have anything to share, please do not hesitate to contact me at zoltan@dragonweb.hu.

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Table of Contents

- "Big Tent Digital Humanities," a View From the Edge, Part 1

- "Big Tent Digital Humanities," a View From the Edge, Part 2

- Administrators Ate My Tuition

- (Moral) Hazards of Scanning for Plagiarists: Evidence from Shoplifting

'Big Tent Digital Humanities,' a View From the Edge, Part 1

By William Pannapacker

After generations of relatively quiet progress—going back to the era of punch cards—the digital humanities has exploded into academic consciousness as the Next Big Thing at a time when the humanities seem to be in big trouble.

Some recent Ph.D.'s who were engaged with "DH," as insiders call it, before it was cool—say, seven years ago—are starting to feel jostled by the arrival of so many newcomers. As one young postdoc complained to me, "Lots of people are trying to hitch their wagon to the digital humanities star." And maybe I am one of them.

One DH leader described me as a writer who traffics in "edge discourse," which is not quite the same thing as being a "bottom feeder." I gather it means that I am not an insider, nor am I a complete outsider, since I've been following this movement for about three years now (see my previous columns, "Summer Camp for Digital Humanists," "The MLA and the Digital Humanities," and "Digital Humanities Triumphant?").

For a comprehensive introduction to the field, freely available online, I recommend A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Also, the Association for Computers and Humanities runs a helpful site called Digital Humanities Questions & Answers.

According to Matthew Kirschenbaum, associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the field is growing so fast that the major challenge is managing the proliferation of projects and approaches. Many of those were on display at Stanford University in June at the international conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.

Titled "Big Tent Digital Humanities," the alliance's annual conference brought together members of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and the Society for Digital Humanities, along with more than a few people who might be described as DH-curious.

A high percentage of DH'ers at the meeting were young graduate students and postdocs. A lot of others there had gone off the grid of traditional tenure-track academe without regrets: the "alt-ac community," including librarians and technologists, along with a variety of new professional identities who find homes in research centers rather than traditional departments.

The conventional academic hierarchies are quite muddled in the digital humanities. A new graduate can be more famous in the field than a senior professor. It's an informal culture of tie-dyed T-shirts and cargo shorts; interactive conversational presentations; and nonstop twittering involving audience members and DH'ers all over the world. There may have been more people monitoring the conference in real time online than attending in person.

Stanford University in June is almost too good to be believed. It seems like a computer-generated, fantasy campus built using SimCity with all the cheat codes enabled, especially the most useful one: "infinite money." Alternating between Europe and the United States, the digital-humanities conference is an expensive one compared with most academic meetings, favoring established scholars with travel budgets, although the member groups do subsidize some early-career scholars. There were more than 350 participants, most from Canada and the United States, particularly California, and a good number from England, continental Europe, Australia, and Japan. It was a highly competitive venue. According to one of the conference organizers, the acceptance rate for presentations was about 28 percent, which had an impact on the range of institutional affiliations, since most small institutions do not subsidize conference attendance for observers. A lot of people, I am sure, were attending on their own dime.

But it was worth the price of admission. If you're interested in digital humanities and the future of humanities research and teaching, this was one of those conferences where you are forced to choose among not-to-be-missed sessions. More than a few presentations still stand out in my memory, perhaps for idiosyncratic reasons.

A session called "Virtual Cities/Digital Histories" included a presentation by Chris Speed, a lecturer at the Edinburgh College of Art. He showed how QR tags, also called 3D bar codes, when combined with iPhone apps called "Touching the City" and "Tales of Things," can be used to allow places and objects to tell their own stories, so to speak. Your experiences in Philadelphia meeting loved ones at the bronze eagle in Wanamaker's—added to the experiences of thousands of other people—can become part of its history. Equally exciting, he said, special objects can be tagged and their emotional provenance can be recorded, so that the personal history of a favorite toy or piece of furniture can passed down to future generations, complete with the memories of previous users.

Both possibilities seemed to open unlimited frontiers for place studies, social history, and personal nostalgia—a whole new way of recording our lives and our culture, although one has to wonder at what point we'll begin spending more time documenting our lives than actually living them.

More than one DH veteran observed that this year's conference was characterized by reflections on professional protocols and establishing best practices. One of the most notable of those reflections came from Joshua Sternfeld, a senior program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities' division of preservation and access. In "Reforming Digital Historical Peer Review," he explained how digital historians should be transparent about their use of archival records, organizational frameworks, contextual information, and methods for users to navigate and repurpose their projects.

It's a problem, for example, if you represent African-Americans in 1920s Harlem primarily on the basis of police reports. In other words, new tools for representing large sets of data are not a replacement for expert analysis and peer review. Digital historians—given the tendency of technology to make the interpretive seem objective—need to be particularly conscientious about transparency and methodological rigor. Building on standards established by the Modern Language Association, Sternfeld offered an approach for assessing scholarship that is as rigorous and respected as the processes involved in the publication of scholarly articles and monographs.

A session on "Networks, Literature, and Culture" followed introductory remarks by Franco Moretti, author of the influential Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005). The panel included presentations by three Stanford-affiliated scholars: Zephyr Frank spoke on the visualization of character relationships in Brazilian novels and how that relates to larger social historical patterns. Ed Finn talked about the changing rules for literary success in the era of Amazon.com. And Rhiannon Lewis covered the ways that literary genres depend on the structure of networks among characters; for example, there is a lower density of social connectedness in Shakespeare's tragedies than in his comedies, and such patterns can be observed by new tools for visualization.

Some of the sessions went over my head, as though I were in the presence of the digital-humanities sublime. Afterward, Alan Liu observed that DH projects are "quickly approaching the limits of what is graspable by the human mind." Readers can judge for themselves by browsing the abstracts of 152 presentations available online.

Clearly, the resources allowing for the growth of digital humanities are unevenly distributed. It takes a while for innovations at the major research universities to trickle down to undergraduate colleges with lesser resources. DH cultivates an egalitarian, almost evangelical, fervor for spreading its methods to the provinces—DH'ers are genuinely nice people, many of whom understand academic marginality from personal experience. But the movement also prides itself on a rapidly slicing cutting edge that was on display at the "Big Tent" conference.

In one panel discussion, "The '#alt-ac' Track: Digital Humanists Off the Straight and Narrow Path to Tenure," an audience member asked, "How can I prepare for careers in the digital humanities if my adviser is not interested, and we don't have a digital-humanities center?"

The half-joking answer from one panelist was, "Transfer."

The remark was greeted with groans even though it contained a lot of truth. DH is a field that's difficult to enter without significant support and collaboration. You can't just read more books and articles—you have to learn to build things. If you have any thoughts about exploring the field, choose your graduate program carefully—and maybe even your undergraduate program, since it won't be long before applicants to graduate schools in the humanities will be expected to possess DH skills. Some programs are already giving their students that competitive advantage (see, for example, the Digital Humanities Initiative, at Hamilton College), but the academic luxuries of this year will become necessities for many other institutions in this decade, even under the pressure of severely constrained resources.

Considering a transfer to one of those centers is less helpful for those of us who are at midcareer and are more deeply rooted in the lives of our institutions. Based at a liberal-arts college in the Midwest, I am not exactly near the center of the field, but I think I might be representative of the growing numbers of faculty members who recognize the importance of DH yet are struggling—even with administrative enthusiasm and small grants—to find the resources to keep up and participate in a meaningful way.

The most important of those resources is human. We can't succeed as islands. We have to collaborate with one another and with the larger research centers if the field is going to succeed outside of major universities. More and more, we recognize that the old model of the individual scholar—if it was ever really viable, and not a romantic myth—has become completely dysfunctional.

In Liberal Arts at the Brink (Harvard, 2011), Victor E. Ferrall Jr. argues convincingly that most liberal-arts colleges are going to need to collaborate, forming regional consortia if they are going to provide the kinds of educational opportunities that students will increasingly demand and faculty members will need to conduct their work. The future of digital humanities at many colleges depends on their ability to share resources and build relationships with the DH centers at major institutions, cultivating careers on the edge between innovation and tradition, as well as between research and teaching.

It's a daunting task, even at the individual level, but the alternative is to become increasingly irrelevant, rejecting innovation and embracing a seemingly principled Luddism. Or worse, standing in the way of positive developments by maintaining an inflexible vision of scholarly productivity, based entirely on term papers, journals, and monographs, that will hold a diminishing place in the marketplace of ideas.

In his extemporaneous and highly motivational Zampolli Prize lecture, "Re-Imagining Digital Scholarship in the Digital Age," Chad Gaffield, president of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, described the ways that DH is transforming every aspect of academic life by reconfiguring relationship networks both inside and outside academe. DH will change graduate education, job preparation, faculty evaluation, the structure of academic units, and the relationship of educational institutions to one another and to the communities they serve.

According to Gaffield, DH provides the most compelling counternarrative to the one about the humanities' being in decline. In the future, students will no longer see a hard line between working in the humanities and working with technology. Moreover, as a result of new networks and access to information, the undergraduate degree is fast becoming a research degree, at least at colleges that seek to prepare students for the challenges of this century.

In Part 2 of this essay, I plan to reflect on several important projects and initiatives in the digital humanities that were announced at the "Big Tent" conference and directly respond to the issues I raise here.

William Pannapacker is an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily represent those of his employer.

Source URL: http://chronicle.com/article/Big-Tent-Digital-Humanities/128434/
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Big-Tent Digital Humanities: a View From the Edge, Part 2

By William Pannapacker

It's an interesting time to be an observer from the edge of the digital humanities, but I can see that this subfield, much like the rest of the humanities, faces many challenges.

Some are related to the traditions of academic culture—the apparent disinclination of some humanists to work with digital technologies, the academic tendency to value individual achievement over teamwork, and the continuing emphasis on the use of scholarly monographs to certify tenure and promotion. Other challenges seem more structural, such as declining financial support for the humanities in general.

And, of course, the continuing transformation of higher education into a system of casual labor off the tenure track continues to make it much harder for young scholars to get established, particularly if they are working in new, interdisciplinary fields that do not already have dedicated faculty lines.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, I wrote about trends I saw at the international conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, at Stanford University. There were new applications, new scholarly projects, new intellectual communities, new career paths, and undoubtedly a lot of excitement about the accelerating growth of the field.

Now I'd like to turn to the larger problems facing the field, such as the reality that most people don't know all that much about it.

That's true of much of the work done in the humanities. We speak with each other primarily through scholarly channels—which is essential to our work—but that creates a void in public discourse about what we do. How can we justify putting money into seemingly impractical fields when college costs more than an average house?

Even some academics dismiss digital humanities as yet another fad and, therefore, not worthy of investment at this particular moment. But the digital humanities is already well established as a field, with landmark works of scholarship, major journals, conferences, awards, and an increasing number of degree programs, even as the profession keeps asking, à la Crevecoeur, "What is the Digital Humanist, this new academic?"

There are plenty of answers to that question. I recommend reading Matthew G. Kirschenbaum's recent addition to the genre, "What Is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?"

Based on what I saw at the Stanford conference, one answer is that this emerging field is more than the integration of digital technologies with the humanities. Digital humanities is a comprehensive activist project that uses technology to respond to the interconnected cultural and structural problems of academe. From my perspective, as part of a generation that went through graduate school in the 1990s, the "DH" field is a response to a feeling of disenfranchisement and alienation from traditional academic culture in the context of a radically changed system of employment.

Digital humanities cultivates scholarly collaboration as well as individual exploration, technological innovation alongside methodological rigor. It redefines the nature of academic careers while dealing with longstanding disciplinary conversations. And it engages in complex, theoretical heavy lifting while building projects that are often based on the Internet, available to the public, and indisputably useful. (Consider the various projects of the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and Hamilton College's Digital Humanities Initiative.)

Like the founders and builders of museums, libraries, concert halls, and critical editions in the last century, digital humanists are creating the new infrastructure of our history and culture and changing the nature of education and scholarship. In undergraduate education, for example—where there is so much lamentation about declining standards and irrelevant coursework—the lecture and exam in DH are being succeeded by faculty-student collaborative research toward projects that are not just going to be graded and forgotten. They will be put to use in a global, online community. With leaders who have never known a time when scholarship in the humanities wasn't in crisis, DH is moving us—finally—from endless hand-wringing toward doing something to create positive change throughout academe.

And yet I am uncomfortable with being one of the people beating the digital-humanities drum—and possibly encouraging even more people to consider graduate school or to change fields so they can be part of this "revolution."

Perhaps celebrating the importance of DH may stimulate the creation of some new positions, or at least the flow of more soft-money grants, but I already know some outstanding DH'ers—known leaders in the field—who have yet to find stable academic jobs. At a job slam at the conference at Stanford, announcements of a few new positions were greeted with cheers.

The digital humanities may seem like a lifeboat amid the wreckage of higher education in the humanities, but it's not large enough to hold everyone who's still in the water. And who can say whether any more lifeboats are coming? By now this subfield is almost unavoidable for anyone on the tenure track. But identifying oneself with DH is not a shortcut to stable, traditional employment for anxious graduate students and faculty members.

The Stanford conference marked the launch—with a well-attended panel discussion and much conversation on social media—of the #Alt-Academy project, an open-access collection of essays, dialogues, and personal narratives on the subject of unconventional academic careers for scholars. The collection defines "alternative academics" as people with deep training and experience as humanities scholars who take up nonprofessorial roles in universities and colleges or work in allied cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, academic presses, and other humanities organizations.

Many of the collection's initial 33 contributors are DH'ers. The editor of #Alt-Academy, Bethany Nowviskie, is one of them: a non-tenure-track English Ph.D. serving as director of digital research and scholarship at the University of Virginia Library. Otherwise known as the Scholars' Lab, her program provides support in digital scholarship to faculty members and advanced students. She is also vice president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and a well-known DH blogger.

Nowviskie's career path is a model for graduates who no longer regard a tenure-track appointment as realistic—in other words, for the overwhelming majority, who don't want to be adjuncts.

"#Alt-Academy is an attempt to fill a gap," Nowviskie said. "Many career-development resources exist for humanities Ph.D.'s who decide to leave the academy, but few focus on the special problems and opportunities facing those who stay—often as second-class citizens." She sees what she calls the "#alt-ac track" as uniquely positioned to test experimental publishing models and new forms of peer review: "The upside of our sometimes tenuous status in higher education is that many of the rules of professional advancement no longer apply to us. We've already stepped off the straight and narrow path to tenure."

According to Lisa Spiro, a contributor to #Alt-Academy who is director of the Nitle Labs, of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, the work of scholars in the digital humanities is "more likely to be practical rather than theoretical, collaborative rather than solo, and focused not so much on writing books and essays as on producing grant applications and building tools, digital collections, Web sites, or training programs."

Speaking on the same panel, Julia Flanders, director of the Women Writers Project at Brown University's Center for Digital Scholarship, observed that tenure-stream faculty members are only 15 percent of the employees at Brown. "The professor as a paradigm," she said, "obscures the ecology of the university."

Alternative academics have more-serendipitous career paths, she said. One thing leads to another. They often hold multiple positions at the same time, and their job transitions are dovetailed rather than clear changes.

Unfortunately, many alternative positions are short-term, part-time, and fragmentary: projects based in centers rather than departments. Once the grant money runs out, digital humanists' jobs often evaporate, and, of course, they face the contumely of the securely tenured. One panelist noted how she had often been treated with disrespect, since staff members lack academic freedom and are often excluded from academic leadership, even if they hold doctorates and have recognized accomplishments as scholars.

It's not an ideal situation, but, for many alternative academics, it's better than joining the growing ranks of adjuncts who aspire to tenure-track positions. Even so, one panelist also observed, the alt-ac path means constant grant writing and job seeking, and no pay for the research and training that needs to be done to advance those efforts.

In other words, "Alt-ac can mean alt-workaholic."

"Alt-ac is fine," said one audience member, "but there are a lot of reasons to hold out for a tenure-track position."

As I see it, we need to find new ways to be humanists, while recognizing that alternative academic careers must coincide with substantial resistance to the deprofessonalization and adjunctification of the humanities.

Next year's digital-humanities conference will be held in Hamburg, Germany. In 2013, the location is Lincoln, Neb.

William Pannapacker is an associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Mich. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily represent those of his employers.

Source URL: http://chronicle.com/article/Big-Tent-Digital-Humanities-a/129036/
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Administrators Ate My Tuition

Want to get college costs in line? Start by cutting the overgrown management ranks.

By Benjamin Ginsberg

Photo: Mario Lalich

No statistic about higher education commands more attention—and anxiety—among members of the public than the rising price of admission. Since 1980, inflation- adjusted tuition at public universities has tripled; at private universities it has more than doubled. Compared to all other goods and services in the American economy, including medical care, only “cigarettes and other tobacco products” have seen prices rise faster than the cost of going to college. And for all that, parents who sign away ever-larger tuition checks can be forgiven for doubting whether universities are spending those additional funds in ways that make their kids’ educations better—to say nothing of three times better.

Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.

Apparently, as colleges and universities have had more money to spend, they have not chosen to spend it on expanding their instructional resources—that is, on paying faculty. They have chosen, instead, to enhance their administrative and staff resources. A comprehensive study published by the Delta Cost Project in 2010 reported that between 1998 and 2008, America’s private colleges increased spending on instruction by 22 percent while increasing spending on administration and staff support by 36 percent. Parents who wonder why college tuition is so high and why it increases so much each year may be less than pleased to learn that their sons and daughters will have an opportunity to interact with more administrators and staffers— but not more professors. Well, you can’t have everything.

Of course, universities have always employed administrators. When I was a graduate student in the 1960s and a young professor in the 1970s, however, top administrators were generally drawn from the faculty, and even midlevel managerial tasks were directed by faculty members. These moonlighting academics typically occupied administrative slots on a part-time or temporary basis and planned in due course to return to full-time teaching and research. Whatever their individual faults and gifts, faculty administrators seldom had to be reminded that the purpose of a university was the promotion of education and research, and their own short-term managerial endeavors tended not to distract them from their long-term academic commitments.

Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience, and even those who have spent time in a classroom or laboratory often hope to make administration their life’s work and have no plan to return to teaching. For many of these career managers, promoting teaching and research is less important than expanding their own administrative domains. Under their supervision, the means have become the end.

Every year, hosts of administrators and staffers are added to college and university payrolls, even as schools claim to be battling budget crises that are forcing them to reduce the size of their full-time faculties. As a result, universities are now filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school. If there is any hope of getting higher education costs in line, and improving its quality—and I think there is, though the hour is late—it begins with taking a pair of shears to the overgrown administrative bureaucracy.

Forty years ago, America’s colleges employed more professors than administrators. The efforts of 446,830 professors were supported by 268,952 administrators and staffers. Over the past four decades, though, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents”—that is, slots filled by two or more part-time faculty members whose combined hours equal those of a full-timer—increased slightly more than 50 percent. That percentage is comparable to the growth in student enrollments during the same time period. But the number of administrators and administrative staffers employed by those schools increased by an astonishing 85 percent and 240 percent, respectively.

Today, administrators and staffers safely outnumber full-time faculty members on campus. In 2005, colleges and universities employed more than 675,000 fulltime faculty members or full-time equivalents. In the same year, America’s colleges and universities employed more than 190,000 individuals classified by the federal government as “executive, administrative and managerial employees.” Another 566,405 college and university employees were classified as “other professional.” This category includes IT specialists, counselors, auditors, accountants, admissions officers, development officers, alumni relations officials, human resources staffers, editors and writers for school publications, attorneys, and a slew of others. These “other professionals” are not administrators, but they work for the administration and serve as its arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouthpieces.

Before they employed an army of professional staffers, administrators were forced to rely on the cooperation of the faculty to carry out tasks ranging from admissions to planning. An administration that lost the confidence of the faculty might find itself unable to function. Today, ranks of staffers form a bulwark of administrative power in the contemporary university. These administrative staffers do not work for or, in many cases, even share information with the faculty. They help make the administration, in the language of political science, “relatively autonomous,” marginalizing the faculty.

While some administrative posts continue to be held by senior professors on a part-time basis, their ranks are gradually dwindling as their jobs are taken over by fulltime managers. College administrations frequently tout the fiscal advantages of using part-time, “adjunct” faculty to teach courses. They fail, however, to apply the same logic to their own ranks. Over the past thirty years, the percentage of faculty members who are hired on a part-time basis has increased so dramatically that today almost half of the nation’s professors work only part-time. And yet the percentage of administrators who are part-time employees has fallen during the same time period.

Administrators are not only well staffed, they are also well paid. Vice presidents at the University of Maryland, for example, earn well over $200,000, and deans earn nearly as much. Both groups saw their salaries increase as much as 50 percent between 1998 and 2003, a period of financial retrenchment and sharp tuition increases at the university. The University of Maryland at College Park—which employs six vice presidents, six associate vice presidents, five assistant vice presidents, six assistants to the president, and six assistants to the vice presidents—has long been noted for its bloated and extortionate bureaucracy, but it actually does not seem to be much of an exception. Administrative salaries are on the rise everywhere in the nation. By 2007, the median salary paid to the president of a doctoral degree-granting institution was $325,000. Eighty-one presidents earned more than $500,000, and twelve earned over $1 million. Presidents, at least, might perform important services for their schools. Somewhat more difficult to explain is the fact that by 2010 even some of the ubiquitous and largely interchangeable deanlets and deanlings earned six-figure salaries.

If you have any remaining doubt about where colleges and universities have been spending their increasing tuition and other revenues, consider this: between 1947 and 1995 (the last year for which the relevant data was published), administrative costs increased from barely 9 percent to nearly 15 percent of college and university budgets. More recent data, though not strictly comparable, follows a similar pattern. During this same time period, stated in constant dollars, overall university spending increased 148 percent. Instructional spending increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent.

Three main explanations are often adduced for the sharp growth in the number of university administrators over the past thirty years. One is that there have been new sorts of demands for administrative services that require more managers per student or faculty member than was true in the past. Universities today have an elaborate IT infrastructure, enhanced student services, a more extensive fund-raising and lobbying apparatus, and so on, than was common thirty years ago. Of course, it might also be said that during this same time period, whole new fields of teaching and research opened in such areas as computer science, genetics, chemical biology, and physics. Other new research and teaching fields opened because of ongoing changes in the world economy and international order. And yet, faculty growth between 1975 and 2005 simply kept pace with growth in enrollments and substantially lagged behind administrative and staff growth. When push came to shove, colleges chose to invest in management rather than in teaching and research.

A second common explanation given for the expansion of administration in recent years is the growing need to respond to mandates and record-keeping demands from federal and state governments as well as numerous licensure and accreditation bodies. It is certainly true that large numbers of administrators spend a good deal of time preparing reports and collecting data for these and other agencies. But as burdensome as this paperwork blizzard might be, it is not clear that it explains the growth in administrative personnel that we have observed. Often, affirmative action reporting is cited as the most time consuming of the various governmental mandates. As the economist Barbara Bergmann has pointed out, however, across the nation only a handful of administrators and staffers are employed in this endeavor.

More generally, we would expect that if administrative growth were mainly a response to external mandates, growth should be greater at state schools, which are more exposed to government obligations, than at private institutions, which are freer to manage their own affairs in their own way. Yet, when we examine the data, precisely the opposite seems to be the case. Between 1975 and 2005, the number of administrators and managers employed by public institutions increased by 66 percent. During the same time period, the number of administrators employed by private colleges and universities grew by 135 percent (see Table 4). These numbers seem inconsistent with the idea that external mandates have been the forces driving administrative growth at America’s institutions of higher education.

A third explanation has to do with the conduct of the faculty. Many faculty members, it is often said, regard administrative activities as obnoxious chores and are content to allow these to be undertaken by others. While there is some truth to this, it is certainly not the whole story. Often enough, I have observed that professors who are willing to perform administrative tasks lose interest when they find that the committees, councils, and assemblies through which the faculty nominally acts have lost much if not all their power to administrators.

If growth-driven demand, governmental mandates, and faculty preferences are not sufficient explanations for administrative expansion, an alternative explanation might be found in the nature of university bureaucracies themselves. In particular, administrative growth may be seen primarily as a result of efforts by administrators to aggrandize their own roles in academic life. Students of bureaucracy have frequently observed that administrators have a strong incentive to maximize the power and prestige of whatever office they hold by working to increase its staff and budget. To justify such increases, they often seek to capture functions currently performed by others or invent new functions for themselves that might or might not further the organization’s main mission.

Such behavior is common on today’s campuses. At one school, an inventive group of administrators created the “Committee on Traditions,” whose mission seemed to be the identification and restoration of forgotten university traditions or, failing that, the creation of new traditions. Another group of deans constituted themselves as the “War Zones Task Force.” This group recruited staffers, held many meetings, and prepared a number of reports whose upshot seemed to be that students should be discouraged from traveling to war zones, unless, of course, their home was in a war zone. But perhaps the expansion of university bureaucracies is best illustrated by an ad placed by a Colorado school, which sought a “Coordinator of College Liaisons.” Depending on how you read it, this is either a ridiculous example of bureaucratic layering or an intrusion into an area of student life that hardly requires administrative assistance.

The number of administrators and staffers on university campuses has increased so rapidly in recent years that often there is not enough work to keep all of them busy. To fill their time, administrators engage in a number of make-work activities. This includes endless rounds of meetings, mostly with other administrators, often consisting of reports from and plans for other meetings. For example, at a recent “president’s staff meeting” at an Ohio community college, eleven of the eighteen agenda items discussed by administrators involved plans for future meetings or discussions of other recently held meetings. At a gathering of the “Process Management Steering Committee” of a Midwestern community college, virtually the entire meeting was devoted to planning subsequent meetings by process management teams, including the “search committee training team,” the “faculty advising and mentoring team,” and the “culture team,” which was said to be meeting with “renewed energy.” The culture team was apparently also close to making a recommendation on the composition of a “Culture Committee.” Since culture is a notoriously abstruse issue, this committee may need to meet for years, if not decades, to unravel its complexities.

When they face particularly challenging problems, academic administrators sometimes find that ordinary meetings in campus offices do not allow them the freedom from distraction they require. To allow them to focus fully and without interruption, administrators sometimes find it necessary to schedule off-campus administrative retreats where they can work without fear that the day-to-day concerns of the campus will disturb their deliberations. Sometimes these retreats include athletic and role-playing activities that are supposed to help improve the staff’s spirit of camaraderie and ability to function as a team. For example, at a 2007 professional development retreat, Michigan Tech staffers broke into teams and spent several hours building furniture from pieces of cardboard and duct tape. Many staff retreats also include presentations by professional speakers who appear to specialize in psychobabble. Topics at recent retreats included “Do You Want to Succeed?” “Reflective Resensitizing,” and “Waking Up the Inner World.” In all likelihood, the administrators and staffers privileged to attend these important talks spent the next several weeks reporting on them at meetings with colleagues who had been deprived of the opportunity to learn firsthand how to make certain that their inner worlds remained on alert.

Administrative budgets frequently include travel funds, on the theory that conference participation will hone administrators’ skills and provide them with new information and ideas that will ultimately serve their school’s interests. We can be absolutely certain that this would be the only reason administrators would even consider dragging themselves to Maui during the winter for a series of workshops sponsored by the North American Association of Summer Sessions. Given the expense and hardship usually occasioned by travel to Hawaii, it is entirely appropriate for colleges to foot this sort of bill.

Another ubiquitous make-work exercise is the formation of a “strategic plan.” Until recent years, colleges engaged in little formal planning. Today, however, virtually every college and university in the nation has an elaborate strategic plan. This is typically a lengthy document— some are 100 pages long or more—that purports to articulate the school’s mission, its leadership’s vision of the future, and the various steps that are needed to achieve the school’s goals. The typical plan takes six months to two years to write and requires countless hours of work from senior administrators and their staffs.

A plan that was really designed to guide an organization’s efforts to achieve future objectives, as it might be promulgated by a corporation or a military agency, would typically present concrete objectives, a timetable for their realization, an outline of the tactics that will be employed, a precise assignment of staff responsibilities, and a budget. Some university plans approach this model. Most, however, are simply expanded “vision statements” that are often forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has presented two systemwide strategic plans and one arts and sciences strategic plan in the last fifteen years. No one can remember much about any of these plans, but another one is currently in the works. The plan is not a blueprint for the future. It is, instead, a management tool for the present. The ubiquity of planning at America’s colleges and universities is another reflection and reinforcement of the ongoing growth of administrative power.

There is, to be sure, one realm in which administrators as a class have proven extraordinarily adept. This is the general domain of fund-raising. Even during the depths of the recession in 2009, schools were able to raise money. On the one hand, the donors who give selflessly to their schools deserve to be commended for their beneficence. At the same time, it should still be noted that, as is so often the case in the not-for-profit world, university administrators appropriate much of this money to support—what else?—more administration.

The stress on fund-raising has enabled more than a few university presidents to acquire luxurious offices, lavish residences, and an assortment of perks in addition to princely salaries. Some enjoy the services of a chauffeur when they commute to work and a household staff when they entertain or even relax at home. These and many other perquisites are usually defended by administrators as needed to carry out their social duties and, particularly, to impress their schools’ wealthy benefactors. Yet no study has ever proved that presidents who arrive at fundraising events in chauffeur-driven limousines are more likely to succeed in their capital campaign goals or in any other endeavor than their counterparts who drive their own cars or come by taxi or, for that matter, by subway. I have personally known university presidents who were outstanding fund-raisers but, nevertheless, lived frugally and always traveled as cheaply as possible. Among college officials, though, the spendthrifts seem to outnumber the penny pinchers.

College presidents are usually the guiltiest parties, since they are in the best position to authorize expenditures, and many are more than happy to use school funds to burnish their own images. One recent case in point is that of Benjamin Ladner, the former president of American University in Washington, D.C. Soon after arriving on the campus in 1994, Ladner and his wife, who dubbed herself AU’s “first lady,” declared that the president’s official residence was inadequate and had the university build an expensive new house, which included a waterfall and pond behind the patio, a few blocks from the campus. They outfitted the house with expensive furnishings, china, and stemware. At university expense, the Ladners employed a chauffeur, a cook, a social secretary, and numerous other personal staff members. They hosted gala events to which they invited prominent Washington figures. They traveled abroad frequently, generally charging their first-class tickets to the university.

Matters came to a head in March 2005, when an anonymous whistleblower wrote to the board of trustees accusing the Ladners of “severe expense account violations.” An extensive audit subsequently revealed hundreds of thousands of dollars in questionable spending, some personal but most associated with President Ladner’s frenetic image-polishing efforts. Over the previous several years, the Ladners had charged the university for $6,000 in club dues, $54,000 in drivers’ costs, $220,000 in chefs’ services, $44,000 for alcohol, and $100,000 in services from their social secretary.

After months of bruising battles within the AU board, Ladner’s contract was terminated—though he and the first lady received a generous severance package. While Ladner mingled with the rich and famous at the school’s expense, faculty members had to settle for miserly annual salary increases and students saw their tuitions rise markedly every year.

The expansion of college and university administration has not been coupled with the development of adequate mechanisms of oversight and supervision, particularly for senior managers. University boards, which technically oversee the administrations, are generally not well prepared for the task. One recent study found that 40 percent of university trustees said they were not prepared for the job and 42 percent indicated that they spent less than five hours a month on board business. Many trustees serve because of loyalty to their school and say they have “faith” in its administration. They do not go out of their way to look for problems, and administrators are generally able to satisfy trustees with the rosy pictures of college life presented at weekend board meetings.

Moreover, university boards do not have the same legal responsibilities borne by corporate boards. Most federal regulations establishing management standards for private-sector firms, such as the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, do not apply to nonprofit entities, and state regulation of university administration is spotty. At the same time, while schools have developed many internal rules and standards applying to the conduct of faculty members and students, few if any have established standards governing administrative conduct or established oversight mechanisms. For the most part, senior administrators police themselves.

The result of this lack of supervision is that a number of college and university administrators have, in recent years, succumbed to the temptation to engage in corrupt practices. In 2008, for example, the director of Tufts University’s Office of Student Activities, Josephine Nealley, was indicted on three counts of larceny for embezzling more than $300,000 in student activities funds. She allegedly transferred the money to her personal bank accounts and used it for purchases and trips. While acting on an anonymous tip regarding Nealley’s activities, university auditors uncovered a second, apparently unrelated case of embezzlement. Raymond Rodriguez, a budget officer, allegedly stole more than $600,000 from the university, which he spent on trips and luxury goods. Rodriguez was indicted on two counts of larceny for his alleged thefts. Both Nealley and Rodriguez entered guilty pleas and were sentenced to prison terms.

In a similar vein, the president of the University of Tennessee was forced to resign when an audit revealed that he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in university funds on personal trips, entertainment, and purchases. The president’s travel at university expense allegedly included trips to Birmingham, Alabama, where he was said to have a “personal involvement” with the president of another school.

Often, frauds go unnoticed for years because the perpetrators are the accountants and financial officers responsible for fiscal oversight. When fraudulent conduct is discovered, university officials often prefer to allow the perpetrators to resign or retire quietly rather than risk a public brouhaha that might upset donors and lead to questions about the quality of the school’s leadership. Many professors can point to cases at their own school when crooked administrators were allowed to leave quietly, sometimes even without being compelled to make restitution for their offenses.

When fraud is exposed and restitution demanded, the sums can be considerable. In January 2008, Roy Johnson, chancellor of Alabama’s community college system, pled guilty to bribery and was required to forfeit the $18 million he admitted receiving in direct and indirect benefits from companies doing business with the colleges he oversaw. As the U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case observed, “Taxpayers must wonder how many more Alabama students could have been educated had money not been wasted on fraud.”

The priorities of the hyper-administrative university emerge most clearly during times of economic crisis, when managers are forced to make choices among spending options. Thanks to the sharp economic downturn that followed America’s 2008 financial crisis, almost every institution, even Harvard, America’s wealthiest school, has been compelled to make substantial cuts in its expenditures. What cuts did university administrations choose to make during these hard times?

A tiny number of schools took the opportunity to confront years of administrative and staff bloat and moved to cut costs by shedding unneeded administrators and their brigades of staffers. The most notable example is the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, which in February 2009 addressed a $100 million budget deficit by eliminating fifteen “leadership positions,” along with 450 staff jobs, among other cuts. The dean also emphasized that faculty would not be affected by the planned budget cuts. Chicago’s message was clear: administrators and staffers were less important than teaching, research, and—since this involved a medical school—patient care; if the budget had to be cut, it would be done by thinning the school’s administrative ranks, not by reducing its core efforts.

Unfortunately, few if any other colleges and universities copied the Chicago model. Facing budgetary problems, many schools eliminated academic programs and announced across-the-board salary and hiring freezes, which meant that vacant staff and faculty positions, including the positions of many adjunct professors, would remain unfilled until the severity of the crisis eased.

Perverse administrative priorities were even more in evidence at a number of schools that actually raised administrative salaries or opted to spend more money on administrative services while cutting expenditures on teaching and research in the face of budget deficits. For example, in January 2009, facing $19 million in budget cuts and a hiring freeze, Florida Atlantic University awarded raises of 10 percent or more to top administrators, including the school’s president. In a similar vein, in February 2009, the president of the University of Vermont defended the bonuses paid to the school’s twenty-one top administrators against the backdrop of layoffs, job freezes, and program cuts at the university. The university president, Daniel Fogel, asserted that administrative bonuses were based on the principles of “extra pay for extra duties” and “pay for performance.” The president rejected a faculty member’s assertion that paying bonuses to administrators when the school faced an enormous budget deficit seemed similar to the sort of greed recently manifested by the corporate executives who paid themselves bonuses with government bailout money. Fogel said he shared the outrage of those upset at corporate greed, but maintained there was a “world of difference” between the UVM administrative bonuses and bonuses paid to corporate executives. He did not specify what that world might be.

In the meantime the president of Washington State University, Elson Floyd, accepted a $125,000 pay raise, bringing his 2009 salary to $725,000 per year, soon after announcing that financial circumstances required the school to freeze hiring. At another university that had just announced a large budget deficit and mandated salary and hiring freezes, the outgoing president was feted by the board of trustees at a gala 350-person dinner, to which trustees, senior administrators, alumni, donors, and other notables—but no students or faculty—were invited. The dinner, which might as well have been held on the promenade deck of the Titanic, featured musical performances, videos, and a lounge area with hundreds of Chinese newspapers and a tea set to recognize the president’s many trips to China. (No wonder university spending was frozen.) Later, this same university placed restrictions on the use of copy paper by graduate students. Maybe the Chinese newspapers should have been recycled.

On any given campus, the only institution with the actual power to halt the onward march of the all-administrative university is the board of trustees or regents— which, as we’ve seen, tend to be unprepared or disinclined to make waves. But they need to do so if their institutions are to be saved from sinking into the expanding swamp of administrative mediocrity.

To begin with, trustees interested in trimming administrative fat should compare their own school’s ratio of managers and staffers per hundred students to the national mean, which is currently an already inflated nine for private schools and eight for public colleges. If the national mean is nine administrators per hundred students at private colleges, why does Vanderbilt need sixty-four? Why does Rochester need forty and Johns Hopkins thirty-one? Management-minded administrators claim to believe in benchmarking, so they should not object to being benchmarked in this way.

The right kind of media coverage would embolden boards to ask the right questions. In particular, the various publications that rate and rank colleges—U.S. News is the most influential—should take account of administrative bloat in their ratings. After all, a high administrator-to-student ratio means that the school is diverting funds from academic programs to support an overgrown bureaucracy. I am certain that if Vanderbilt or Duke or Hopkins or Rochester or Emory or any of the other most administratively top-heavy schools lost a few notches in the U.S. News rankings because of their particularly egregious administrative bloat, their boards would be forced to act.

But given the general fattening of administrative ranks in recent years, even schools with average administrator-to-student ratios could stand to see major cuts in their administrative staffs and budgets. This could help not only to fill budget holes but, more importantly, to begin a healthy shift in the balance of bureaucratic power within universities. A 10 percent cut in the staff and management ranks would save millions of dollars but would have no effect whatsoever on the operations of most campuses. The deanlets would never be missed; their absence from campus would go unnoticed. A 20 percent or larger cut would begin to be noticed and would have the beneficial effect of substantially reducing administrative power and the ongoing diversion of scarce funds into unproductive channels.

With fewer deanlets to command, senior administrators would be compelled to turn once again to the faculty for administrative support. Such a change would result in better programs and less unchecked power for presidents and provosts. Faculty who work part-time or for part of their careers as administrators tend to ask questions, use judgment, and interfere with arbitrary presidential and provostial decision making. Senior full-time administrators might resent the interference, but the university would benefit from the result. Moreover, with fewer administrators to pay and send to conferences and retreats, more resources might be available for educational programs and student support, the actual items for which parents, donors, and funding agencies think they are paying.

Benjamin Ginsberg is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. This article is adapted with permission from The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, by Benjamin Ginsberg, published by Oxford University Press, 2011.

Source URL: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all
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(Moral) Hazards of Scanning for Plagiarists: Evidence from Shoplifting

By David E. Harrington

Nearly everything we buy nowadays is electronically scanned to ensure that we paid for the items in our bags—and under our coats.  Stores began using sensor tags and security screens in the early 1970s.  According to the New York Times, the market for anti-theft systems grew rapidly because they were viewed as “more reliable and less expensive” than having employees watch customers.

Students are being scanned as well to make sure that the words in their papers were not swiped from other sources.  Scanning papers began a decade ago when anti-plagiarism software was created to compare the phrases of student papers with other sources.  The leading anti-plagiarism software is Turnitin, which compares student papers with academic journals, Internet web pages and its library of previously submitted papers.  On its home page, Turnitin quotes an instructor as saying, “I used to spend hours on Google searching for unusual wording when I suspected that the paper was not written by the student. Now, I can search quickly with Turnitin!”

Scanning store customers and student papers are touted as substitutes for labor, so that clerks and instructors can spend less time guarding against thievery and more time doing what they do best, serving customers and teaching students.  Sounds great; sounds efficient; sounds easy!

In the years before sensor tags and security screens, the battle against shoplifters was waged with security guards and convex mirrors.  An expert on store security—quoted in Shoplifting: A Social History—argues that hiring security guards may have actually increased shoplifting because other employees were likely to think, “Pete is here, so I don’t have to watch out for shoplifters.”

Today, store clerks may think, “our stuff is tagged, so I don’t have to watch out for shoplifters.”  Indeed, stores have begun to question whether the substitution of security systems for labor has gone too far, reenlisting labor by having employees greet customers.  On a recent shopping trip, my daughter Emma and I were greeted by a handsome teenager at Abercrombie, a well-dressed woman at J. Crew and an elderly guy at Wal-Mart.  Sure, the first two were modeling clothes.  (I hope the last guy wasn’t modeling them for me!)  But, their real job is to make eye contact with customers to deter shoplifters.

Similarly, teachers might think, “I’m using Turnitin, so I don’t have to watch out for plagiarists.”  The instructor quoted on Turnitin’s website certainly thinks so, implicitly arguing that Turnitin is a perfect substitute for her own investigations using Google.  Not surprisingly, Turnitin encourages this belief.  On its website—right next to her quote—Turnitin advertises that it has crawled and indexed “14+ billion web pages.”  Choosing between Turnitin and instructor investigations seems like a no-brainer.

But wait, how many web pages are there on the Internet?

A few years ago, Google announced that it had crawled and indexed a trillion web pages.  That makes TurnItIn’s crawlers look puny, having searched and indexed only 1.4 percent as much of the Internet as Google’s.

I wanted to test Turnitin but needed a suspicious manuscript.  I had one in my hands—Shoplifting: A Social History.  I suspected Kerry Segrave of plagiarism when I heard echoes of his book while reading New York Times articles he cites.    He cites a lot of them—35 in the first 14 pages!   To investigate my suspicions, I created a document containing the 14 pages stripped of direct quotations and another one containing the New York Times articles.  I began by searching for identical phrases (of at least 6 words) in the two documents using the open source software Copyfind, which highlighted the matches it found in each document and produced the metric that 15 percent of the early pages of Shoplifting were taken verbatim from the New York Times.  (Here is the document that highlights the matches.)

But this measure captures only the most flagrant form of plagiarism, where passages are copied from one document and pasted unchanged into another.  Just as shoplifters slip the goods they steal under coats or into pocketbooks, most plagiarists tinker with the passages they copy before claiming them as their own.  In other words, they cloak their thefts by scrambling the passages and right-clicking on words to find synonyms.  This isn’t writing; it is copying, cloaking and pasting; and it’s plagiarism.

Kerry Segrave is a right-clicker, changing “cellar of store” to “basement of shop.”  Similarly, he changes goods to items, articles to goods, accomplice to confederate, neighborhood to area, and women to females.  He is also a scrambler, changing “accidentally fallen” to “fallen accidentally;” “only with” to “with only;” and, “Leon and Klein,” to “Klein and Leon.”  And, he scrambles phrases within sentences; in other words, the phases of his sentences are sometimes scrambled.

I spent hours comparing the two documents, matching phrases and highlighting the ones that were copied, cloaked and pasted into Shoplifting. My estimate is that 32 percent of the early pages of Shoplifting are taken nearly verbatim from the New York Times. (Here is the document that highlights the matching phrases.)

To test Turnitin’s crawlers, I uploaded the document containing the New York Times articles to my website a few months ago.  Google now matches many of the plagiarized phrases from Shoplifting to the New York Times articles on my website and some of the phrases to articles in the archives of the paper. Google also matches them to Shoplifting itself, which has been scanned into Google Books.

Turnitin fails to match the plagiarized phrases to any of these sources.  I e-mailed Turnitin’s help desk, essentially asking, “What’s going on?  Why can’t Turnitin find these things?”

A few hours later, a guy at Turnitin’s product support sent me a detailed answer that boils down to three basic points—the Internet is a big place and it takes our crawlers time to scan it; we can’t scan the New York Times because it requires a subscription; and, we can’t scan images of text like those used by Google Books.  In other words, our crawlers are puny compared to Google’s.

I decided to give Turnitin a little help, so I submitted the document containing the New York Times articles as a student paper, causing the file to be catalogued in Turnitin’s library of student papers.  This enabled Turnitin to find the file and then to compare Shoplifting with the New York Times articles.  It produced an originality report that highlighted matched phrases and concluded that 25 percent of the phrases of Shoplifting were very similar to those of the newspaper articles. (Here is the document that highlights the matching phrases.)

Nearly all the passages highlighted by TurnItIn are also highlighted by me.  However, I highlight a few more because my algorithm—embedded in my brain—casts a wider net than the one used by Turnitin.  However, the differences are relatively minor—they both present compelling evidence that Shoplifting is an example of Wordlifting.

But Turnitin needed my help to find the original sources of the plagiarized phrases, making it a poor substitute for instructors who are willing to “spend hours on Google searching for unusual wording.”  It needs the help of instructors who are willing to investigate suspicious papers; otherwise, greater reliance on Turnitin could lead to more plagiarism.

There are other ways that instructors may change their behavior if they believe that anti-plagiarism software insures them against the risk that their students are plagiarizing.  Economists give a fancy name for changes in behavior induced by insurance—it’s called moral hazard.

One instructor told me that he used to devote an hour to discussing plagiarism with his class—what it is; why it’s wrong; and, where students go when they get caught.  Now, he just tells them that he uses Turnitin and lets them infer that plagiarizing is not worth the penalty.  He lauded the change, saying it saved him valuable class time.

Relying on students to weigh the benefits and costs of plagiarism in this way assumes that they are good stewards of their future selves.  Just as some shoplifters may give too much weight to the thrill of shoplifting, some students may give too much weight to starting their weekends early.

Instructors may also change the way they write their essay assignments.  One of the best ways to suppress plagiarism is to come up with creative assignments that are literally one-of-a-kind.  For example, I like to rip mine from the headlines by asking my students to write op-eds on current legislative proposals. If I felt insured against plagiarism, I might not spend hours looking for unusual proposals and instead tell students to write their essays on any topic they found interesting.

Instructors, like all human beings, look for excuses to avoid doing things they don’t want to do.  Grading essays is hard—often discouraging—work, so instructors look for excuses to avoid assigning them.  One plausible excuse is that plagiarism is rampant, making in-class exams better measures of students’ performance.  Anti-plagiarism software may make this excuse less credible, nudging some instructors to assign more essays.  Hence, moral hazard can work in the opposite direction, something akin to moral security.  Feeling insured against plagiarism, instructors may decide to do the right thing and assign more essays.

Turnitin is also being used to teach the wrong lessons concerning how to write well.  Searching Google, I found syllabi of instructors who use Turnitin to teach students how to paraphrase well.  In particular, they ask students to check the originality reports of their rough drafts and make any necessary changes to improve their paraphrasing of sources prior to submitting the essays to be graded.  In the hands of a skilled instructor, it might teach students how to paraphrase well.  But, I think it is more likely to teach students how to right-click words and scramble phrases to get acceptable scores on Turnitin.

I want to teach my students how to write well, not simply paraphrase well.  I also fear that copying, cloaking and pasting is endemic.  Hence, I would not allow my students to use originality reports to revise their drafts.

But I would have no choice because Turnitin offers another product called WriteCheck that allows students to “check [their] work against the same database as Turnitin.”  I signed up and submitted the early pages of Shoplifting.  WriteCheck matched many of Shoplifting’s phrases to those of the New York Times articles in its library of student papers.  Remember, I submitted them as a student paper to help Turnitin find them; now WriteCheck has them too!  WriteCheck warned me that “a significant amount of this paper is unoriginal” and advised me to revise it.  After a few hours of right-clicking and scrambling, I resubmitted it and WriteCheck said it was okay, being cleansed of easily recognizable plagiarism.

Turnitin is playing both sides of the fence, helping instructors identify plagiarists while helping plagiarists avoid detection.  It is akin to selling security systems to stores while allowing shoplifters to test whether putting tagged goods into bags lined with aluminum thwart the detectors.

I am not a Luddite.  I use an online homework system in many of my courses and I plan to experiment with student response systems.  And, I think that anti-plagiarism software is a useful tool, but should be used as a complement to, not a substitute for, instructor investigations of suspicious language, class conversations on plagiarism, and creative essay assignments.

This fall, I plan to say to people, “I’m using anti-plagiarism software, but I’m still watching out for plagiarists.”

Source URL: http://davideharrington.com/?p=594
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KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 7

http://www.dragonweb.hu/projektek/e-konyv/#kindlereads

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