My mom forwarded me this article about celebrity academics who rely on teams of research assistants to do help them write their books–usually without credit. The ethical implications of this are pretty clear. To me, it shows how the single-author model in the humanities and the general distrust of co-authored articles and books belies the material realities of their production. A scientific model of authorship, which would give credit to all those involved significantly with the research and/or writing, might help to address this problem.

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading about the conditions of scientific authorship in the 17th century, and found a similar set of conditions. Robert Boyle apparently used a team of technicians and assistants to not only conduct his experiments, but also to write up the results. According to Steven Shapin, Boyle let his assistant Denis Papin write some of the results of his air pump experiments. Even though Boyle depended heavily on Papin, Robert Hooke, and others for his experiments, though, these men were not seen as originators or authors of scientific knowledge because they lacked the qualifications to make knowledge–not technical qualifications, but class qualifications. Boyle was a gentleman and his assistants were not, and only gentlemen were considered disinterested enough to be trusted. Paid technicians were distrusted because, as Shapin says, “those that were paid to do something were pen to the charge that this was why they did it” (395).

I found a similar situation at work in my study of the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study, a project conducted by Dorothy Thomas during World War II. Thomas used the field reports of a team of researchers (usually graduate students in anthropology)

We have a similar situation today, if it is true that many academics are relying on undercredited assistants for their work. The problem must not just be about time constraints and the economics of publishing, or about celebrity. It also has to do with similar kinds of the class relations of the academy and the position of graduate students, who are treated not as knowledge-makers in their own right.

This article also tells us something about the way people actually write. The article describes one professor’s research and writing practices as follows:

Several of his researchers say that Dershowitz doesn’t subscribe to the scholarly convention of researching first, then drawing conclusions. Instead, as a lawyer might, he writes his conclusions, leaving spaces where he’d like sources or case law to back up a thesis. On several occasions where the research has suggested opposite conclusions, his students say, he has asked them to go back and look for other cases, or simply to omit the discrepant information. “That’s the way it’s done; a piecemeal, ass-backwards way,” says one student who has firsthand experience with the writing habits of Dershowitz and other tenured colleagues. “They write first, make assertions, and farm out [the work] to research assistants to vet it. They do very little of the research themselves.”

Writing becomes not a gradual process of using research to draw conclusions, but a process of making assertions first and then backing them up with evidence. It reminds me of a research job I had in graduate school for a professor who was serving as an expert witness in a major trial. My job wasn’t to gather as much information as I could about the topic–it was to gather as much information as I could find to support his position. (Later he suggested that we write an article together based on my research. I would write up the results, and he would frame it, take first author credit, and make sure it got published. I declined. ) When the assertions are made ahead of time, the research and writing process becomes more like expert witnessing and less like openended inquiry. This makes me wonder about some of the assignments we give students–research papers with emphasis placed on making a strong claim and defending it with evidence. Are we encouraging this pattern of thinking and writing, one in which research becomes secondary to the act of making claims rather than a necessary (and enjoyable) prerequisite? Does this also say something about the way we argue now, privileging conviction over openmindedness?