Don’t universities
take strong public standards against plagiarism? What would the University of Toronto or The
Munk School (partners in the award) do with students who engaged in these
practices?
It’s
not as though Ms. Wente springs immediately to mind as the country’s foremost expert
in diplomacy and foreign policy – the focus of the award; she’s best known for a
kind of artful contrarianism often aimed at social issues like gender and
education. Unlike journalists who also produce
sustained scholarship on foreign affairs, her books are largely collections of
previous columns – an anecdotal writing style with covers
showing her provocatively draped in a Canadian flag. They seem more about Wente than the world.
Given
its billing as “the world's most important
award for non-fiction”, you’d expect jurors to bring relevant expertise from
a variety of perspectives. But looking
at the list, there’s not a lot of diversity.
Other jurors include former Globe Editor William Thorsell, who, as I
think I read somewhere, shares both a work history and a country house postal
code with Ms. Wente. And Wente’s ‘originality’
problems may present other challenges in terms of range and diversity – take
for example fellow juror, Walter Russell Mead.
In the
last couple of years, Wente has cited the work of the “brilliant analyst Walter
Russell Mead” about 7 times. While not extensive
enough to warrant the plagiarism discussion
that followed the Paarlberg or Carr examples, or the ethical concerns about "John",
one might still ask if some of the similarities in viewpoint or missing quotation
marks in these articles amplify questions around her selection.
For
example, a column Ms. Wente wrote on climate change followed one by Mead,
who here puts punctuation around material he includes from The Guardian:
“[a]
Guardian investigation… found evidence that a series of measurements from
Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to
them could not be produced.”
But as
happens so often, Wente presents almost identical
material with no quotation marks.
The
Guardian… has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations
were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be
produced.
In a
similar article called Kyoto fraud
revealed, Mead celebrated the demise of that “idiotic”, “stupid piece of
counterproductive social engineering” (or as others might see it – failed
international diplomacy) aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. He argued that environmentalists got a ‘free
ride from the media’ and ‘need to grow up’.
Wente seems to be singing along for a
bit.
If
you add up the CO2 released by the goods and services Europeans consumed, as
opposed to the CO2 thrown off by the goods and services they produced, the EU
was responsible for 40% more CO2 in
2010 than in 1990.
(The
EU is actually responsible for 40 per cent more CO2 today than it was in 1990,
if you count the goods and services it consumed as opposed to the ones that it
produced.)
(Environmentalism)
gets a free ride from most of the mainstream media and also the mainstream
intellectual establishment.
They
got a fabulous free ride from politicians and the media…
Kyoto
was as big a fraud as…
…reduction
in carbon emissions… exposed as a giant fraud…
Environmentalists
will only be able to help the world when they grow up.
And, after
arguing that environmentalists should forget climate change and polar bears and
focus on important things - like lions and tigers - she echoes Mead’s
observation:
Please
grow up, people. You have important work to do.
In
other articles, both writers show their displeasure with public education and
universities, arguing that we need to scrap current arrangements, and move to a more market driven approach.
Tenure
is going to become much, much rarer…
Tenure
will become much rarer…
Mead
says classes will be taught by:
…
non-Ph.D. TA’s trained to handle a particular group of courses…
…teaching
loads will increasingly be handled by non-PhDs trained to handle a particular
group of courses.
The
natural sciences … will probably do better than the humanities…
Natural
sciences will fare better than the humanities…
Here,
Wente gets around to mentioning Mead, but still no quotation marks:
…as
U.S. commentator Walter Russell Mead remarks, taxpayers are not going to
subsidize research in critical literary theory much longer.
Taxpayers
are not going to subsidize research in critical literary theory very much
longer.
In Our school systems are so last
century
Wente credits Mead for paraphrased material,
but then uses some words that had appeared in an article by Globe colleague
Gary Mason (without mentioning him):
“It
is in almost every respect a system built for another age,” writes education
historian John Fleming (whose views were cited in The Province newspaper). The
union, the government and the school trustees, in his view, are all
anti-visionary, anti-technological and completely committed to the status quo.
The historian’s name was later corrected; and Thomas Fleming’s views - at least the
ones that Mason and Wente cite – seem to have appeared in The Tyee rather than The Province. Here’s Mason’s passage in The Globe a few months earlier.
“It
is in almost every respect a system built for another age,” Dr. Fleming writes…
the union, the government and the school trustees – are anti-visionary,
anti-technological and completely committed to the status quo.
Wente then devotes a few paragraphs to Mead’s 21st
century vision of education:
…groups of
like-minded teachers… empowered to get together and open neighbourhood schools
and run them as they see fit… determine their own curriculum, teaching
materials and policies. They…would decide how big the classes would be and
whether they should offer Grade 11 history, gym, music or clown lessons.
Teachers would be treated as entrepreneurs and professionals… Principals would
be able to recruit the teachers they want...Every so often, the students would
write standard tests in core subjects, and the results would be public…
And last, in Debt ceiling chicken and the end
of empire, Wente again channels Mead, who in
the article she cites also writes that Medicare/Medicaid is a “catastrophe”
“destroying the nation”, adding that abortion rates in the U.S. contribute to a
“holocaust of youth and hope on a scale hard to match”. Wente apparently concurs:
As the thinker
Walter Russell Mead puts it, the U.S. health system marries the greed of the
private sector to the ineptitude of government. This health-care industrial complex
will soon account for one-fifth of the economy.
No real attribution
problems there, but in the same article, Ms. Wente finds efficiencies in material
she reuses two weeks later.
Wente, July 30, 2011: As
Fortune’s Nina Easton writes, 20 per cent of all American men are “collecting
unemployment, in prison, on disability, operating in the underground economy,
or getting by on the paycheques of wives or girlfriends or parents.”
Wente, August 16, 2011: These men, as
Fortune’s Nina Easton observes, are either “collecting unemployment, in prison,
on disability, operating in the underground economy, or getting by on the
paycheques of wives or girlfriends or parents.”
Are
these as serious as past instances? No.
But they do reflect a kind of practice, a habit, and dare one say, a
kind of entitlement. Given all that, and
what was pretty universally described as the dreadful
way Ms. Wente
and her editors dealt
with the more serious instances, one has to wonder why the Gelber Prize,
the University of Toronto and the Munk School chose to rely so heavily on jurors
associated with that particular newspaper in their selection of assessors .
One can think of so
many qualified Canadian writers with unblemished careers. Even if one had to put so many eggs in The
Globe’s basket, there are other choices.
Take Stephanie Nolen – a book, six
National Newspaper Awards, a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics.
Or Doug Saunders, author of two books at least related to foreign policy.
There are lots of writers
capable of sustained, original writing on relevant issues who would know first
hand what the task involves – historians, analysts and others who could provide
peer review, not just book review – especially when some of those
book reviews have been acknowledged to be unacceptable.
And there are other
newspapers, other postal codes. How
about Dan Gardner? True, he may not have
written glowing profiles of Peter
Munk, but
he’s written two great books and a pretty good article about Robert Paarlberg.
Sure, the Gelber
Prize involves a private foundation, a wonderful and generous gift, and they
can do what they want with their money. But it’s also associated with, and
reflects, The University of Toronto and The Munk School – which, coincidentally, just announced a new journalism partnership with The Globe and
Mail. What might that mean? As Ms. Wente
might say, I don’t have a clue.