supply and command

Homocidal Maniac Doing Fieldwork

The weirdest story I have ever read: Murder Most Academic.

Dalrymple on English riots and Amy Winehouse

British intellectual Theodore Dalrymple has this to say about the riots in the ever more disunited Kingdom. And he takes a mighty whack at a recently-beautified British Icon. Merciless but entertaining, as always:

Relatively poor as the rioting sector of society is, it nevertheless possesses all the electronic equipment necessary for the prosecution of the main business of life; that is to say, entertainment by popular culture. And what a culture British popular culture is!

Perhaps Amy Winehouse was its finest flower and its truest representative in her militant and ideological vulgarity, her stupid taste, her vile personal conduct and preposterous self-pity.

Her sordid life was a long bath in vomitus, literal and metaphorical, for which the exercise of her very minor talent was no excuse or explanation. Yet not a peep of dissent from our intelllectual class was heard after her near canonisation after her death, that class having long had the backbone of a mollusc.

Turner Likes Heidelberg!

Is Ed Miliband on Cocaine?

The Henry Jackson Society worries about the well-being of UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband. And rightly so, given his strange and involuntarily hilarious performance in a BBC interview on the ongoing union strikes in Britain. Obviously, Miliband's preparation for the interview consisted of memorising a single sentence containing a few standard labour talking points ("these strikes are wrong!" "the government acted in a provocative manner" "both sides should put away the rhetoric" "orchids are pretty"), which he uses to reply to all of the interviewer's questions. As far as political communication is concerned, this could be the blunder of the decade. Watch it here (lower quality youtube version here).

More on Cheating

German Joys alerts us to this highly interesting dialogue between a New York college professor (“T” for teacher) and a man who ghost-writes student essays for money (“C” for cheater). In the course of their conversation, T and C discuss the incentives for plagiarism in higher education:

C: Now, I’m not saying there’s no virtue in forcing people to take classes in things they aren’t interested in. But plagiarism is going to happen in a society in which you are told, “This is something you need to do in order to have the life you want, and in order to have the life you want there are things you must do that you don’t want to do, and may even be incapable of doing. Now, we don’t really care where you went to high school, and we can’t speak to the quality of your English professors. So, here, write a paper about philosophy. And if you cheat, we will fucking expel you.” But if you don’t cheat, you’ll get a D, which is as good as being expelled. And that’s a rock and a hard place.

T: I was discussing this very issue with a representative of my department, and that is indeed the case. In a rational choice model, it’s actually, in certain cases, if you get at all behind with your work—all of them have jobs, many of them have children, some of them are not native English speakers, so they’re already at a disadvantage relative to the course that’s being taught to them—and the course that’s being taught to them can’t be “dumbed down to their level” because then the degree becomes meaningless anyway… The rational choice model encourages cheating.

I think “C” is raising an important point here, one that has not been emphasised enough in the past and that certainly did not receive enough attention in the coverage of recent German plagiarism scandals. In a previous post, I have used the term Titlemania to describe Germany’s insane obsession with academic titles. For irrational reasons, the German professional world craves for job candidates with the letters D and R in front of their names, thus incentivising people to pursue doctoral degrees even if they have zero intention to work in academia afterwards. This, obviously, leads to universities being swamped with often mediocre dissertations, and to their staff having to waste their time with research attempts whose printed results are destined to end up in some library’s basement never to be consulted again. Now, “C” establishes a convincing link between a professional culture that values pretention (“you have to do/ to have X in order to get the job you want/ be successful/ become rich”) and plagiarism by noting that the degree of pretention and the frequency of cheating are likely to be positively correlated. A first step to remedy this problem could be for universities not to admit students to degree programs in whose contents they are not interested. Obviously, this would require a careful selection process, but the increase in quality of produced dissertations will eventually reflect the benefits of selection.

 

Improving European Academia...

Silvana Koch-Mehrin has been elected to the European Parliament's research committee. Prost!

Ritschl and Kamm on Greece

LSE economic historian Albrecht Ritschl and TIMES columnist Oliver Kamm have both made the case for a Greek bailout. In a SPIEGEL interview, Ritschl points to the fact that restructuring the debt of a bankrupt country can be the basis of a successful restart and a more prosperous future. According to Ritschl, no country exemplifies this better than Germany, whose fast post-war recovery was buttressed by generous US aid programs, debt relief and the putting-on-hold of reparation payments to countries who had fallen victim to German occupation (that includes Greece). Similarly, Oliver Kamm recalls that Germany’s export-oriented economy has been one of the big beneficiaries of the single currency. Kamm notes that a Greek exit from the Eurozone could trigger a domino effect that could eventually lead to the dismantling of the Euro. Compared to this scenario a new Greece bailout package would incur only minor costs.

Both points are, I think, important. If the bankruptcy of a member state of a currency union is not answered with aid programs and debt relief, the only real options left are debt default and eventually monetary reform followed by a massive devaluation of the new currency. This, however, would have disastrous consequences to the monetary union’s remaining countries, especially to those also suffering from severe structural debt problems. As these countries will find it increasingly difficult to finance themselves through the capital markets, exiting the union will look more and more like an attractive option. Step by step, this will lead to the union’s erosion.

The current eurozone debt crisis reveals once more that EU policy makers are caught in an “elitism trap”. European finance minister must be aware of the dire ramifications of further delay on the Greece issue, yet they keep playing tactical games in order to appease the angry man in the street. And who can blame them? When doing the right thing is bound to trigger an electoral backlash caused by irrational popular sensitivities (some two thirds of German voters oppose financial aid to Greece), doing nothing until the issue gets out of the media spotlight must seem like an attractive option. If anything has ever presented a convincing case for a European Monetary Fund (i.e. an institution that can react adequately to sovereign default without having to fear being voted out of office), the Greek tragedy certainly did!

Of Titles and Twats

Silvana Koch-Mehrin, until recently vice-president of the European Parliament, has joined Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg in losing a doctoral degree. The former German defence minister had his doctorate withdrawn after his Alma Mater, the University of Bamberg, noticed a few indefensible shortcomings in Guttenberg’s dissertation (the most blatant one: pretty much none of its 450 pages had been written by the alleged author). Now, Koch-Mehrin has met the same fate. Three days ago, the University of Heidelberg announced that her degree was to be scrapped. Investigators had found 120 instances of obvious plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation, which Koch-Mehrin had submitted to the university’s philosophical faculty in 1999.

Yet, while the two cases are similar, the two fraudsters could not have behaved more differently in the aftermath of their respective exposure. While Guttenberg eventually stepped down from all political functions, retired to his Franconian castle and even announced his intention to leave Germany, Koch-Mehrin has kept her seat in the European parliament. Worse, she has started a childish skirmish with her former university. In a press statement, she claims that Heidelberg knew about the weaknesses of her dissertation: “[They] were known to the University of Heidelberg for 11 years, for all these words can be found in the written assessment of my supervisor. His highly critical remarks were seconded explicitly by the second examiner. […] The board of examiners awarded my doctoral degree in full awareness of the obvious weaknesses of my work. Today the board sees this differently.”

One is tempted to say to the poor girl: “Shut up, you are making it worse”. It is mind-boggling to see a respected parliamentarian complaining about the decision of an independent academic commission while not displaying any awareness of having made fundamental mistakes. After years of studying and alleged independent research, Koch-Mehrin evidently does even not grasp the basics of good academic conduct. She does not seem to understand the difference between a poor dissertation – which her supervisors thought she had produced – and a plagiarised one – which she did submit.