Francisco Goya, Saturn
It
should’ve been a proud moment.
There was
my name on the cover and the title page, for contributing a chapter to the new
volume: Ashkelon 5, by Yaakov Huster.
Inside, the editors’ preface praised my work in helping to put this volume out.
It
should’ve been a proud moment, but it wasn’t. It was one of anger and sadness.
As it happens, I had co-authored the entire volume.
In short, my former Ph.D. adviser and a former fellow student had stolen my work.
Why had they done this? On one level, Master needed to justify the way he had overseen the project. He had paid $60,000 to Huster to write the book when the book was, in Master’s own words, clearly beyond him. It seems that I was the obvious scapegoat. An example: after my co-author disappeared from contact for a year, Master told me that I was at fault for having overestimated my ability to keep in touch with Huster.
But there
is another reason why Master and Stager did this: simply because they could.
One person I talked to after these events expressed sympathy with me for being
“Ashkelon'd”. That is, those familiar with the Ashkelon project and its
directors are well aware of a long line of people who have been victimized by
them. Over the course of these events I also realized that the Harvard Semitic
Museum, the institution behind the Ashkelon project, had for years been falsely
claiming copyrights of contributions to earlier volumes, including my own,
despite the fact that contributors had not signed any forms transferring
copyright, as required by law. Nor was this the only time my work had been
plagiarized. In his 2010 book Philistine Iconography, David Ben-Shlomo
reprints nearly verbatim an earlier article that we had co-authored on
Philistine figurines, without any acknowledgment that he had done so and, to my
knowledge, without permission of the copyright holder (in this case the journal
had had us sign forms transferring copyright). This means that all of the ideas
I had contributed to that article were passed off as his. In addition,
Ben-Shlomo stole ideas from my then-unpublished dissertation, including the
identification of a new figurine type. There have been no consequences to my
knowledge for any of these actions.
This leads
me to perhaps the most disheartening thing about my own story: No one seems to
care. While those I've confided in have expressed sympathy, almost no one
called it what it is – theft and exploitation – and insisted that it must stop.
Instead, I was repeatedly encouraged, by junior and senior scholars alike, to
keep quiet about the incident and move on. I debated with myself at length
before writing down my experiences. It is as if we all view such abuse and
exploitation not as an outrage, but as an unfortunate but inevitable – even
necessary – part of the scholarly process. A rite of passage into academia,
perhaps.
And so it
seems that academic ethics run on an honor system – but that honor system is
routinely violated. What do we do then, when the system is a failure? Or is
it a failure? The honor system ends up entrenching the power of senior figures;
perhaps it is designed to do so. Senior scholars are less likely to suffer a
violation of the system, because of the power they wield in it; and if they do,
their prominence and influence will help balance any negative consequences.
What about for a junior scholar, who does not have such a network to help them? Who has trouble fighting back (and is in fact encouraged not to do so) – who
is most vulnerable to mistreatment? What if the people doing the victimizing are
your own mentors? Where can you turn then?
In these
cases, silence is not enough. We cannot simply stand by while these incidents
happen, because this will only allow them to happen again and again – unless we
are fine with the continued exploitation and mistreatment and abuse of the very
students we are supposed to be promoting. By allowing such things to happen,
over and over, we are failing in our most basic responsibilities: nurturing our
own students, the very future of our profession. Will our own fields survive in
this time of threat to the humanities? And if they do, what wreckage are we
leaving in them? I look at this situation again and again and come to the same
conclusion:
2 comments:
Excellent blog. They should be exposed as frauds and thieves to the whole world.
Very important. Have you heard of "The Matthew Effect in Science
" ? Merton wrote about it.
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