Crabby Old Coots
Jun. 18th, 2006 04:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarkagesI am delighted to find that my friend Don Jenner, whom I have known since I was thirteen years old, has a blog called River View, where he opines at a refreshingly high level. Don was done a bad turn by a Heideggerian many years ago, and as a result he has maintained twin careers in the computer press and in adjunct hell at the many fine community colleges of the CUNY system. I rather envy him his ability to land on his feet and to maintain a professorial manner at all times; plus, he makes a damn fine pot of Lapsang Souchong.
We are, of course, in complete agreement on the shambles that is academia these days. He has some horror stories from the trenches that beggar belief. All I have to do is read the LA Times to find out that the percentage of plagiarized papers in undergraduate courses is at the thirty percent mark, and that, as a result, teachers are moving away from assigning research papers. That's completely screwy. The research paper is the foundation upon which humanistic knowledge is built. Like the eight-legged essay in China, it represents the ability to acquire and manipulate knowledge. You don't get rid of it because students are evil. Instead, you improve detection mechanisms and increase the penalties for getting caught. (Of course, then you'll have parents and counselors trying to muscle in to prevent the penalties from being applied, but that's another story.). The probability of sixteen words in a row being identical between two original papers is about as low as the probability of error in matching OJ's DNA. That should be a bright line.
We are, of course, in complete agreement on the shambles that is academia these days. He has some horror stories from the trenches that beggar belief. All I have to do is read the LA Times to find out that the percentage of plagiarized papers in undergraduate courses is at the thirty percent mark, and that, as a result, teachers are moving away from assigning research papers. That's completely screwy. The research paper is the foundation upon which humanistic knowledge is built. Like the eight-legged essay in China, it represents the ability to acquire and manipulate knowledge. You don't get rid of it because students are evil. Instead, you improve detection mechanisms and increase the penalties for getting caught. (Of course, then you'll have parents and counselors trying to muscle in to prevent the penalties from being applied, but that's another story.). The probability of sixteen words in a row being identical between two original papers is about as low as the probability of error in matching OJ's DNA. That should be a bright line.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-19 05:28 am (UTC)This is a physical impossibility. Lapsang Souchong is what happens when someone lives downstream from a pine forest fire that just got rained out.
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Date: 2006-06-19 08:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-19 02:18 pm (UTC)Careful!
Date: 2006-09-09 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-09 10:23 pm (UTC)The trick is...
Date: 2006-09-09 10:21 pm (UTC)The problem is, of course, that the wee lambs want to sound really up on stuff and so on -- like forty- and fifty-year-old professors. Ain't gonna happen. On the other hand, I have read some papers from students who just got down and did it, using an idiom form with which they were completely comfortable, who said some very interesting things. Nor is such an idiom inappropriate.
But if I tell this to the weenies, they simply won't hear it.