Neville Morley's Blog, page 11

Just An Illusion

Update from the Thucydiocy Bot: Ex-Twitter is now really, really boring. Yes, there are still a few people posting the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote to make the same old points about jacked librarians, and a fair amount of boilerplate ‘strong do what they want’ Realism, but there hasn’t been anything interesting – a decent argument, let alone a new misquotation – for six months or more. When someone posted the old image of three students in random graduation outfits, it actually created a little warm feeling, thinking of the old days when the Thucydides musattributions seemed never-ending.

The one positive – and we can thank the advent of generative AI for this – is that the illustrations are sometimes a lot funnier, because Dall-E and their ilk seem to get rather carried away when given a prompt like, I guess, ‘An ancient scholar-warrior’.

Where do we start? The improbable musculature? The bulging, muscled armour? The fact that it’s a sort of Roman rather than a Greek? The peculiar object that he’s holding in his three-fingered right hand? Or the fact that he’s in a library full of nicely-bound codices, that must date to the eighteenth century at the earliest..?

Perhaps the prompt was ‘an ancient time-travelling scholar-warrior’…

Message Personnel

As someone expensively educated in an imperialist state recklessly convinced of its innate superiority and entitlement, whose once-promising career was derailed by embarrassing failure, I have a far better instinct for Thucydides’ ethos and political sensibilities than do most moderns. I was once regularly threatened with violence by a member of the school’s Combined Cadet Force to extort the nicer elements of my packed lunch, so can personally attest to the prevalence of the mentality depicted in the Melian Dialogue within the officer class. And I visited Amphipolis once, gaining a powerful sense of quite how long it takes to get there…

I think the jury is out as to how far either author or reviewer may have their tongues in their cheeks when expounding the benefits of an Eton education or tutoring a young Earl for understanding Homer’s heroes. Assuming that the aim of the enterprise is not in fact to depict Ajax, Diomedes and friends as chinless horsey types addicted to pointless killing or sociopathic Bullingdon Boys, the assertion of cultural continuity does seem rather naively to take the toffs’ self-conception as hoi aristoi at face value. But of course the prettiest sight in this world is the privileged class enjoying its privilege of not having to take any of this stuff seriously, of gently mocking any critical ancient world studies types who are silly enough to get worked up about it – can’t you take a joke? – and of humourously joshing one another about their ironic yet heartfelt elitism.

Such autoethnography, interpreting culture through personal experience – even if it eschews the framework of poststructural ideas that informs this approach in other disciplines – represents a push-back against social-scientific research methods based on explicit theory and the testing of hypotheses. Just too alienating! Truth is about the feels, if you’re the sort of chap whose feels are authoritative for a given topic. So much of our evidence from antiquity is the product of its elite – clearly we desperately need to maintain the supply of posh privately-educated classicists who can properly empathise with ancient oligarchs and their sensibilities. I’m reminded also of Victor Davis Hanson and his regular evocation – before he devoted all his time to paranoid podcasting – of his experience as a farmer to understand classical Greece. Those of us who don’t own landed estates or ride to hounds can only ever produce impoverished interpretations of the past, by grubbing around vulgarly in that messy evidence stuff.

Shoulda Woulda Coulda

We have a new cat bed for upstairs, as the one in which Hans passed away last week clearly still smelt of him, and/or death, even after multiple washes, and the surviving two refused to use it. The problem is that it’s a design which Hector can get his teeth into, literally, and drag it off the bed onto the floor – and even down the stairs. We thought he had abandoned this habit, or we would have bought a different type, but clearly he was just waiting for conditions to change to resume his plan.

Plan? It’s always tempting to start doing Heath Ledger impressions when it comes to Hector, who might not chase cars but definitely chases squirrels, but in this case at least there does seem to be a consistent, long-term goal. In the past, he hasn’t always taken the bed all the way down the stairs – but he doesn’t try to take it anywhere else. And often it remained at the bottom of the stairs, but several times he’s dragged it across the sitting room, and one attempted to pull it into the cat box, an old wooden chest into which we cut a couple of side entrances. This is the Lair, where Hector takes empty cat food packets to chew on – one suspects he soukd he gnawing bones and/or issuing demands to western governments from the controls of his giant space laser if he had the opportunity – and it’s hard not to conclude that the long-term goal is to upgrade the accommodation by adding a bed, practical issues of getting a three-foot bed through a six-inch hole notwithstanding.

Please note, in the interests of historical accuracy, that this is a photo from two years ago of a different cat bed being pulled downstairs by Hector.

I started thinking about this yesterday morning, waiting for the alarm to go off after being woken by the thump of the cat bed onto the floor, partly because the big commitment for that day was a departmental meeting about developing individual research strategies (obviously in the hope that this will traenslare into a collective effort to keep bringing in the external funding). Again, considering my own career, I’m inclined to respond: Do I look like a man with a plan? I’m just a dog chasing random ideas, though to be fair I do have some idea what to do with one if I catch it… The idea of drawing up a five-year strategy seems absurd, in a world where resources are not instantly available but have to be hustled. Maybe if your research activities are limited to individual reading and writing it could make sense to have a clear strategy and milestones, but even then life is likely to get in the way.

On reflection, though – and it’s with this insight that I could make a constructive contribution to the discussion as a more experienced colleague, rather than risk sabotaging the Director of Research’s exhortations – the problem is not with having a plan per se, but with its linearity. Planning for five years’ time makes no sense if it’s conceived as a single goal, because too much depends on what happens previously – rather, it needs to be thought of as a decision tree, or a Soiding Doors scenario. If this, then this; if not, then that.

Concretely: this time last year I was still pushing to get a major project application together on the Politics of Decadence; I think it was late March that I decided it had to be postponed by a year, and instead I would at least get an application for a Leverhulme fellowship on Marx and Antiquity submitted (this was a version of earlier bids, so easier to get done). At that point, the plan became: if not Leverhulme, then Decadence application in 2024; if Leverhulme – the situation I’m now lucky enough to find myself in – then push Decadence back by another year, as it would make no sense to start it earlier. And further down the line, it all depends on whether the Decadence bid is successful first time, or needs to be reworked.

Or, something else comes along in the meantime. The Marx and Antiquity Project includes writing a book that was first conceived at least a decade ago, but which repeatedly fell on the wrong side of critical if/not gates – above all, if I hadn’t got funding to pursue a project on the Reception of Thucydides, which then occupied my attention. I suppose that I had enough of a plan to try to get back to it eventually – but not to the extent of ignoring something new that seemed like a good idea, the Politucs of Decadence thing (including an application that wasn’t for the project I had in mind but was for a connected idea, with someone I wanted to collaborate with, that happened to fit with a specific funding call).

Actually, Marx should count himself lucky; there are other projects and book ideas that could have been the next thing if circumstances and funding decisions had been different, that now seem unlikely to be revived any time soon (I must remember to look back at a post I wrote a few years ago about the various books I wanted to write at some point, to see how much the list has changed). Considering how much I floundered after my PhD in trying to develop any sense of direction, it’s quite a privilege to have more ideas than I have time or energy to develop; it is also probably an advantage, that I am not too utterly committed to just one projectm such that I’ll be devastated if it never works out, and have a greater possibility of responding to new opportunities, simply because I have more embryonic projects that might be relevant to something.

Alternatively – as I have remarked of myself before – this is all about an irretrievably butterfly mind, always thinking that the next flower looks as if it might have more delicious nectar than the current one. Or the Siamese cat who creates plenty of disruption, and threatens to chew holes in a brand-new bed within a week, but never gets anywhere close to fulfilling his ultimate goal because he’s got distracted again. But I prefer to believe in the ultimate possibility of fitting a metaphorically three-foot-wide research plan through a six-inch opening…

Twelve Days in the Year: 27 February 2024

Woken marginally before the alarm went by A. putting the radio on – she has an even earlier start than usual, with a quick appointment for a routine blood test before heading into work. Got up to do last night’s washing up, remember to take a bread roll out of the freezer for her lunch and make tea; thick head full of phlegm, as the cold that’s been hanging around for the last couple of days seems to be coming out. Cats are still being very weird after Hans’s death last week; Hector briefly sits next to us then makes a grumpy noise and jumps up onto the wardrobe, which Olga takes as a cue to disappear under my legs under the duvet. News full of stupidity; apparently Lee Anderson is the true beating heart of Conservatism – which would actually confirm a lot of entrenched prejudices about the Tories, if one thought most of these unnamed MPs were entirely sincere, rather than sharing his prejudices but quietly sneering at his vulgarity.

Possible explanation for Hector’s mood is suggested when he throws up on the rug during breakfast, including a dark fibrous mass that can plausibly be linked to the catnip toy he eviscerated and shredded yesterday; obviously feeling better, he switches to righteous fury about not being allowed outside yet. Strange as it feels to have only two cats in the house for the first time ever – not counting times when they’ve all been off in jail, before and after we take a trip – there are times when just one cat can make it feel very small. Hector is not a subtle cat; Olga, on the the hand, slinks and wheedles.

Working at home today, so the first key task is to work out what’s causing the awful smell that suddenly turned up in the study yesterday so I can actually bear to spend any time there. In fact the smell as just as suddenly disappeared – which suggests a link to the lunch wrapping that was left in my satchel over the weekend… On with the emails and teaching prep, the latter made slightly more complicated by the fact that students were offered the chance last week to complete mid-module feedback; only a couple have actually responded, entirely constructively but I’m left with the dilemma of whether I change my approach on the basis of a tiny, probably unrepresentative sample, or ignore them although these are clearly the students who are most engaged. Are the others basically content with everything, or mired in alienated disaffection and apathy?

Rather than the feelings of moderate illness dissipating in the course of the morning, as they’ve tended to do in recent months, these ones hang around; work is slow and a bit of a struggle as a result, especially as, once I’ve updated my Roman Political Thought lecture to include a load of portraiture (to consider the depiction of virtue and leadership), my key task is to prepare a class on Xenophon’s historiography that isn’t simply a rant about his general inadequacy. Break for online meeting of departmental leadership team in which my presence feels as redundant as ever, break for lunch and watching an episode of Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who on catch-up (the one in which he slips into a parallel dimension where Nicholas Courtney has great fun playing a fascist version of himself, that I remember – as with all of these – from the novelisation). Break for online Q&A session with Greek Historiography students in relation to forthcoming assessment; eight of them attend, most of them with actual questions, and it’s good to see that at least a couple of them are considering taking the Generative AI optin, as I was afraid they would all end up being too small-c conservative and afraid of trying anything unusual. More Xenophon; break for tea; finally finish Xenophon. And have to start thinking about the following week, exploring a different aspect of Xenophon – which, to be fair, is easier, as anything not involving the Hellenica is easier…

A. returns home after an aggravating day, including being ticked off by a manager for using the wrong font in some minutes; the cats get very excited at the possibility of being able to persuade her that I had forgotten to give them some nice food at half past four. She lights the fire – the weather has turned unpleasantly cold, and it’s not just because I’m feeling under the weather – while I get on with supper, experimental Persian-style marinated salmon and saffron potatoes. We watch the final episode of season 6 of Buffy together – the semi-annual rewatch has finally staggered to the end of the worst season ever, and even developing a theory of its uncanny prescience (everyone’s miserable, horrible things happen, no one takes the creepy misogynists seriously enough) has not persuaded me that it’s any good. Then I headed upstairs for half an hour of musical tinkering – I am definitely not in the mood for having my homework looked at in jazz class this week, but I am certainly making sure that I have some just in case.

Back downstairs to the fire, the kittens squabbling over the smaller cat basket – it would be big enough for both of them if Hector didn’t insist on stretching out his legs in all directions – and the first episode of season 7, which is a breath of fresh air after season 6, especially the final scene with Spike being harangued by a series of deceased villains from seasons past. Then Great British Menu, trying not to get annoyed about the very shaky connections to the theme displayed by some of the chefs – the Olympics doesn’t appear to be as inspirational a brief as last year’s cartoons and illustrations. The really fascinating aspect this evening was the entirely plant-based cook doing a fish course – it’s oddly easier to imagine a vegan approach to the massively meat-based main course, perhaps because there the goal is to replicate texture and heartiness, whereas the fish course is more directly linked to a specific kind of ingredient. Well, good news is that we get to see this theory tested tomorrow…

Nine o’clock: bed, feeling very tired and achy, and a bit grotty. Olga as ever comes up for her regular cuddle – she’s been demanding more cuddles throughout the day since Hans began to decline, but the bedtime session is clearly a fixed point in her day. Once we’ve actually in bed, Hector comes to lounge against me and have his tummy tickled until I stop doing killer sudoku and turn the light out, at which point he goes back downstairs to enjoy the last of the embers. Dream, recursively, about dreams.

Everybody Wants To Be A Cat

I don’t know if I have ever been more glad that it’s Reading Week. It has been quite a slog on the teaching front, with a fair amount of marking (students from courses last term submitting revised/expanded versions of their assessments) and a timetable that gives me four straight hours on a Friday morning, actually an adrenalin buzz but the come-down is substantial. But the main reason is that the last month has been dominated by Hans very gradually deteriorating and fading away, beyond any hope but still hanging on, still purring and happy more or less until the very end; last night he finally slipped away, this morning I was out in the rain burying him, and now I am very happy that I don’t have to make an effort to talk to students or put up a front, but can just stay at home, cleaning – he’s been down in the sitting room for the last week and a half, as he became less capable of managing stairs or the jump up onto the bed, and we didn’t want to disturb him, and now it smells – and occasionally sniffling and sobbing.

A Siamese cat lounging on a hearthrug

In some ways this feels very sudden – he wasn’t that old, and even though he’s largely been confined to his basket for weeks, it still feels incredibly abrupt that there are now only two cats in the house (and I feel this). In other ways it’s not sudden at all, not just because we’ve had nearly a month of knowing it was just a matter of time, and not just in comparison with his sister’s very rapid decline back in November, but because he’s been chronically ill pretty well all his life. Both the twins had a vicious digestive infection as kittens, and lots of antibiotics as a result – and he then suffered from regular chest infections (cue more antibiotics, until a vet suggested it might be asthma) and endless digestive problems (initially tackled with drugs and laxative, until we discovered a special fibre-rich food that largely solved the problem – if only we’d known about it years before). No wonder his whole system was a mess.

It must be admitted that Hans didn’t always endure this stoically – understandably, one might say, given that he obviously felt thoroughly rubbish at times and we (and the vets) completely failed to grasp what was wrong. He gave me years of disturbed nights, prodding me awake or crying, and all I could do was stroke him and try to calm him down in the hope that he wouldn’t also wake A.. He pissed EVERYWHERE – on the rosemary bush just outside the back door (that is now on its last legs), on the kitchen furniture, on the bedroom door, on my chest of drawers, and on the coat of a visitor who had a cat. This provoked our biggest rows about child-rearing methods, so to speak; I argued for a cat psychologist, A. shouted at him and tried to terrify him into obedience. At some point, I suppose, we will have to come to terms with no longer needing to strew mats and puppy pads all round the house to limit the damage.

Certainly he was my cat in the “if we ever divorce, you’re taking that one” sense, but there was a deeper bond. The idea of a ‘spirit animal’ is New Agey, cultural appropriation-y bollocks, but it did feel at times that he was something like that. After a while, it wasn’t that he woke me, but that I simply woke when he needed my attention, and vice versa – and as someone who regularly suffers from raging insomnia, I am desperately going to miss having a cat who would come and cuddle when I needed company at three in the morning. Especially over the last three and a half years of my own chronic fatigue and tendency to phlegm and other flu symptoms, I’ve had a lot more appreciation of his relative stoicism (and no envy of his lack of inhibition in expressing discomfort or insecurity by pissing everywhere, not at all, honest).

For I will consider my cat Hans. For he appreciated every moment of sunshine, if only to go to sleep in it. For he was patient with annoying over-exuberant kittens, and knew when to take himself off on his own rather than squabbling over the cat basket. For he thoroughly appreciated his food. For he defended his territory with a fierce determination, but never to the point of violence. For even when he lost his voice he would purr deafeningly, to express contentment and love. For he was gentle, and patient, and endured. And I honestly don’t know if these final weeks have been trying to teach me a lesson about fortitude, or about the perils of bloody-minded stubbornness.

Slave To The (Algo)Rhythm

Looking for more articles like Daniela Cammack’s ‘Plato and Athenian justice’? You might try M.B. Foster, ‘On Plato’s conception of justice in the Republic’, The Philosophy Quarterly 1.3 (1951) and Stella Lange, ‘Plato and democracy’, The Classical Journal 34.8 (1939). If you enjoyed Pantelis Michelakis’ ‘Naming the Plague in Homer, Sophocles and Thucydides’, you might also enjoy Masen J. Williamson, ‘Thucydides’ Plague, a narrative aggressor’, Brigham Young University ProQuest Dissertations (2021) or Andy Coghlan, ‘Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers’, New Scientist 193 (2007).

Yes, it’s been quiet on here recently; partly due to the fact that we are, painfully soon after the last time, living with a terminally ill cat and so lacking in energy or emotional bandwidth, but also I’ve had quite a lot of marking to do (early in the term, because it’s students from last term who’ve submitted the revised post-feedback versions of coursework). One of the things that struck me, perhaps because it coincided with an exchange on Bluesky, is that I’m still having to comment on students using deeply obscure and/or absurdly outdated publications as key sources, despite the fact that I’ve expanded the explicit guidance in my module handbooks about using random stuff found on the internet. There is a regular temptation to post in-text feedback comments like ‘SERIOUSLY?!?’ on certain bibliographies.

My sense – yes, this is a topic where more substantial research might be useful, if I had any time – is that this practice has in the past been primarily driven by students doing a general search for an essay title, or at least for very specific key words. I can think of at least three possible reasons for this: a desire for scholarship that is directly relevant to the specific topic (even when they might be far better off relying on relevant sections of more general publications, like the ones in the module bibliography); a belief that finding material beyond the reading list is ipso facto good (I’ve certainly seen assessment criteria that emphasise ‘independent research’); and the increasing uselessness of search engines, so that if you don’t have an incredibly specific query you’re going to have to wade through a deluge of irrelevant crap to find what you’re looking for. Hence the alarming habit of citing undergraduate dissertations from mid-western universities – WHY are these all over the Internet? – as authoritative sources. To be fair, final-year students do this a lot less, presumably because it dawns on them that such dissertations carry all the academic authority of the bloke sitting next to them in class – first- and second-year students clearly have an elevated respect for those slightly more senior than them.

What we are also seeing, and I’d be interested to know how long this has been the case, is publishers seeking to drive further traffic to their own publications by providing Spotify-like recommendations when you view an article online. I’d managed to blank this entirely until quite recently, but it offers a clear explanation for the association, in recent coursework, of recent stuff that I’d recommended and very old stuff that I definitely hadn’t, all proper academic publications but some very definitely marginal to the current state of the debate. My snarky first paragraph above in fact records precisely the articles that were recommended to me when I checked the pieces by Cammack and Michelakis as an experiment.

What’s suggested is relevant, and scholarly (for rather loose definitions of ‘scholarly’), but entirely useless in practical terms. I’m actually a great believer in disappearing down rabbit-holes or following chance leads. Much of my research over the years has involved finding interesting-looking things in the references of a book or article and retracing the development of an idea, often leading to whole new areas of study and unexpected new questions. So, I can appreciate the potential pleasures of looking up, say, Raaflaub on democracy, oligarchy and the concept of the free citizen, and being offered a selection of more recent ‘related articles’ in contemporary political theory, Peace Studies and anthropology – it’s like being able to follow the trail of breadcrumbs forwards as well as backwards in time. But of course I do this only if I know I have the time to follow lots of different paths and read loads of stuff, much of which might turn out to be irrelevant to my current project, and in the knowledge that I can usually judge the potential usefulness pretty quickly – sometimes just by looking at the details of the journal and the title. What I am not going to do is rely on these chance discoveries as one of the five or six key sources for what I’m working on.

My basic advice to students on the use of older scholarship (and by coincidence I wrote something like this on the Ask Historians Reddit the other day): it’s not that it’s worthless, but it’s probably worthless to you. The further back in time a thing was written, the more you need to consider it in its intellectual context, to appreciate not just how it’s out of step with contemporary scholarship but also why – and for that you need a pretty extensive knowledge of the current scholarship, in order to evaluate it – rather than being able to side-step the current stuff. It is not that older scholarship is only relevant to the history of historiography – but you need to do a certain amount of history of historiography in order to make use of it, and you probably don’t have time for that. If an older piece is actually essential, I will generally have told you about it already.

What this immediately reminded me of was the ‘if you liked that, try this’ algorithms of music platforms, and it’s interesting to reflect on this resemblance. The digital revolution has made available, at remarkably low cost (at least if you’re a university student with access to a decent library, as the equivalent of having an Apple Music subscription), a vast resource of much of what has ever been produced; whereas once, to access something old and relatively unregarded, you’d have to search through card catalogues and then look through dusty old volumes in distant stacks, or rummage hopefully through boxes of second-hand records, now it’s just there on your computer, a few clicks away.

In the olden days, of course, you’d be looking for something specific because you’d seen it referred to elsewhere (a shout-out to everyone who remembers combing through back issues of l’Année Philologique!) – and if that hadn’t already impressed on you the fact that it was Old then the process of accessing it surely did. Today, it has been suggested that Most Young People consume music in an eclectic manner, without much sense of its history or traditions or development (let alone the powerful tribal sense in my youth that if you liked X you shouldn’t like Y) – which is fine, if you have no interest in those things but just want to enjoy the music, but may be an issue if (a) you would like more of a sense of development rather than just an undifferentiated mass, (b) you start to wonder if you can really trust the algorithms, and/or (c) you fail to realise how much of contemporary pop and rock is a pale simulacrum of the genius-level creations of the early 1980s, and therefore are incapable of making proper aesthetic judgements.

This decontextualisation is obviously more of a problem for history students, where a sense of the historical development of ideas and arguments is a major part of the point* – and the operations of publisher websites do seem to be encouraging it. But the real question around music algorithms is whether they are really directly you towards things you should really like based on your listening history, or whether they are actually pointing you towards things they think they can sell you. There’s an enterprising Norwegian pianist who has clearly paid Facebook a load of money to push adverts for his pleasant but undemanding trio records at anyone who shows signs of an interest in jazz (yes, reader, I bought one); the Spotify approach is much more subtle, as of course you’ve already paid – so the suspicion is that you may be directed towards artists from whom they will make more money, not least the ones who are actually wholly-owned gAI products. Corollary: there’s a load of great music you are not being told about because it won’t make them money.

What’s going on with academic publishers? Simple: I assume that numbers of page views on Open Access articles increasingly drive the whole ecosystem, from the charges that can be levied on authors to, rather more significantly, the terms of Read & Publish contracts with universities. They’re not going to point you towards another publisher’s journals (students, I suspect, see each journal as a separate enterprise, rather than being part of a stable, and so imagine that because the suggestions are all from different journals they must be drawn from the whole world of scholarship), only stuff with relevant keywords in their own database, and they don’t actually care whether the recommended article will be any use, they just want you to click on it.

How much does this actually matter? I’d be interested to hear views… We may at some point identify significant changes in research, reflecting the younger generation’s radical eclecticism and obliviousness to traditional narratives of disciplinary development – projects inspired by long-neglected ideas and approaches rather than by the Important Male Figures who dominate conventional historiographical accounts, or revivals of unfashionable styles that may or may not be ironic (I’m looking forward to a new Finleyite primitivism wowing the crowds at Glastonbury next year). Or, for the doom-sayers among you, the spread of an increasingly random, decontextualised sense of scholarship, in which everything is tailored to individual preferences. My feeling is that at the moment it’s just a mild irritation for me as marker and a potential pitfall for students that can be addressed by some tweaks to the guidance I give them – so long as they read it, rather than trusting the algorithm.

*Oh, and don’t get me started on the fact that eBooks get given the date of electronic publication not original publication, so the priority of different interpretations gets hopelessly tangled…

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th January 2024

A disturbed night full of strange dreams – definitely embroiled in some sort of complex academic scandal and a lot of uncomfortable secrets – I think I was whistle-blower rather than culprit – crossed with complex navigation of the public transport system in a strange city. Around half five – so, normal getting-up time in the week, but not what was hoped for on a Saturday – emerged close enough to consciousness that A. turning on her iPad to read was enough to wake me completely. She put the radio on, and I tried and failed to get back to sleep to an accompaniment of Philippa Forrester talking about otters and invasive crayfish – it must be nice to have the sort of house where you then get to make programmes talking about your bit of river – and Farming Today This Week, most of which I’d already heard. Got up to make tea and do dishes after the seven o’clock news and before the sports news to avoid hearing the cricket scores, as I’d rather create a little bit of suspense by reading back through the Grauniad’s over-by-over commentary, avoiding looking at the score as I scroll back and click on the ‘load more’ button. Of course England will be struggling in India; it’s the performance of the West Indies in Australia I care about.

Into the Saturday morning routine, which is basically about finding the balance between doing all the stuff there isn’t time and energy for during the week – cleaning, batch cooking, tidying garden, catching up on domestic paperwork – and doing as little as possible to help recharge batteries and get ready for next week. This latter feels especially important after getting blood test results that confirm there is indeed something in my system that helps explain the chronic fatigue, rather than just malingering, but without offering any sort of solution beyond trying to manage the condition. This does leave me with a dilemma about the piles of essay marking that I haven’t started yet – do a couple of hours over the weekend to make a dent in it, or avoid like the plague in the hope of having loads of energy to get them done next week?

Down into town for the usual round of shopping: butcher for Sunday dinner (chicken this week), Co-op for fruit and a few groceries (normally also newspaper, but there’s been a delivery issue and/or a fascist plot so only Mail and Torygraph are available) and bakers for a pasty for A. for breakfast. Back home to bake my own croissants; a ridiculous expenditure of time to make them in the first place, but now that I have the routine down (remove from freezer to defrost and prove overnight, right oven temperature, watch like a hawk after seven minutes) the results are superior to anything available locally – crispier and tastier than the bakers, not as ridiculously crispy and definitely cheaper than the posh deli even if you factor in my labour time. Hector comes in from the garden with a fluffy tail and yells at us – the “give me cat treats or I’ll keep yelling” version rather than “there’s a dog around and I’m not happy about it”. He gets a cat treat and settles down, lounging back against A. on the sofa with his legs stretched out in different directions.

After an espresso (ginger tea for A.), up to The Hut, smallholding just outside town, to buy eggs and veg, stopping for chat with elderly neighbour en route. Back home for the big task of the day, negotiating with A. what should be grown in different raised beds in the veg plot this year and then sorting out the seed shopping list. Interrupted by visit from neighbour from across the road to share a bit of gossip, health of assorted elderly friends (we really do need to get some friends who aren’t 15-20 years older than us or we’re liable to have none left in the near future…), and despair over the new local group on Facebook that’s agitating about the proposed 20mph speed limit (the only good thing the council has done in years), setting up online surveys about whether people feel safe to go out at night and so forth. This has predictably attracted all the local cranks, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, so you hope no one is going to take it seriously. Hector comes down to be made a fuss of.

Back into town to see if I can get a Grauniad now – yes, but something has obviously gone wrong as the top third of the Saturday supplement (admittedly not something that generally detains me for very long) is missing, having been sliced off at an oblique angle. Made some quick egg-fried rice for lunch, wallowed in a bit of 1985 nostalgia with Pick of the Pops (yes, Little Red Corvette is a fantastic song, and I continue to fail to understand the success of Madonna’s musical career) and then headed upstairs to tinker with jazz composition (this week: taking a more formal approach to developing melody) and looking out for garden birds for an hour for the RSPB garden bird watch.

The latter was reasonably successful – not as many or as interesting a selection as we sometimes get in the garden (the woodpecker didn’t put in an appearance), but a few moderately exotic birds, with some fieldfares scrabbling around in the dead leaves and, right at the end of the hour, a long-tailed tit on the fat balls. The former was trickier; set out trying to compose a melody line for the Monk-ish piano figure I came up with a week or so ago, first had to work out some harmonies that more or less worked, and then eventually realised that the piano line was a bit too fidgety for the melody, so that needs paring back. But by this point it was time for tea, giving the cats their afternoon treat and getting the fire going – it’s a distinctly chilly afternoon.

A. gets back from a walk and we have a cup of tea, then I head off to the kitchen: to prepare spicy mince and retried beans for supper, to try out the lemon posset recipe from today’s Grauniad food supplement (I love citrus flavours so much – last week was tarte au citron), and to avoid Calendar Girls, which A. has started watching. Thankfully she likes the second part less than the first, so switches to Derry Girls after a while and we can have supper, without my having to spend more than two hours away from the cosy sitting room. Then we start on Great British Menu on catch-up (since during the week either we’re in bed by half eight, or A. just wants familiar comfort viewing, or both); I used to have no time at all for these insanely OTT culinary displays, but years of Professional Masterchief has clearly now developed my taste for the extreme cutting edge. It’s always interesting to see the changing fashions – at this level it tends to manifest in techniques (a lot of dehydrator work so far this week) more than ingredients, though I am also now googling various unusual expensive delicacies…

One of the nice things about the fire is that the cats usually join us, rather than crashing out in the basket upstairs. Olga writhes around on the rug in front, exposing herself shamelessly; Hector curls up on the rocking chair and snores loudly; Hans looks Sphinx-like and superior to such sordid hedonism, then heads back upstairs for some more food – and produce some poo, and throw up. Thank you, Hans.

To bed by quarter to ten, which is insanely decadent by our current standards; a bit of sudoku, then lights out. Awful dreams, restless and disturbed, and Hans coughing for half the night…

Screwface Capital

Amazon is the ultimate marketplace, uniting buyers and sellers across the globe, so you can find whatever you’re looking for, even the most obscure items, or find purchasers for utterly niche and esoteric products. Facebook is a miraculous social space allowing you to keep in touch with family, friends and neighbours and to know what’s going on in your district or in the world, all without having to pay anything. Spotify gives listeners access to a cornucopia of music, and gives artists access to a global audience, for a pittance of a subscription compared with the old days of buying records. Publishers are inspired by the mission of making available the very best material, fiction and non-fiction, to the people who will enjoy and benefit from it the most. Universities are nobly dedicated to the pursuit and dissemination of truth and understanding as an end in itself, and to preparing young people for the rest of their lives.

I’m sure that no regular reader of this blog would be naive enough to take any of those statements at face value. But the obvious point is that they are all partially true; that truth is the root of the astonishing success of these organisations, and helps to sustain that success, even as their actual performance and impact on the world become ever less positive. Above all, it works to disguise what’s really going on; it remains possible to mistake that partial truth for the whole. You can actually still find that obscure item on Amazon, even if you have to spend an hour refining your search terms and wading through irrelevant, fake and probably fraudulent results. You can still keep in touch with the people you want on Facebook, if you put in the time to search, like, block and mute, and just don’t trust the algorithm. And however far the process of ‘enshittification’, in Cory Doctorow’s term, advances, there isn’t a sufficiently plausible alternative; consumers and business customers alike are locked in and can be exploited.

I’m not certain whether academic publishers are similar enough to internet platforms that serve as two-sided markets for Doctorow’s enshittification to be the relevant term; I guess you could argue that they extract rents by providing a space where research producers and consumers (libraries as much as readers) can meet – and increasingly get screwed for shareholder value. What’s striking is that there was a serious move to break the control and rapacious rent-extraction of the big journal publishers, through the move to Open Access; research should be accessible to all, it should be evaluated by its actual quality not its place of publication, researchers can take more control of where and how they publish and over the whole process… Yeah, that worked. We (certainly for ‘people making decisions on appointments, promotion, research quality’ values of ‘we’) were unwilling or unable to abandon our reliance on the prestige of journal names; but still more, most of us don’t have the time or knowledge to trailblaze unconventional modes of publication; so, yes, we’re locked on to the existing platform. And we certainly underestimated the fact that publishers employ clever people to anticipate changes and protect the bottom line – we really were naive enough to imagine that Open Access would magically lead us into a wonderful new decentralised, cooperative, Creative Commons future…

So, here we are, still providing free labour – researching and writing, reviewing articles, editing – to create value for commercial enterprises; of course we do this for our own benefit and prestige, to serve the discipline, to support younger colleagues, and that’s still true, but clearly it’s not the only thing happening. The publishers still get the money, just by a different route – and indeed they identify exciting new opportunities: the shift to electronic publication simultaneously removes the costs of physical printing and distribution and does away with space restrictions, hence scope for lots more articles and their lovely APCs, and journals that try to resist the trend can be pressured either through dramatic reductions in the income to the organisation (learned societies, for example) or just by replacing the editors (see recent developments in political philosophy).

Universities are definitely not ‘platforms’ (passing over the various dubious and unsuccessful attempts at establishing MOOCs as the higher education of the future…). Indeed, given that the vast majority even of private universities are not-for-profit enterprises, there’s an argument that they shouldn’t be considered as ‘businesses’ at all – there’s no sense that their activities and decisions are driven by the imperative of maximising shareholder returns.

But of course that hasn’t stopped university management talking about their institutions in business terms. Sometimes this is in very basic terms, as a rejoinder to naive/grasping/selfish/delete as appropriate staff asking for a pay rise or worrying about pensions and jobs: the books have to balance, we have to build surpluses as a precaution and to support refurbishment and building programmes etc. Sometimes, however, the subtext becomes text: I have a powerful memory of a university finance director blithely remarking to assembled academics that the proportion of the university’s turnover spent on staff was far higher than in any normal business, so obviously they were working on this. To which the obvious response was: WTF? Have you not grasped the nature of what we do here?

The answers ‘no’ and ‘yes, but I don’t care’ would be equally worrying. Perhaps this assumption that the university should be managed and evaluated as if it were a biscuit manufacturer or a chain of department stores was a one-off, but I doubt it. In any case, there are plenty of other examples of ‘business thinking’ pervading the higher echelons of university leadership; to quote Clifford Ando’s recent op-ed on the University of Chicago and what it tells us about the trajectory of the modern university, “the extent to which universities now participate in pathologies of leadership in contemporary politics and corporate governance.”

It’s not just the escalating salaries of ‘top’ university managers while those of the mass of employees stagnate, justified by the claim that they should be comparable with senior managers and CEOs in ‘other’ industries; it’s the fact that they adopt, absorb or at least mimic a corporate mentality. Perhaps campaigns against excessive VC and PVC remuneration have been too effective, not in actually bringing salaries and perks down again but in making them feel they must justify them by being properly dynamic leaders. Which, as Ando notes, means risk-taking, and change, and disruption.

It does appear as if it is basically impossible to get a job as a university leader these days without a grand outside-the-box synergistic strategy for radical restructuring; one starts to imagine the H.M. Bateman cartoon, The Applicant Who Suggested That The University Seemed To Be Doing Pretty Well, If It’s Not Broken Don’t Try To Fix It. No, by definition any university is in need of being shaken out of its complacency, made fit for the future, transformed, streamlined, expanded, rebranded. What sane institution would pay a six-figure salary to someone just to keep things ticking over?

As noted, this isn’t being driven by an obsession with share price or dividends, the regular drivers of terrible short-term thinking in various other areas of business. But in some way it’s worse; at least share price and dividends offer some sort of external yardstick for evaluating leadership performance, and a coherent set of targets, whereas university leadership is driven by the pursuit of league table rankings – mostly, completely beyond their control, whatever they do – or just disruptive transformation as the end in itself rather than the means to an end in any serious, measurable way. And while the aim of the exercise is not to extract value from the institution for the benefit of others, that seems to happen anyway; not just the management salaries, but the consultancy fees, the costs of rebranding, the construction costs for new prestige projects, the interest payments…

A commercial way of thinking – not the risk-taking, but the bean-counting – spreads through the university in other ways. The all-too-familiar idea of students as consumers is simultaneously a mechanism for disciplining and extracting ever more work from staff and, in this day and age, an invitation to see how far the product can be degraded before this has any noticeable effect on demand. But there’s also the conception of research as primarily a means of revenue-generation – through the REF, through external grants, and through the hoped-for generation of IP with lucrative commercial potential (an approach which has all sorts of exciting unintended side effects if your external collaborations are with bohemian theatre types).

There’s a familiar bit of sage advice for academics, and probably everyone else in the university: Don’t love the institution as it won’t love you back. In the context of these rambling musings, it’s worth noting that the reason such a warning has to be given is that there is such a temptation, just as you can still sometimes imagine Facebook to be close enough to a friendly, convenient social space not to delete your account in horror. It’s sufficiently true – not at institutional level, but certainly there’s a decent chance at department level – and it used to be more true. Before university leadership became an alternative pathway rather than an academic hiatus, before its ethos became one of growth and accumulation and creative destruction and the ruthless extraction of value. It’s the capitalism, stupid.

Update 24/1: it’s obviously a month for doom-laden head-shaking over the future of the university, as I came across this piece, focused on a key aspect of budget devolution as a shell game, this morning after I posted the above last night: https://buttondown.email/ModernMedieval/archive/university-budgets-are-moral-documents/

Walk Like An Egyptian

I’ve been down another random research rabbit-hole this week, responding to someone posting on Twitter – for reasons I still haven’t entirely grasped – a quotation from the 1741 English translation of a 1739 book, Histoire du ciel considéré selon les idées des poètes, des philosophes et de Moïse, by a man called Abbé Pluche, famous for his subsequent nine-volume work of popular science, Spectacle de la nature, ou Entretiens sur les particularités de l’Histoire naturelle qui ont paru les plus propres à rendre les jeunes gens curieux et à leur former l’esprit (1740). I’ve read only the first volume of History of Heaven, which offers a comprehensive rationalising account of all Egyptian deities, and their Greek, Roman and other derivatives, as being originally just symbolic language to mark the passage of the seasons and the coming of the Nile flood.

In passing, this offers Pluche the opportunity to explain Medusa (symbolic representation of Isis, with multiple snakes – symbol of life and fertility – around the face, to mark the date for the pressing of the olive harvest) and Cerberus (tomb decoration symbolising the affection felt for the departed relative using man’s best friend and loyal companion, with the three heads representing the three cries of lamentation given for the passing of a good man); in both cases he asserts a Hebrew etymology for the names, ‘pressing of the olives’ and ‘cries of the grave’ respectively. My uninformed sense is that this is mostly if not entirely complete bollocks, but it’s all very entertaining, and reminds me of the wackier bits of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, nearly two centuries early. As an example of the application of reason to unreasonable material on the basis of some very questionable assumptions, it’s fascinating.

But anyway, the reason I started on this in the first place was, inevitably, because Pluche mentioned Thucydides. “The Athenians, as well as the Egyptians their fathers, made great use of linen-clothes” – p.137, citing Book 1 (Pluche does not do more precise references than that; in many cases you’re lucky to get anything, and he would certainly fail a contemporary plagiarism check). This is what led me to look through the rest of the book, where I found this on p.59: “Tis known from the testimony of Diodorus Siculus, and from the conformity of the Athenian laws with the Egyptian, that the first inhabitants of Attica were an Egyptian colony. We have even several proofs, that it originally came from the city of Sais, so famous for its olive-trees…” Similar remarks appear elsewhere, e.g. 133-4.

This is genuinely the first time I’ve come across the suggestion that the Athenians came from Egypt, but Pluche takes it entirely for granted, and regularly comes up with examples of Athenian customs that supposedly echo Egyptian ones (e.g. putting golden snakes on new-born babies, as a confused version of the association of Horus (son of sun and earth, symbolising agriculture and work) and the serpent as Life; p.55).

Pluche cites Herodotus and Diodorus, along with some more modern authorities. The obvious section of Herodotus is 2.169-71, where his narrative arrives in Sais; he speaks of a temple of Athene, generally assumed to be that of Neith, and suggests that this is the birthplace of the Eleusinian Mysteries that were later brought to Greece by the Daughters of Danaus. Although Pluche doesn’t mention it, Plato, in Timeeus 21e, explicitly suggests a link between Neith and Athene, and asserts a resemblance between the two cities: “The chief city in this district is Sais—the home of King Amasis—the founder of which, they say, is a goddess whose Egyptian name is Neith, and in Greek, as they assert, Athena. These people profess to be great lovers of Athens and in a measure akin to our people here.” Finally, Diodorus Siculus 5.57 posits a still more direct connection – but the other way round: “The Athenians, although they were the founders of the city in Egypt men call Saïs…”

At some point – it doesn’t seem as if Pluche is responsible, as he cites the idea of Athens as an Egyptian colony as if it’s well-established fact, rather than something he needs to justify – the antiquity of Egyptian culture, and probably Herodotus’ comments about the Greeks drawing much of their religion from there, has been taken as the basis for turning the Greek sources on their head: if Sais resembles Athens, it must be because Athens was founded by Egyptians, but the Greeks then claimed it was the other way round. I do wonder when this argument was first made; the answer, if I didn’t already have too much to do, is doubtless found in “Marsham, Potter, and Samuel Petit on the laws of the Athenians”, to quote Pluche’s note. Petit’s Leges atticae was published in 1635; John Marsham published a chronology of ancient Egypt, as well as Hebrew and Greek history, in 1676; Potter is currently defeating me because all you get from Internet searches are books that talk about Egyptian pottery…

Anyway, back to the linen-clothes, and on p.138 Pluche elaborates his argument that Pallas Athene/Minerva the teacher of flax-weaving was Isis, mistaken for a goddess but actually just a marker for the time of year when you should start weaving flax:

What renders this conjecture most acceptable, is, that the name of Athene, which Homer always gives to the goddess, and which was given to the city of which she was the reputed patroness, exactly signifies [italics] the flaxen thread [end italics] which is rolled upon the weaver’s beam, in order to the making of cloth. The scripture gives the name of Athen to [italics] the flaxen thread [end italics] that was made in Egypt [cites Proverbs 7:16]: and Thucydides informs us, that the Athenians being of Egyptian extraction had worn none but linen-clothes before the Peloponnesian War. Nothing is more common in the establishment of the ancient colonies than the custom of giving them the name of the first object which was of particular concern to them.

To return to my usual refrain: no, Thucydides did not exactly say that. He notes (1.6) that the Athenians were the first to adopt a more relaxed and luxurious lifestyle, including linen tunics and topknots held in place with golden cicadas (which of course implies that they had not always worn linen since their supposed foundation), and only recently had older men of the wealthier families stopped doing this, similar to the fashion of their older kinsmen in Ionia (so, not just an Athenian thing because of their Egyptian connection). Thucydides certainly doesn’t say that the explanation for Athenian wearing of linen clothes was their link to Egypt, whereas by this point Pluche is so clear convinced of this as a fact that he can’t imagine Thucydides not assuming it as well.

Given that it’s extremely unlikely this misquote will suddenly take off, from the perspective of Thucydidean reception this is utterly trivial and a waste of my time. But a regular joy of monitoring random Thucydides references on social media is the way it can send me down unexpected rabbit-holes, opening up whole new worlds (there’s a really weird bit of 19th-century religious numerology that I need to look into at some point). Part of me really wants to explore whether the Pluche phenomenon – conviction that there is only one true God inspiring thorough-going materialist, proto-anthropological interpretation of all non-Judeo-Christian religious beliefs – was widespread in the 17th and 18th centuries, and whether it’s been widely studied. But teaching starts again next week, and I need to look at student Individual Learning Plans…

More Than Words

Puny mortals of the pathetic Higher Education System (HES)! In one hour, from this fearsome orbital battle station, I shall release my legions of AI monkeys to scrutinise the publications of every academic in the world for plagiarism! No one’s reputation is safe! This will destroy you all! Unless you pay me…respect. Mwahaha!

Ah, plagiarism. One of the many ways in which, in retrospect, my undergraduate education was extremely deficient was its complete obliviousness to referencing. No one ever told me to use footnotes, or even suggested that it might be a good idea, or explained their different functions. There certainly wasn’t any penalty for paraphrasing material from books without acknowledgement – indeed, it seemed rather than the inclusion of easily-recognisable paraphrases of key arguments was one of the main ways in which the supervisor determined whether a student had actually read the books their bibliography claimed they had.

It has genuinely only just occurred to me, in the light of the current situation in the US, how odd this is. When I embarked on my PhD, it was clearly expected that one should follow proper academic conventions, so I underwent a crash course in different approaches to referencing – and by the time I finished and was in my first teaching position, it was expected that students should all be doing this. What I really don’t know is whether there was an actual change in the early 1990s, with all universities introducing new guidelines and regulations – perhaps because the advent of cheaper word processors made it much easier to do footnotes – or whether Cambridge was seriously out of step in the late 1980s, presumably because the task of hacking out a plausible bit of waffle on a weekly basis would have been rendered less practical if footnotes were required, and obviously the core assessment activity of unseen exams wouldn’t expect any such thing. It is of course not impossible that Cambridge remains out of step in this regard…

This does mean that I am much more sympathetic to the ‘actually plagiarism is complicated’ position of a billionaire defending his academic wife than the ‘plagiarism is always wrong’ position of a billionaire seeking to dictate to universities. Indeed, ‘plagiarism’ is so complicated that I can still see a case for my undergraduate experience not actually being too much of an issue. Yes, it meant that the 1980s-vintage History BA (at any rate in Cambridge) was a fairly terrible preparation for academic research, but the minority who continued on that path could learn referencing on the job, so to speak, while everybody else had no particular need of it – ‘academic integrity’ was about making sure that it was you, not an imposter, improvising smartarse arguments in the exam hall. Student essays aren’t academic publications, so why should the expectations of the latter be imposed on the former?

The shift to coursework that counted towards the degree, rather than just being a dress rehearsal for the aforementioned exam improvisation, created a whole set of problems for students and staff alike. Suddenly academic integrity entailed producing a facsimile of proper academic writing, with students having to keep track of their notes to reference points and avoid reproducing text without quote marks, and staff having to spend time testing and tracking down suspicious-looking passages. Now, academic integrity obviously matters, including to prospective employers. But this shift towards requiring proper referencing has dramatically expanded the level of jeopardy for students – the number of ways in which they might fall foul of the rules – without a corresponding increase in relevance to future activities for anyone besides prospective research students.

Plagiarism constitutes an academic offence; being found guilty of an academic offence is a serious impediment if not an absolute bar to various careers; lots of instances of technical plagiarism seem far too trivial to merit such consequences, especially when, often, determining their seriousness depends on ascertaining motive, which is basically impossible; and so staff spend a lot of time and effort investigating ‘plagiarism’ in order to reach a finding of ‘poor academic practice’, which is then mostly punished by creating yet more work to mark a replacement bit of coursework. What’s the lesson here? Don’t do it again.

Counterpoint: the reason for expecting proper referencing from undergraduate students is not as an end in itself or simply a defence against accusations of plagiarism as a bad thing in itself (even if that’s how it probably looks to a lot of students), nor is it because the imitation of correct academic practice is a core learning outcome of degree programmes. Rather, correct referencing goes to the heart of the development of critical understanding and analytical argument, which are skills we aim to teach and which will be relevant to the future activities of those students who won’t be going on to further academic research.

Critical understanding has to involve engagement with a range of source material, that needs to be compared and set into dialogue. Simply copying a single source, let alone a Wikipedia definition, doesn’t demonstrate understanding, let alone critical understanding; and individual understanding based on critical grasp of a wide range of sources still needs to be grounded in the supporting material, establishing its relationship to existing work, because that is part of what needs to be (shown to be) understood. Further, it’s not just a matter of defensively citing sources, but of developing a sense of how one deploys different sources and engages with material in different ways to ground and elaborate one’s own analysis.

This is what my undergraduate education lacked; the approach to analysis and argument was almost entirely focused on logical coherence and persuasive rhetoric, with the use of examples as mere decoration. Those are relevant skills – but arguably less important than actual understanding of the material and how to use it. And, while I was able to get up to speed when I started doctoral research – I am not one of those academics trembling at the thought of right-wing billionaires directing their minions to scrutinise my publications – I did have to get to grips with this all at once, whereas my subsequent experience is that it’s far preferable to lead students gradually through the process, the multifarious purposes and uses of references, from diligent anti-plagiarism self-defence at the beginning to critical engagement with the scholarship and sophisticated argument by the end – including getting enough of a sense of different topics to recognise when referencing isn’t necessary.

So, references are needed to demonstrate knowledge and understanding – but, still more, learning how to reference properly is a process not just of learning how to reference properly but how to engage with evidence and scholarship, how to construct and support arguments, and how indeed to develop original ideas through dialogue – and through the performance of dialogue, one might say – with the scholarly tradition.

This multifariousness is of course why ‘plagiarism’ continues to be a messy business when it comes to ‘proper’ academic writing. At this point, we can start talking seriously about the possible theft of someone else’s ideas, which is manifestly heinous. But that might not entail any duplication of language at all, especially if the ideas are being taken from a conference paper or a graduate student’s work, and so won’t be detected by any software. Conversely, duplication of language without proper acknowledgement – let alone cases where the source is acknowledged but words aren’t put in quote marks – doesn’t often indicate the theft of ideas or an unwarranted claim of originality.

That’s not to say it’s not bad, but it’s a different sort of bad. Above all, it’s a sign of sloppiness; maybe the author hasn’t properly understood the material, if they’ve resorted to Wikipedia definitions, but at any rate they haven’t bothered to make the effort to put things into their own words, compare a couple of different definitions or get their quote marks in order.

That isn’t necessarily a hanging offence; it doesn’t necessarily invalidate the work as a whole. But it is a warning sign. I think of it as something rather like the story about Van Halen’s gig rider including the provision of a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones taken out: if a promoter forgets or doesn’t bother, what else might they have forgotten or not bothered with? If I’m reviewing a submission or a PhD, I start with the references and bibliography, because if the author hasn’t taken trouble with those, what else might they not have done properly? Sometimes, the answer is: nothing; everything else is fine, they just ran out of time or suffer from dyslexia or the like, and so I can simply add these points to the list of required corrections.

Sometimes, it is indeed a sign of more worrying weaknesses and/or limited knowledge. The point is that, at least in my view, you don’t fail a PhD or reject a submission simply because of a bit of sloppy referencing; you see how far it’s a symptom or a consistent pattern. If someone keeps doing it in a range of publications, that starts getting more problematic – not least because such a person is then also likely to be failing in their responsibilities in training younger researchers.

The problem is that these are not easy judgements. It’s much more straightforward to identify duplicated words, especially with software, than to determine the significance of that duplication, or to explain why sometimes duplication is less of an issue than at other times. When this question enters the public domain, bound up with wider political and/or cultural issues, insistence on the complexity of the issues looks like academics closing ranks and making special pleas for their own kind. It’s easy to imagine the consequences if/when the work of thousands of academics is revealed to contain ‘plagiarism’ in a narrow sense; for academics, this will confirm the emptiness of the exercise, and for the enemies of free intellectual discourse it will confirm the bankruptcy of the entire Higher Education System (HES).

In some ways it’s surprising that an obsession with detecting plagiarism has taken so long to spread beyond Germany – the von und zwischen Guttenberg affair was over ten years ago! UK and US public figures are, I guess, either less likely to have doctorates or less likely to emphasise them as part of their public profile, hence less likely to be vulnerable to such investigations. With academics, on the other hand, it’s an obvious line of attack – they’re using our own publications against us! Well, when I say ‘our’ publications, I mean all these words that other people have also used at some point in the past…