Clueless and Special

I read Andrew Gelman’s Stats blog regularly because he is one of the few academics I know about who spends space and effort calling out academic fraud and bullshit. That being the case,  he is no more clued in about his utter isolation from the world in which most of us live than any other academic. Academics rarely realize how unlike the rest of the world is the environment in which they operate, and they tend to go even further and believe that academia, whatever its faults, is truly ‘special’- in a good way.

A case in point. Gelman’s last post was about some white collar criminals who were likely going to get away with fraudulently obtaining millions of dollars, due to the corruption in the Trump Justice Department. The lesson from this Gelman wants to focus on, however, is that ‘getting justice can require a lot of effort’.

Ok, Andrew.

He goes on to describe a past situation in which he, as a working political scientist, wrote a long letter (he included the entire text in his post) to The American Political Science Association to point out that they had given a prestigious award to a book that had been revealed to be plagiarized. In a big way. Not just some paragraphs, but in fact largely stolen. Shame on the APSA, but what’s interesting is Gelman’s take on it.

He got no answer from the APSA until he contacted them for a third time, at which point they said ‘Well you did not file a formal complaint, so we cannot do anything’.

Really, APSA? Cannot do anything?

Prof Gelman then writes:

Fair enough. I didn’t think it would be right for me to file the complaint myself, given that I’m not at all knowledgeable about this area of political science.

Um, you said it was plagiarized. What expertise is needed? What do those letters after your name mean, exactly? He further notes that he thinks it ‘unfair’ that the book full of plagiarism got an award, and the books from which the material was stolen did not.

I would agree with that. Then he writes this, and I quote again:

Anyway, my point is that it takes work to pursue these things, and it’s more my inclination to point out the problem than to go through the political and administrative steps needed to rectify the problem.

I’m not dissing “the political and administrative steps”–I have a lot of respect for people who can do these things!–it’s just not something that I’m good at.

There you go. The Ivy League Prof is just not good at those political and administrative things, so taking the time to turn the long letter he had in any case already written into a formal complaint? Not his thing.

Wow.

It gets better. Many of Gelman’s readers commented on this post, and the discussion in the comments took a number of interesting turns. One commenter noted that he had seen a story from the AP in which is reported that the US National Park Service has backed Trump’s story that it was vandals who caused the water in the Washington DC reflecting pool to turn green. The commenter writes ‘I’m saddened that I can’t trust the US National Park Service either’.

Gelman responds as follows:

I feel the same way. When Harvard professors lie and cheat, sure, whatever, they’re trying to climb the greasy pole. I’d expect better from Park Service employees, for sure.

Yea, right. Those Harvard professors, one can understand that they are trying to climb that greasy academic ladder, so it’s no wonder they do fraudulent research, or plagiarize others’ work. I mean – whatever, eh?

But NPS employees? Their bad behaviour is surely beyond the pale. I mean, what could possibly happen if they didn’t go along with Trump’s story? They get fired from their piddly little jobs? What is that compared to not getting tenure at Harvard?

That’s an academic for you, and it is, I suspect, all the worse if they are Ivy League. Utterly clueless about the world, and utterly clueless as to just how clueless they are.