Unit 7
忠犬八公的故事下载
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瑜伽教练培训学校
The Cult of Celebrity Professors
—Celebrity professors are a good thing. Really!
Few species have as many natural enemies as the celebrity professor. Other academics envy their money and fame; journalists dislike their cleverer-than-thou airs; and everybody hates their determination to have it all—the curity of academic tenure and the glitz of media stardom. So the are happy days for the rest of us. Plagiarism, lying, waffle-mongering: hardly a week goes by without some academic celebrity or other biting the dust, his reputation in tatters.
Stephen Ambro was arguably America’s favorite historian, a man who wrote bestllers faster than most people read them. An inspirer of Hollywood blockbusters, he can also claim credit for two of the best presidential biographies around, on Einhower and Nixon.
appearances>pangaeaBut it now turns out that five of his books contain extensive “borrowings” from other historians. (“I’m not writing a PhD”, he has offered as an explanation—an unsurprising claim, as he would not get one for somebody el’s work.)hottle
Mr. Ambro must be grateful that attention has shifted to another cutter and paster, Doris Kearns Goodwin. She was a fixture on American television, always ready with a telling anecdote on, say, Lyndon Johnson (whom she knew) or Abraham Lincoln (the subject of her next blockbuster).Her handling of the plagiarism charges against her has arguably been wor than the charges themlves. In the last 1980s she quietly mollified one of her chief victims, paying her some money. Now she explains her behavior by the fact that she relied on handwritten notes—something other historians have managed to do without such dire conquences. Amazingly, Ms. Goodwin remains on Harvard’s board of overers, despite the fact that she committed sins that might get an undergraduate expelled.
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The hunt is now on for the next rial plagiarist. Meanwhile, other charges are also being
hurled at celebrity professors. Take compulsive lying. Joph Ellis, the author of a first-rate study of the Founding Fathers, told the students that he had fought in Vietnam when the clost he came to combat was sitting in a university library. Or take hypocrisy. Paul krugman, a professor of economics at Princeton University, ud his column in the New York Times to Savage the Bush administration for its links to Enron, when the fearless professor had himlf received ＄37,500 from the energy firm. Or take general flatulence. A squabble between Larry Summers, Harvard’s combative new president, and Cornel West, a professor of black students , alerted the world to the latter’s recent work, which turns out to be a mixture of post-structuralist mumbojumbo, religious rhetoric and rap music. More should be expected from one of only 17 people to hold the exalted title of university professor at Harvard.
Is this a ca of a few bad apples? In public intellectual (Harvard University Press) Richard Posner, a federal judge, argues that it is the whole barrel. Although the book looks at all sorts of thinkers(not just whorish academics),Mr. Posner suggests that celebrity professors owe their influence to a fraud. They build their reputations tilling som漂亮男孩英文版
e minuscule academic field, and then pontificate on Charlie Ro about everything under the sun.
All true. Yet the judge, himlf a leading intellectual for hire, is a little too harsh. Each celebrity professor may be a nauous beast. Yet there are two big arguments in favor of what they do. Most obviously, they help to circulate ideas. They give educated laypeople a chance to get their information from real authorities rather than mere journalists. They give universities a chance to pay back some of their debt to the societies that nurture them. The fact that America’s bestller lists feature works written by academic authorities amongst the ghost-written memoirs and celebrity suck-up jobs should be cau for rejoicing.
The cond point is that they help to keep talented people in academia. Some noble souls will always be willing to put up with low salaries in exchange for a chance to pursue the truth :it is hard to imagine John Rawls hustling for a bit of extra cash. But others are inevitably attracted to money and bright lights. A bit of moonlighting is a relatively easy way for universities to keep some of their smarter faculty happy.学土耳其语
什么是应用电子技术
britishWhat about the costs of this moonlighting? Don’t academic superstars short-change their universities? Well, a bit. Yet the ostentatiously ludicrous Mr. West has undoubtedly helped to attract bright students to Harvard in the same way that tho rather more rious once did. Surveys suggest that academics who engage in outside activities are actually more likely to do their share of teaching than tho who don’t. Besides, the link between popular success and lower academic standards is not sharp. Mr. Ambro and Ms. Goodwin both started “borrowing” other people’s work before they hit the big time.
Fundamentally, the betting sin of American academia is not celebrity professors but hyper-specialization. Academics have a bit of crawling along the frontier of knowledge with a magnifying glass, blind to the wide vistas opening up before them, and often reducing the most engaging subjects to tedious debates about methodology. By looking at the big picture, populists restore the excitement of intellectual life. Who has done more for literary studies in the United States: Harold Bloom or the thousands of post-structuralists and their insufferable conferences? Who has more to advance the understanding of American business: Peter Drucker, who has never been employed by a
n Ivy League university, or the entire list of contributors to the Journal of Supply Chain Management?
And the market does work. The same media machine that turned Mr. Ambro and Ms. Goodwin into superstars is now trashing their reputations. The honest majority of celebrity professors improve the world by spreading the fruits of academic rearch. The dishonest minority pay for their sins with the loss of their cherished reputations.
