Who Writes What in the Bureaucratic University?

...But so is authorship...

...Some publishers or departments of publishing firms receive a substantial part of their income by such publications, and others are virtual branches of an agency or a foundation...

...Subordinates may consciously or unwittingly sabotage agreements to which they are not privy...

...With this tactic, his own claim is strengthened as the actual author's is correspondingly weakened...

...It is even better than the solution adopted by commercial agencies which do not list authors but only names of the agencies or departments in lieu of authors...

...Once the professional writer goes to work, a new set of battles begins...

...As a result, the principal investigator forces him self to accept authorship of work initiated and completed by others, in an environment where to have written something is to have validated oneself...

...It is understandable why graduate students see themselves as the most exploited class in America...

...More typically, the conventional author can justify his claims to that title by becoming an editor...

...Writing for them requires a special kind of literacy, far removed from generally recognized standards of literary English...

...In correcting these violations, the editor-author justifies his conventional authorship, even though it was his inability or failure to communicate to the actual author that made this editorship necessary...

...But as yet, convention outlaws joint authorship by more than six persons...

...Nor is this ectoplasmic output necessarily condemned...

...The principal investigator who is destined to be the conventional author serves as mediator between technicians and professional writers, usually siding with the professional writer, but restraining him when his literary imagination provokes the threat of resignation or sabotage by the technical staff...

...From the standpoint of jurisdictional disputes, this solution is the most efficient...

...He does not mind...

...Grantsmanship is time-consuming...

...In a large-scale project, literally dozens of people will have worked on the research, some as staff members and others as consultants brought in to rescue a phase of a floundering study...

...A number of names affixed to any one report is reduced, and each project member can be a principal or sole author...

...He must estimate the sales potential of a specific book for either a particular audience or that mysterious body, the general public...

...In many instances, this problem is solved by subvention...

...More fundamentally, when much of the background for a study is based upon tacit understandings and subliminal or implicit agreements, the principal investigator may become only aware of the nature or implications of these agreements by discovering their unwitting violation by actual authors who were not aware of these agreements since they had no part in them...

...When this happens, subsidized publication comes to be a form of information control...

...IN MASS SOCIETY, problems related to plagiarism and authorship can take on bizarre characteristics...

...This process reaches a culmination when the editor-publisher begins to resent the author for being inexpert in the field in which the book is written, or for depriving him of credit for his own secret authorship...

...Since he takes on authorship by usurpation, he tends to feel acutely uncomfortable in the presence of a genuine author...

...Some of this editing is necessary...

...When the conventional author writes a book that does not require the legitimacy of his official position, he can be magnanimous by including his actual author as a co-author, usually under the designation, "as told to " or "with the help of ." This technique has its advantages for the professional writer...

...It is one form of distributive justice...

...Where large-scale organizations prevail, the head man is presumed to be too busy, too engaged, and too important to write his own speeches, policy papers, books, or letters to the editor...

...But the number of prestigious books he can publish is severely limited...

...Authorship is only one form of acknowledgment...

...He is unsympathetic to the publicity needs of the conventional author...

...MORE ANXIETY is in store for such an author...

...He success fully defended himself by claiming that he had not written his speech...

...These policies are often comprised of unspoken or half-forgotten understandings, not to speak of misunderstandings, between sponsors and project heads...

...If he is intractable he will be fired, or he will resign...

...Convention requires that the nominal author be treated as the actual author —unless, after receiving an unfavorable response, the nominal author denies responsibility for "his" unfortunate statements by claim ing that he has not read them...

...He can excise "unnecessary academic complexity...

...It adds the dignity of footnotes, concepts and definitions—after the fact...

...For in the flood of `objectively necessary" but imminently useless paper work, the real thing, conceived and recorded by one man or a pair of scholars, continues to be produced...

...Because the book, the article, or the essay is valued over the mimeographed report or the government-sponsored monograph, many contract researchers are driven to get their reports or articles printed by book publishers, and/or by scientific journals...

...His greatest pleasures in authorship, so long as he remains an editor, must be secret pleasures...

...On top of all this, the putative author must find some device by which to convince his writers that he, not they, deserve authorship...

...IN MOST CASES, the issue will be resolved by splitting authorship among a handful of coauthors, all under the senior authorship of the illiterate or non-writing senior conventional author...

...He has his own needs...

...Others must be acknowledged by other means...

...Theory operates to take the particular, specific data of a report and reset it in a general "scientific" framework...

...Those individuals who are still around at the time of completion of the manuscript are most likely to become authors...

...In one highly publicized case, a university president was exposed for lifting a speech verbatim from a learned journal...

...Since, however, the principal investigator is the visible director of "his" project, outsiders treat him actually as if he did the work...

...To many sponsors, subliterary, incoherent (or elegant and cogent, but al ways ghostly) fecundity is evidence that they have a responsible administrator...

...THE PROBLEM looks somewhat different in research organizations attached to universities...

...In the academic community this situation results in greater conflict if only because the actual author needs to validate and advance himself through authorial credits...

...Ordinarily only a few key people read research reports...

...If the publisher accepts the project report, the editor at the publishing house is enlisted as co-author of the conventional author and his anonymous editorial consultant...

...He must know how to write a proposal or has to hire someone who does...

...in fact, he derives personal pleasure (and professional recognition from his fellow writers) based on the amount of work done and the position of the nominal authors who use him...

...The net result is to devalue research authorship...

...Protocol requires that he be sole or principal author of the final report...

...The government agency or private foundation finances the cost or part of the cost of publishing the book...

...Subordinates frequently implement policies that never have been communicated to them...

...dissertation, his vulnerability weakens his bargaining position...

...Among politicians, ghost writers are so nearly universal that special virtue attaches to a man who writes some of his own speeches (Adlai Stevenson) or edits them, like John Fitzgerald Kennedy...

...He gets work done...

...The writer feels that technicians are illiterate barbarians, infatuated with their own words, stubborn and intractable...

...This is so even though the principal investigator has not writ ten a line or is incapable of writing a line...

...The sheer volume of unrelated studies attributed to a single re search broker serves best to indicate the na ture of his authorship...

...In that case the problem is solved...

...There, the "principal investigator" is usually a specialist in securing funds...

...The con tinued need for a principal writer in subsequent research guarantees at least a junior authorship for the writer...

...At the other extreme, professional writers are employed simply to make the work intelligible...

...If pressed for time, he finds a professional writer to make certain corrections and simplifications...

...Moreover, where there are no funds, no staff, no apparatus to intervene between the author and his work, this presumption is probably correct...

...Thus the highly literate editor is inundated with specialized, badly written manuscripts which have as their principal reason for existence the need of their conventional authors for promotions, and the fact that a government agency or foundation financed the research upon which a non-book is based...

...Since no one knows who actually wrote what, conventional authorship is more an attribute of rank in an organization, which implies the ability to attract funds and to fulfill contractual requirements...

...As pillars of the sponsoring agency and as readers, they are known to have sharply defined tastes...

...Beyond this, it is desirable that he be a good administrator, able to employ competent researchers and reasonably articulate writers...

...Failure to list the principal investigator as an author may be construed by the sponsor (who has occupied all the work time of the principal investigator) as neglect of duty...

...Moreover, he is expected to censor copy that may offend the school or institution that "houses" the grant...

...If the project manages to pull itself together and "gets out a report," convention demands that all contributors be acknowledged...

...Hence, it is possible for quasi-illiterates to become the authors of innumerable speeches, papers, monographs, articles, and books, writ ten by variegated specialists whose only rela tionship to each other is that they are financed by the same agency...

...In doing so, NOTEBOOK he distributes the authorship to as many individuals as possible...

...But good writing does not drive out bad writing, which it merely inundates...

...The problem remains of discovering some means of distributing recognition between acknowledgment and authorship...

...THE FLOOD OF REPORTS of contractual Iesearch then reaches the "publisher," a writer or wouldbe writer, who generally is forced against his better judgment to act as businessman...

...He has to make a positive contribution...

...The whole artifice contributes to an inflation in the number of publications, and to the devaluation of publication itself...

...Convention again allows for a list of acknowledgments to as many as 20-30 contributors, some of whom may be writers of preliminary drafts...

...The project head may edit the work from the standpoint of its political implications...

...His own ignorance may be a major source of anxiety to the entrepreneur...

...It is wise to have a "theorist" on the staff, or at least, to add one as a consultant...

...BECAUSE THE CONVENTIONAL AUTHOR is the "outside man," he knows or thinks he knows how the work is likely to be received by sponsors...

...He becomes a writer...

...Because he is an academic, providing the money and the job is not enough...

...To transform "practical" research with concrete recommendations into a "scientific" report is a delicate matter...

...Thus the ghosts of past authorship haunt the ghosts of contemporary authorships...

...In business and government, the employed journalist-author is used to accepting anonymity as a basis for employment...

...In this case, the stable of writers becomes a brotherhood, with each writer competing for acceptance and praise from the patriarch...

...Thus "theory" becomes public relations, NOTEBOOK and the theorist an indispensable aide to dignified project researchers...

...The actual author, unless he is a "pro," will resist such attacks on his manhood, and fight tooth and nail not only for the credit, but also for what he regards as the integrity of the manuscript...

...He receives the manuscript of the actual author and makes suggestions...

...He can eliminate recommendations or evidence that implies a recommendation that might run counter to what he thinks is the sponsor's policy...

...The editor tries to avoid competing with his own authors...

...The possibility of a scandal also serves to guarantee authorship...

...The technical staff feels all too frequently that the professionl editor is falsifying its results...

...In general, this problem is resolved by power, by statesmanship, by bargaining, and by occupational mobility...

...But even in such cases, the problem is not resolved without bitterness...

...He is forced to accept the fraudulent role that would no doubt have seemed obnoxious to him when he initially embarked upon a career in research...

...Editorship is thus, in the world of bureaucratic writing, a thankless task...

...His name on the title page symbolizes his temporary acceptance of a document concocted for him...

...If he is able to dredge up an earlier essay written by himself or written under his name, he can insist that it be inserted in a later work the better to buttress his present pretensions...

...The writer may unknowingly provide the evidence for a policy that suggests budgets or programs unacceptable to the institution "housing" the project...

...Simply because there is a presumption of actual authorship in such work, it is valued...

...If he is competent, or feels that he is, he will actually rewrite part of the material...

...To maintain his social and occupational position he must act as if he really writes—which will make him uneasy and if he is capable of it, cause him to experience a sence of guilt...

...The problem is, of course, more complicated when one conventional author has a stable of "ghosts," all contributing works, ideas, or lines to a given piece of work...

...Sometimes they reject or accept unsubsidized manuscripts by judging whether they are compatible with their subsidized publications...

...If the actual writer is a graduate student who needs the approval of his professor-employer for his Ph.D...

...It leaves the academic entrepreneur with little energy for the day-to-day operations of his project...

...If all of these justifications fail, the conventional author sits down with blue pencil and "corrects" or otherwise alters the English, punctuation, and all...

...But if he can succeed in making the report into an intelligible book he takes pride in his virtual authorship...

...Moreover, their vocabulary is likely to consist of professional jargon...

...If he claims credit for his authorship, the actual or conventional authors might seek a more self-effacing editor...

...He knows that in an academic community authorship leads to prestige and promotion...

...He knows where the money is and he knows how to lay his hands on a grant...

...ALL OF THESE COMPLEXITIES are generally known and understood by the participants, by university administrators, by sponsors, and by faculty not engaged in project research...

...Instead, he has a staff of information specialists, aides, consultants, and public relations men who write for him...

...A "theorist" and a theory are needed to "reframe" the report...

...Usually, the editor is handicapped by his fondness for a well-made and well-written book that has something to say, even if it doesn't sell...

...upon his departure, he can be assigned a junior authorship...

...His name on a bibliography or a title page then justifies the convention which allows it to be there...

...Haste in meeting deadlines and the fact that project researchers are hired for their technical not their literary skills make for more pedantic gobbledygook...

...The theorist earns his keep by assisting in academic publication, and by legitimizing otherwise not respectable research...

...The publisher's editor increasingly resents both the illiteracy of the academician in general, and that of the conventional author in particular...

...In addition, by pressing his claims for authorship he evokes guilt in the conventional author who thereupon feels obliged to justify his own claims...

...He is a capable and some times a super-salesman who effectively promotes his proposal both to the funding agency and to his own university...

...If there are numerous reports, the principals agree to rotate authorship...