Truth in scholarship

[John Jacobus <crispy_bird@YAHOO.COM>]

The following appeared in yesterday's Washington Post.



As an aside, if you need help writing a article in

support of the Bush, see

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38703-2004Apr24.html?referrer=emailarticle



------------

How Original . . .

 

 By William M. Adler

 

  AUSTIN

  

 Everyone has quirks. Among mine is an obsession with

matters nuclear: weapons, power, waste. I've been

writing about little else for several years. So I was

intrigued not long ago to run across an opinion piece

in my hometown daily, the Austin American-Statesman

headlined "Funds for nuclear waste storage should be

used for just that."

 

 The March 4 op-ed by Sheldon Landsberger, a

University of Texas professor of nuclear engineering,

argued trenchantly that the government is fleecing

electric-power ratepayers, who for more than two

decades have been contributing mandatory fees for the

development of a proposed national nuclear waste

repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Landsberger

charged that a portion of the fees earmarked for the

Nuclear Waste Fund is diverted to the U.S. Treasury.

"Denying the Yucca Mountain project an adequate level

of funding," he wrote, "is stealing money from

taxpayers who were required to support the waste

management project."

 

  Strong words. Familiar ones, too. So familiar that I

was sure they were entombed in the towering file of

articles on nuclear waste that I, ahem, maintain. I

knew I could excavate the words eventually. Or I could

Google them. I typed in "Yucca Mountain" and "stealing

money"; 0.11 seconds later, I had my cite: A Dec. 9,

2003, op-ed column in the State, the Columbia, S.C.,

daily. It appeared under the byline of Abdel E.

Bayoumi, chairman of the department of mechanical

engineering at the University of South Carolina. Wrote

Prof. Bayoumi: "Denying the repository project an

adequate amount of funding is essentially stealing

money from the taxpayers who were required to support

the waste management project."

 

 Other sentences were identical, as was the entire

last paragraph, but this was no case of garden-variety

plagiarism; Landsberger had not appropriated the words

of Bayoumi. Instead, as I was about to learn,

Landsberger and other engineering professors at

universities great and small had been sent op-eds over

the past decade or more and asked to sign, seal and

deliver them as their own to their local newspapers.

The opinion pieces were written not by the academic

experts, but originally by a PR agency in Washington,

D.C., working on behalf of the nuclear energy

industry. 

 

 But I'm getting ahead of myself. I called

Landsberger, but he was away for spring break. So I

called Bayoumi, who was indignant that someone might

have lifted his words. "I didn't consent to let anyone

else use it," he said. "I told the State it was only

for the State."

 

  Finally, I reached Landsberger. He told me he was

unaware of Bayoumi's column. Indeed, he was taken

aback when confronted with the similarities between

the two pieces. His defense was odd but convincing. He

admitted immediately that he had not written his

column. "It was something which was written for me,"

Landsberger said, but he wouldn't say by whom. "I

agreed with it, I went over it, read it a couple of

times, took all of 15, 20 minutes." Nor was it the

first time he'd lent his good name and academic

credential into the service of an ideal in which he

believes: a nuclear-powered world. 

 

 "I've written five to 10 [such] articles over the

last five years," he said. "They come maybe two or

three times a year, particularly when there's a

hot-button issue." They came to him? Again, he

wouldn't say from whom.

 

  I returned to Bayoumi's column and typed its final

sentence, "The government should get on with it," into

the LexisNexis newspaper search engine. Up popped the

same plaintive wail in a Buffalo (N.Y.) News op-ed

published July 26, 1993 -- fully 10 years earlier.

(Bayoumi's column featured other lockstep language as

well.) Back to the phone. I asked if he had written

the piece. He said yes. "All the writing is my own,"

Bayoumi said. "I have no knowledge of that [Buffalo

News] column. I have no idea who did what 10 years

ago."

 

  I believed him, just as I'd believed Landsberger

when he said he was unaware of Bayoumi's column.

Nevertheless, I wondered what was really going on.

 

  Eventually it would become clear. Landsberger

divulged that he had received the op-eds from a fellow

at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Energy

Department's nuclear research and development facility

in Tennessee. He wouldn't name his correspondent, but

he did allow that the man worked with Potomac

Communications Group Inc., a Washington-based public

relations firm. 

 

 A quick visit to Potomac's Web page delivered the

news that among its clients is the Nuclear Energy

Institute, the mighty industry-funded lobby. On the

NEI's Web site is a list of experts whom reporters are

encouraged to call for comment or technical assistance

with a story. One of those experts is Sheldon

Landsberger; another is Theodore M. Besmann, a nuclear

engineer at Oak Ridge National Lab.

 

  You're nobody without a Web page, and Ted Besmann is

no nobody. His page on the Oak Ridge Web site

helpfully mentions that since 1985 he has moonlighted

as a consultant to Potomac. Besmann, although not

overjoyed to hear from me, acknowledged that Potomac

pays him to ghostwrite letters to newspaper editors

and to broker op-ed pieces to engineering colleagues

around the country. (He also is a prolific

correspondent under his own name; The Washington Post,

for instance, has published four  of his letters, most

recently in 2001. His letters identify him as a

"researcher" or "head of a research group" at Oak

Ridge National Lab, but not as a consultant to the

industry.) 

 

 I started searching LexisNexis and other databases

for op-eds written by academics the NEI touts as

experts. I printed out a healthy sampling, grouping

them chronologically and by subject area. Searching on

key phrases led me to other academics' op-eds. Once

sorted, it didn't take a forensic crime lab to

determine that one person's literary DNA is all over

those articles. 

 

  Take the argument that the increased use of nuclear

power leads to fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. Op-eds

on that subject, for instance, ran between 1997 and

1999 with different bylines in three newspapers. Each

writer dismissed the claims of "environmentalists" or

"skeptics" that greenhouse-gas emissions "can be

reduced" without nuclear power. "They are dreaming,"

said one op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 2,

1997. Yes, concurred another in the Record of Northern

New Jersey on Jan. 5, 1998: "They are dreaming." And

Dallas Morning News readers awoke on April 5, 1999, to

learn from Landsberger that those lazy enviros were

still in the sack: "They are dreaming," he wrote.

 

  Or take the campaign to locate low-level nuclear

waste facilities in various states. Between 1990 and

1996, three academics and a physician writing op-eds

in newspapers in four states -- Nebraska,

Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Texas -- all assured

readers that nearby sites would "be among the safest

and best-engineered" waste facilities in the country.

 

 Fascinated by all of this, I phoned the news editor

at the weekly Austin Chronicle, who told me to lace up

my roller skates and get going on a story -- which it

published April 16. 

 

 The op-eds are ginned up by a prodigious copywriter

at Potomac Communications Group named Peter Bernstein,

who works out of an office in Alexandria. Bernstein

did not return several messages tat I left for him

over a two-week period, but I did hear from his boss,

Bill Perkins, a Potomac founding partner. Perkins told

me it makes no difference whose byline is on an op-ed

column; it's what the piece says that matters.

"Whether the words are largely theirs, or largely not

theirs, the views are. Nobody would submit an article

if they didn't totally agree with it," he said.

 

  Besides, Perkins added, everyone does it. "I doubt

that there is a public affairs campaign by any

advocacy group in the country that doesn't have some

version of this," he said. "The op-ed pages are one of

the ways people express their views in these debates."

But, I argued, these professors are not just

expressing their views; rather they express and adopt

as their own those of the nuclear lobby. Said Perkins:

"This is fairly conventional. It does sound as if

you've got a fairly strong opinion on this for a

reporter."

 

  Well, yes, I was upset to learn that the "by" in a

scholar's byline may well be a ruse, a duplicitous

means of inducing a lobby-authored, lobby-funded piece

into print and onto the public agenda. And sure, I

recognize that many politicians don't utter a word

that a ghost didn't write and a focus group didn't

approve, but academic rules require that scholars'

research and writing be original. (And isn't that why

PR firms recruit scholars to sign the op-eds --

precisely because of their status as independent

experts?)

 

 Perkins said that it served no purpose to debate me,

and there he was right. One man's "editorial resource"

is another's op-ed mill, I suppose.

 

 I hereby propose that the nation's editorial page

editors ask at least these two questions of outside

contributors: 1) Did you write this piece? 2) Are you

a consultant, paid or not, to an organization or

interest group with a vested interest in your column?

I'm not advocating that editors bar from publication

those who answer affirmatively, only that their

connection and/or interests be disclosed in the

author's bio.

 

  On April 13, the Austin American-Statesman printed a

letter of apology from Landsberger. "Although I am in

complete agreement with the contents of the article,

in my exuberance to have it published I failed to

state that it was not written by me," he wrote. 

 

 An "A" for exuberance, however, does not earn one a

pass from compliance with academic guidelines. The

University of Texas relies on the federal Office of

Research Integrity's (ORI) working definition of

plagiarism -- which includes the substantial

unattributed textual copying of another's work  ,

according to Sharon Brown, the university's associate

vice president for research. ORI defines such copying

as "the unattributed verbatim or nearly verbatim

copying of sentences and paragraphs which materially

mislead the ordinary reader regarding the

contributions of the author."

 

  A week before his published apology, Landsberger had

told me it was he who felt victimized. He had no

qualms about using a ghostwriter -- until he learned

the ghost was two-timing him. "When I started doing

this, I was under the impression that, rightfully or

wrongfully, I was the only guy."

 

  Is it acceptable, then, to slap your name on writing

not yours, as long as no one else declares it his or

hers? "I had no problems with them coming to me," he

said, until he learned that other professors were

staking their claims to the same material. "I felt

betrayed, duped, whatever the word is."

 

  I know the feeling, and either of those words will

do.

 

 Author's e-mail:  william_m_adler@earthlink.net

 

 William M. Adler's most recent book is "Mollie's Job:

A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line"

(Scribner). He is at work on a book about the links

between civilian nuclear power and nuclear arms

proliferation. 

 

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© 2004 The Washington Post Company





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"Those who have not known the joy of standing up for a great cause of justice have not known what makes living worthwhile."

Paul Painleve, regarding the Dreyfus Affair, 1895



-- John

John Jacobus, MS

Certified Health Physicist

e-mail:  crispy_bird@yahoo.com





	

		

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