more on U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Mon, 03 May 2004 09:08:33 -0400
From: John Adams <jadams01 () sprynet com>
Subject: FOR IP? Re: [IP] U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences
To: dave () farber net

"I was wondering when I'd see that story on IP--here's one from last
week's Washington Post that might help explain it", Johnnie said
puckishly:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38708- 2004Apr24?language=printer

How Original . . .
These Scholars Shared a Ghost. Who Knew?

By William M. Adler

Sunday, April 25, 2004; Page B01

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. 

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/