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What Do They Say About
Ethics in Other Fields?
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As concerns arise about distortions
in academic and curatorial research on the field of contemporary
fiber art and craft, an appropriate response
is to ask questions how research leading to those distortions
is designed and executed.
However, in the field of art, little transparency
and discussion is encouraged regarding its research. This
Tab includes articles that illustrate the discussions in
other professional fields which are more open regarding questions
about reliable professional research practice and ethics.
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Must
You Actually Read The Books to Give the Prize?, New
York Times, 12/02/1989. |
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For Sale: On-Line Bookstore's Recommendations,
New York Times, 02/08/1999. |
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Amazon.com
Plans to Revise Its Ad Program, New York Times, 02/10/1999. |
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Payola,
PC Computing, 01/2000. |
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Wish
You Had an Ethics Code?, OPERA America Newsline, 10/1999. |
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Buying Art? Choose
An Adviser Carefully, The
Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, 12/21/2000. |
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The
Lies of Joseph Ellis, New York Times, 08/21/2001. |
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Historian's
Prizewinning Book on Guns is Embroiled in a Scandal, New York Times, 12/08/2001. |
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As
Historian's Fame Grows, So Do Questions on Methods, New York Times, 01/11/2002. |
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Stephen
Ambrose and Plagiarism, New York Times, 01/12/2002. |
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Gift
to the Smithsonian with Conditions, New
York Times,
02/09/2002. |
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Must
You Actually Read The Books to Give the Prize?,
Edwin McDowell, New York Times, 12/02/1989, p. A19.
In this article the Times reported that "Robert
L. Heilbroner,
the chairman of the nonfiction panel for this year's National
Book
Awards, evoked scattered murmurs
and hisses at the awards ceremony on Wednesday when he said he
had not read most of the 190 books submitted for the prize. Instead,
he said, he narrowed his selections with such shortcuts as reading
the first and last pages of some books, looking at blurbs and
examining the index and table of contents."
Top
of Page . . . . . |
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For Sale: On-Line
Bookstore's Recommendations,
Doreen Carvajal, New York Times, 02/08/1999, p. A1&21. In
this report, Ms. Carvajal wrote that "The
E-commerce pioneer Amazon.com strives for a clean look for
its on-line bookstore. That is why executives consider
it unnecessary to clutter its World Wide Web pages and pithy
book recommendations with notices that publishers are starting
to pay to have titles featured as "New and Notable" or "Destined
for Greatness."
The Times article continued: "But
it will always be a question in my mind: Is this 'destined
for greatness' or is this paid for?" said Jonathan Bulkeley,
the chief executive of Barnesandnoble.com.
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Amazon.com
Plans to Revise Its Ad Program, Doreen
Carvajal, New York Times, 02/10/99, p. C1-5.
In this article, Ms. Carvajal reported that
Amazon.com would follow ethical guidelines that are more stringent
than those followed by some publicly funded museums. She
wrote that "Faced
with e-mail rebukes from its customers, Amazon.com, the on-line
bookseller,
yesterday
revised
its advertising policy,
pledging to disclose when book publishers pay the company to feature
titles."
And the articled included that "Mr. Curry
[spokesman] said that customers had sent Amazon electronic mail
expressing
surprise
at its advertising
program."
Top of
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Amazon.com
Site Tells Users of Book Promotion Payments,
Doreen Carvajal, New York Times, 03/02/1999, p. C6. In
this article the Times continued to report on the strong
public reaction to the undisclosed conflicts of interest
on a commercial website: "Responding
to complaints from customers, Amazon.com retooled its popular
on-line bookstore yesterday
so that it would disclose
when publishers pay money to subsidize titles that are highlighted
or featured with favorable reviews."
The article reported that Mr. Risher said
the response of consumers to the disclosure of the promotional
practice was "almost
surprising in its intensity: and that many consumers
simply wanted the company to be more
open about the system."
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Payola,
Taylor & Jerome, PC
Computing, 01/2000, p. 53. These
writers reported that in "Early
last year Amazon.com was caught rolling in the hay with book
publishers, pocketing up to $10,000 a pop to run purportedly
independent book reviews. Even die-hard customers were
outraged. The company retreated, but the
damage was already done. Today Amazon.com's reviews mostly
clog bandwidth. Nobody with a lick
of sense would trust them to buy a book. . . . . Sites
that brazenly prostitute their content won't last. But
on their
jolly
way to
the grave, they're tarnishing everyone's reputation."
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Wish
You Had an Ethics Code?, Sallee
Ebbett, OPERA America Newsline, 10/1999, p. 11. (OPERA America is the national association for opera companies
in the U.S.A.)
In this article Ms. Ebbett wrote, "While
just about everyone has, at one time or another, chuckled that
the
term
'business
ethics'
is
an oxymoron, most will agree that they want their organizations
to treat employees
fairly, deliver a quality product, deal honestly and responsibly
with its customers and suppliers, and not break the law. In
essence, people want to be associated with ethical organizations. Companies
have been writing Codes of Ethics for several years now, and
most people can name organizations they feel are ethical."
She continued this probing discussion asking, "But
what about non-profit organizations? Perhaps because the "profit
motive" is
removed from the mission statements of non-profits, it is assumed
that they
are already ethical organizations. Perhaps
the fact that most non-profits come into being to satisfy some
critical social or cultural need, they are perceived to
be on a higher plane than 'profit-for-profit's-sake' businesses. But
non-profits face ethical dilemmas just as corporations do, so
they need to consider creating their own Codes of Ethics to
guide them when such crises occur."
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Buying
Art? Choose An Adviser Carefully,
Daniel Costello, The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition,
12/21/2000).
In this report Mr. Costello
described that "Ten
months ago, Julie Mussafer was in the baseball-cap retailing business. Now
she has a better job: She's an art
adviser."
The article continued that "Ms. Mussafer,
of Boston, tells her 15 clients what art to buy and how much
to
pay for
it. She
assists them in deciding what art looks best where and is
already making enough money
to expand the business. There is only one problem: She
doesn't have, nor claim to have, any art experience. No
art-history degrees. No base of knowledge culled during
years in a prestigious gallery. She doesn't even make
it to museums all that much. . . .
Mr. Costello explained that "The roaring
art boom is spawning a surprising boom of its own: the
professional art adviser. Don't know
what you like? They'll teach you. . . . Just
don't ask them if they know about art. Many of the newest
advisers streaming into this field don't have anything
more than a couple of college art-history classes on their
resumes. . . . Some,
including veterans of this booming business, take kickbacks
on the side
from art dealers and recommend pieces they own themselves,
hoping to get more than just their regular, already considerable,
commissions. Both practices are legal but frowned upon
in the art world."
He notes that "Part of the problem is
that there are no professional guidelines, and no certification
process,
for advisers, something
that is standard in most professions, from brokers to hairstylists."
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The Lies
of Joseph Ellis, Editorial,
New York Times, 08/21/2001, p. A16.
The editorial addressed factual misrepresentations
made by a well known writer and professor of history. The
Times stated, "By
suspending Joseph J. Ellis without pay for a year, administrators
at
Mount
Holyoke
College
have
acted fairly and
appropriately, though they must have done so with regret. Mr.
Ellis, a history professor and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author
this year of 'Founding Brothers,' admitted to lying in the classroom
about his past over the last decade after an article about those
lies was published in The Boston Globe in June."
The Times articulated a reasonable expectation
and understanding shared widely in the public when it wrote that "Mount
Holyoke's penalty is severe enough to remind Mr. Ellis, and everyone
else,
that
the
integrity
of the classroom
is sacrosanct. What matters is the basic honesty of the
intellectual transaction that takes place there." The
public trusts many academic fields to uphold these standards
although those standards are not clearly articulated in academic
research on contemporary art.
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Historian's
Prizewinning Book on Guns is Embroiled in a Scandal, Robert
F. Worth, New York Times, 12/08/2001, pp. A1&15.
In this article about Michael A. Bellesiles,
history professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Mr. Worth reported
on his acclaimed book about guns in colonial
America.
The article stated, "Over the past year
a number of scholars who
have examined his
sources say he has seriously misused historical records and possibly
fabricated them. They say the outcome, when all the evidence
is in, could be one of the worst academic scandals in years."
The article noted that many of the records
underlying the research were destroyed by a flood, but that remaining
records, when checked, "showed an astonishing number
of serious errors, almost all of them seemingly intended to support
this thesis. In
some cases his numbers were off by a factor of two, three or
more,
said Randolph Roth, a history professor at Ohio State University."
In this case, a lack of accuracy regarding
the evidence examined for the research was openly discussed. This
transparency was very important
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As Historian's
Fame Grows, So Do Questions on Method, David
D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, 01/11/2002, pp. A1&19.
In this article on historian Stephen E.
Ambrose, the times reported practices that violated acceptable
research guidelines in the field of history writing.
Mr. Kirkpatrick wrote that Mr. Ambrose "acknowledged
that his current best seller, 'The Wild Blue,' inappropriately
borrowed the words and
phrases of three passages from a book by the historian Thomas
Childers, 'The Wings of Morning.' A closer examination
of 'The Wild Blue' by the New York Times indicates that in at
least five
other places Mr. Ambrose borrowed words, phrases and passages
from other historians' books. Mr. Ambrose again acknowledged
his errors and promised to correct them in later editions."
The Times noted that in his defense "even
while conceding mistakes, Mr. Ambrose also defended his overall
methods. He
noted that in each case he included a
footnote to the works he used, and he sometimes praised the books
in his text."
Guidelines for academic research practice exist
in many fields in the liberal arts and sciences. The Times
article detailed that "In
general, professional historians consider it a failing to rely
so closely
on a single
work by
another historian for
whole passages in any event, even when attributed. More
important, Mr. Ambrose should have marked direct quotations in
the text,
or at the very least noted the closeness of his paraphrase in
his footnotes, historians say. College students caught
employing the same practices would be in trouble."
And Mr. Kirkpatrick quoted Northwestern
University history profession Dr.
Sherry: "'Any of us professional historians can
occasionally slip into uncomfortably close paraphrase, but very
few of us
do it as much as he seems to have been doing it in this book. This
would be for me as a teacher, unacceptable in a student, much
less in a professional historian.'"
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Stephen
Ambrose And Plagiarism, Dean
Sluyter, Letter-to-the-Editor, New York Times, 01/12/2002,
p. A14.
Mr. Sluyter's opinion was that "At
the school where I teach, we have an honor code. There
is not a single student, from the youngest seventh grader on
up, who would not immediately recognize any one of Stephen E.
Ambrose's near-verbatim appropriated passages as plagiarism — the
deliberate passing-off of another's work as one's own — and
grounds for a failing grade. There is not a single student
who would use the excuse offered on Mr. Ambrose's behalf — that
he was under time pressure — and expect any sympathy.
He continued in his letter to express that "What
is particularly disturbing is Mr. Ambrose's claim that 'I am
not
out there stealing
other
people's writings.' The
initial offense was damaging; it's the failure to come clean
when caught that's fatal. A biographer of Richard Nixon
should understand that."
While it is very important not to distract
from the question of theft of materials, it is important to include
the concern that unattributed or inaccurately attributed materials
obscure
transparency. They make it virtually impossible to verify
their accuracy
and reliability — a verification which is one of the prized
attributes of academic research practice. Top
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Gift
to Smithsonian with Conditions,
Robert Carlson, Letter-to-the-Editor, New
York Times, 02/09/2002, p. A18.
Mr. Carlson's opinion was "What a
breath of fresh air from the Smithsonian Institution ('Museum
Insisted
on
Control
of
$38 Million Gift,' news article,
Feb. 6). It's about time that someone told the 'donors'
that their money doesn't buy them the reputation of the institution
they're supposedly supporting. I have nothing but respect
for the museum's chairman, Ivan Selin, and the scholars who operate
and curate it. Their scruples and reputation are worth
more than the $38 million they turned down."
Mr. Carlson's opinion is founded upon his experience: "As
a past president of the Glass Art Society, I have firsthand experience
with collectors
who
insist on attaching curatorial
license to their donations. The American art patronage
system is almost totally dependent on private money. It's
a sad spectacle to see wealthy amateurs guiding the curatorial
decisions of respected
institutions while the professionals must sit on their hands
and keep their mouths shut. I pray that the fortitude exhibited
by the Smithsonian will spill over to other institutions."
The poorly disclosed financial influences referred
to in Mr. Carlson's letter could have affected the entire Smithsonian,
including its sub-division, the Renwick Gallery, which is funded
by the public to study and
create
an
accurate record of American decorative art — including
glass and fiber art and craft.
[For further
information on the issues referred to in all these articles,
see also The LIBRARY section, where there are reviews of
books covering this issue in great detail.]
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