Andrew Wollard
Nov 5 · 2 min read

Professor Erin Thompson has written a uniquely interesting, if somewhat controversial, take on academic theft. However, I detect some confirmation bias and projection bias within the writing. The worst and most egregious is the “moral economy of debt” argument, implying that Weber ( and I guess, by extension, wily speculative males engaging in economic risk…) and his bankruptcy “explain” his theft. They don’t, and if it did the moral economy of debt, usually employed by conservatives to lash out at debtors as having a moral failing, explanation undermines the rest of the white-male centered argument ( since there are conservative white males who would use that same line of argument against single women or people of color who also happen to be debtors…). So, the moral economy of debt cannot explain academic theft.

Another confirmation bias is the immediate dismissal of the so-called “handful” of women engaging in similar academic theft. As one of the commentators below notes ( Bruce G Robertson ), only two of the prominent recent examples of academic theft were perpetrated by women. This definitely supports Professor Thompson’s overall argument, but if you are going to name Weber or Obbink, it might be profitable to name one of the women who engaged in similar theft and argue why her case, unlike Weber’s, is not representative of the problem. Professor Thompson instead chooses silence.

Finally, the article begins to become overly speculative at the end and even fall prey to what I would call small-town prejudice and bias against academics who, unlike salt of the earth “producers”, are somehow feeding off daughters, wives, and people of color. It is as if ( and Professor Thompson uses that very same speculative as if construction…) Professor Thompson believes that those who engage in academic theft of valuable documents are also to be directly compared to sexual predators or, at best, those tweed-wearing academic vampires who seek to “ruin” others not like them. It is an odd rhetorical gesture, and one completely out of keeping with the scale and scope, not to mention the specificity, of what came before.

Academic theft of rare and valuable documents seems to me to deserve its own articles, not be swept up in solecistic conflations with the other fellow examples of exploitation of graduate students, abuse of undergraduates, coercion and ruin of those ultimately excluded from the towers and halls of academia. The real damage and reason for all academic thefts appears, to my mind at least, to be the result of the commodification of the past and the insistence many in society have of placing value on academic documents because of the work they do in propping up just-so stories. Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels has written of the theft involved in recounting the story of the Gnostic Gospels, and of how that Nag Hammadi discovery actually threatened to upend many assumptions about early Christian world attitudes and beliefs, so those thefts are a special case. Yet, in general, academic theft normally involves not expanding knowledge of the ancient world but restricting it and putting a price on both the knowledge and the theft.

    Andrew Wollard

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    Former PhD student ( History, without degree ) and MFA graduate. Disciple of historians and writers everywhere.