The Cult of Celebrity Professors翻译

Unit 7

Text A

The Cult of Celebrity Professors

—Celebrity professors are a good thing. Really!

Few species have as many natural enemies as the celebrity professor. Other academics envy their money and fame; journalists dislike their cleverer-than-thou airs; and everybody hates their determination to have it all—the security of academic tenure and the glitz of media stardom. So these are happy days for the rest of us. Plagiarism, lying, waffle-mongering: hardly a week goes by without some academic celebrity or other biting the dust, his reputation in tatters.

Stephen Ambrose was arguably America’s favorite historian, a man who wrote bestsellers faster than most people read them. An inspirer of Hollywood blockbusters, he can also claim credit for two of the best presidential biographies around, on Eisenhower and Nixon. But it now turns out that five of his books contain extensive “borrowings” from other historians. (“I’m not writing a PhD”, he has offered as an explanation—an unsurprising claim, as he would not get one for somebody else’s work.)

Mr. Ambrose must be grateful that attention has shifted to another cutter and paster, Doris Kearns Goodwin. She was a fixture on American television, always ready with a telling anecdote on, say, Lyndon Johnson (whom she knew) or Abraham Lincoln (the subject of her next blockbuster).Her handling of the plagiarism charges against her has arguably been worse than the charges themselves. In the last 1980s she quietly mollified one of her chief victims, paying her some money. Now she explains her behavior by the fact that she relied on handwritten notes—something other historians have managed to do without such dire consequences. Amazingly, Ms. Goodwin remains on Harvard’s board of overseers, despite the fact that she committed sins that might get an undergraduate expelled.

The hunt is now on for the next serial plagiarist. Meanwhile, other charges are also being hurled at celebrity professors. T ake compulsive lying. Joseph Ellis, the author of a first-rate study of the Founding Fathers, told the students that he had fought in Vietnam when the closest he came to combat was sitting in a university library. Or take hypocrisy. Paul krugman, a professor of economics at Princeton University, used his column in the New York Times to Savage the Bush administration for its links to Enron, when the fearless professor had himself received ＄37,500 from the energy firm. Or take general flatulence. A squabble between Larry Summers, Harvard’s combative new president, and Cornel West, a profess or of black students , alerted the world to the latter’s recent work, which turns out to be a mixture of post-structuralist mumbojumbo, religious rhetoric and rap music. More should be expected from one of only 17 people to hold the exalted