duty of experts

“How Dare Universities Charge Such High Tuition?” KABOOM!* #1: Georgetown University Law Center

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments
headexplode

Kaboom.

James Feinerman, the James M. Morita Professor of Asian Legal Studies at Georgetown University Law Center, who also serves as its associate dean for transnational programs, was hired by the U.S. government as an expert witness  to bolster the prosecution in a spying case, and apparently plagiarized a substantial potion of the report submitted to the court from <sigh–there goes that value of THAT degree> Wikipedia.The defense picked up on the uncited cribbing and the federal court is now examining whether the sources used by Wikipedia are reliable enough for his report to be accorded any validity. The Government, meanwhile, represented by assistant U.S. attorneys Peter Axelrod and John Hemann, is stuck with making desperate “ahumunahumuna” sounds like Ralph Kramden used to do on “The Honeymooners” when he was caught looking stupid and spouting lame arguments in court filings about how Feinerman “utilized language from Wikipedia as a concise English-language summary of his opinions on certain topics.”

Riiiight. Continue reading →

When Experts Aren’t: The Ethics of Competence and “The Elements of Style”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Ethics Alarms, and apparently few others who don’t have their TV stuck permanently on Fox News, expressed its outrage of at the revealed ignorance of Al Gore, whose opinion on climate change policy carries weight and influence far beyond his demonstrated ability to comprehend the natural forces underlying his own opinion. (This week Al came up with another howler, stating that the polar ice caps would be gone in a couple of years. The scientist he erroneously quoted regarding this quickly announced that Al must have been talking about some other ice caps.) Experts who are really incompetent cause great harm, which is why competence is a critical, though often ignored, ethical duty for all professionals, from Albero Gonzalez to Bernie Madoff to Ashley Simpson to White House social secretaries.

This excellent article, a long time coming, finally exposes the incompetence of William Strunk and E.B.White, whose 1918 mini-book  “The Elements of Style” was uncritically adopted as gospel by generations of English teachers, many of whom were incompetent themselves. This over-reaching duo was to blame for all the perfectly appropriate split infinitives and passive voice sentences that you were marked down for using in the 9th Grade, and I have a book editor I’m sending this link to as soon as I finish this post who has been quoting  Strunk and White to get me to stop beginning sentences with “And” or “But.”  How many promising, lively young writers were throttled into mediocrity by this book we will never know, but it stands as vivid and tragic lesson on why experts have an obligation to be at least nearly as smart as they claim to be.