Ian Freckleton, Scholarly Misconduct: Law, Regulation and Practice

Abstract

There is a special kind of guilt when the book you promised to review months ago glowers down at you accusingly. I can attest that guilt is all the sharper when the book in question is entitled Scholarly Misconduct. But this book is about things far more serious than the late submission of a book review. The preface acknowledges that scholarly misconduct might be thought ‘relatively innocuous’,1 and it would not be difficult to express mock horror at a missed footnote or an inaccurate citation. Surely such things are best left to the most pedantically minded and certainly not worthy of a book that comes in at over 600 pages. But any sniggering is soon set aside once one starts reading this book. Ian Freckelton uses a broad definition of scholarship to include intellectual work well beyond traditional university work. The line between ‘academic research’ and publications by think tanks or journalism is becoming increasingly blurred. Indeed, that blurring, is one part of the explanation of the bad behaviour described in the book. One of Freckelton’s aims in writing this book is to look at the misconduct ‘en masse, from an international perspective and across disciplines’ (p 17). That way, he hopes to show the extent and underlying features of the problem and its extent. The forms of misconduct covered are broad. They include research misconduct (Chapters 2 and 3); conflict of interest (Chapter 4); expert evidence in court (Chapter 5); plagiarism (Chapter 6); ownership of work (Chapter 7); offensive utterances (Chapter 8); sexual relationships between staff and students/junior colleagues (Chapter 9); and the use of harmful substances within the scholarly workplace (Chapter 10).2 In the final two chapters, the book explores ways of challenging this. First by encouraging and enabling people to whistle blow (Chapter 11), and finally by creating disciplinary and regulatory oversight bodies (Chapter 12).3 Certainly, anyone who believed that academia was populated by otherworldly people with their minds preoccupied on the higher things of life,4 would be sadly disabused by the end of this book.