Social Science and the Public Interest

Excerpt

Society does not presume to settle here anything about the facts of particular cases that routinely receive considerable public attention in such periodicals and blogs as The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Republic, and Inside Higher Ed. Two cases, one about a graduate student in political science and the other an assistant professor of sociology, have stirred controversy about veracity and truth-telling in social-scientific work. Presumptions abound about the ways in which research is conducted, from new forays into experimental research in political science (more often the domain of psychological research) to age-old concerns about the pursuit of ethnographic research (what used to be known in anthropology as the problem of “going native”). In the present cases, another more recent challenge is the role of mentoring to understandably ambitious researchers. A summary of the “findings” of such researchers are elevated quickly (making them celebrities of sorts) beyond the more laborious unpackings required to get through articles and books, revealing still other ambitions of editors and publishers, in one case the journal Science, and the other the University of Chicago Press. The chain of accountability will no doubt be examined in the months to come. That accountability will include a better understanding of the political motivations in the conduct of scientific work. For now, the extraordinary reliance on trust and its relationship to reputation have both much to commend and much about which to be concerned. Judge for yourself: …