If you’re ever tempted to get a little loose with your sources and footnotes, imagine that a reader like Mark Anderson will be perusing your work after it’s published. That’ll keep you on your toes.
A little over a year ago, Mr. Anderson, at the time an assistant professor of philosophy at Belmont University, was trying to decide which of two biographies of Nietzsche to read in preparation for a class he was teaching on the philosopher. He remembered liking Friedrich Nietzsche (Overlook Press, 2005), by the late independent scholar Curtis Cate, so he started rereading that one. But then he had second thoughts. After all, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010), by Julian Young, was newer, and, what’s more, Mr. Young was a philosopher, with a chair at Wake Forest University.
To make up his mind, Mr. Anderson ended up reading chapter by chapter in the Young volume, alternating with the corresponding chapters in Cate. That choice would wind up causing Mr. Young and the Cambridge press considerable embarrassment.
Reading the more recent book, Mr. Anderson found himself thinking, “Hmm, that sounds like maybe a sentence I read in Cate,” he recalls. “So I checked, and it was.” Parallels he identified between the two works, including extremely close echoes of Cate’s language by Mr. Young, inspired Mr. Anderson to write a nearly 8,000-word article in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies last fall, outlining what he’d found. In some cases, he wrote, Mr. Young had “borrowed Cate’s words without acknowledgment.”
But there were also “several other parallels between these two biographies,” the professor found, ranging “from simple similarities of phrasing to longer and more complex parallels of narrative structure.”
At the time, Mr. Young responded very briefly, saying he was “grateful” to Mr. Anderson for pointing out those lapses, and explaining, “Over the years, bodies of material, as they moved from notes to notes and drafts to drafts, sometimes lost contact with their sources.”
But the dispute recently re-erupted after Mr. Young, in part at Cambridge’s prompting, responded a second time, in a piece posted online and scheduled for publication in the journal this fall. This time he was both more apologetic and more aggressive.
His response and the episode in general raise provocative questions about how thoroughly university presses can or should vet their books before publication—and, more broadly, what counts as intellectual property in a life story.
On the one hand, Mr. Young now admits that the unattributed, echoed language amounts to “a serious scholarly failing,” and says future editions of the book will cite Cate in the instances Mr. Anderson has identified. The language in question will be either paraphrased or placed within quotation marks, and an errata slip will be added to unsold copies of the current edition and sent to libraries that bought the book, Cambridge says.
On the other hand, however, he calls “nebulous” and without merit Mr. Anderson’s suggestions that the structure of certain passages within the book—sequences of quotes, narratives that departed from strict chronology—is overly reliant on Cate. He acknowledges “inexperience and carelessness as a biographer.” But explanations of his mistakes strike some readers as condescending to the entire genre.
“Without properly thinking about it, I tended to assume—wrongly—that the manner of reporting humdrum historical facts no more counts as intellectual property than the manner of reporting a bus timetable,” Mr. Young wrote. Moreover, “since Cate appeared in my bibliography I assumed it would be obvious that I had used him as a source of basic historical data.”
‘Idiosyncratic’
Mr. Young also mounts a vigorous defense of the intellectual originality of his work—and he is has some defenders on that score. His take on Nietzsche, says Brian Leiter, a law professor and philosopher at the University of Chicago, is “idiosyncratic and not very persuasive,” and yet “it’s wholly him"—that is, a product of Mr. Young’s mind.
In Mr. Young’s telling, Nietzsche isn’t the arch-atheist and über-individualist of conventional wisdom, Mr. Leiter explains. Rather, Nietzsche was interested in the flourishing of a healthy community; he believed that great individuals are a means to a healthy community, and that a healthy community requires religion, of a sort. All of this is highly unorthodox in Nietzsche studies.
Mr. Leiter also thinks that Mr. Young’s two responses did the trick: “Julian did a clean mea culpa.”
Other observers were not particularly bothered by Mr. Young’s heavy lifting, at least early on. Christa Davis Acampora, editor of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, says its publisher, Penn State University Press, initially forbade her to publish Mr. Anderson’s article—mainly because it exposed the press to libel charges but also because the press’s director thought Mr. Anderson’s detective work irrelevant to Nietzsche scholarship.
Patrick Alexander, the director, denies that account, saying the press merely wanted to establish that the accusations were true before publishing them.
But an e-mail exchange provided by a member of the journal’s editorial board (not Ms. Acampora) confirms it: “It will not be possible to include this article,” Mr. Alexander wrote to her. His note ended with the weary observation that “instances of this kind of ‘borrowing’ occur more than you would care to know.” (After the initial debate, however, Mr. Alexander proved to be a “very good partner” in weighing important issues as the article headed to publication, says Ms. Acampora, an associate professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.)
The episode is a reminder that cash-strapped publishers are rarely equipped to identify the kinds of sourcing issues that Mr. Anderson did. Will Cambridge follow through on investigating the issue?
Beatrice Rehl, publishing director for the humanities and social sciences at Cambridge, writes in an e-mail message to The Chronicle that the press “is relying on Dr. Young to compile the errata slip and is also checking to make sure it is accurate.”
But Mr. Anderson thinks that only a comprehensive, independent vetting can uncover all the parallels, and he’s not sure that’s happening.
Wake Forest, for its part, investigated the matter and found no cause for disciplinary action, says Mr. Young’s department chair, Ralph Kennedy.
Mortal Sin
In a larger sense, the episode speaks to the awkward place that biography occupies in academe. Biography is often denigrated as a vaguely dilettantish pursuit, falling between the cracks of various disciplines. Do philosophers and others not recognize the art and originality that goes into the genre?
“One of the main things that bothers me is that Curtis Cate was a serious man, who wrote a serious book,” says Mr. Anderson, who recently earned tenure. “And it wasn’t paid much attention to when it was published.” Cate, a Paris-based editor at The Atlantic, also wrote books about George Sand and Napoleon’s incursion into Russia. He died in 2006. When Mr. Anderson first came upon the parallels with Mr. Young’s book, he wrote to Cate’s publisher and his agents but was unable to generate any interest. Now that he’s made his case, he says, “the lack of response from the broader scholarly community is strange to me.”
Mr. Anderson’s article making the case against Mr. Young is careful and lawyerly, studiously avoiding the p-word. (At one point he decided to cut a quotation from a footnote in Mr. Young’s volume describing “the elevation of plagiarism from a venal to a mortal sin” as “a very modern phenomenon.”) The article meticulously documents that while Cate’s passages are closely tethered by footnotes to original sources, Mr. Young’s sometimes are not. Of a difficult period for Nietzsche, for example, Cate wrote:
“For the next six weeks, despite the consoling presence of his sister, he suffered acute eye-aches and headaches, and convulsive stomach upsets, some of them so protracted that blood came up with the vomit. ... Nietzsche’s friend, Professor Immermann, seemed to be at his wits’ end as to how to deal with this new crisis.”
Mr. Young’s version reads this way: “For the next six weeks, despite the consoling presence of Elizabeth, he suffered acute eyeaches, headaches and terrible stomach convulsions, some of them so violent that blood came up with the vomit. His friend and doctor, Professor Immermann, at his wits’ end... .”
Mr. Anderson notes several other parallel passages, some considerably longer (see here for more examples). In his second response, Mr. Young contends that in a book of some 370,000 words, “the total number involved [in the dispute] is less than 300.” Mr. Anderson says, first, that’s an undercount, and, second, he did only a spot check, implying that other examples surely lurk in the text.
Daniel Blue, an independent scholar who is working on his own biography of Nietzsche’s early years, has written about the controversy twice in the Nietzsche journal, coming down somewhere in the middle. He estimates that only half of the scholar’s book is biographical (as opposed to philosophical), where overlap was likely. And of the biographical portion, Mr. Blue writes, “the vast majority ... is in language surely Young’s own.”
Then there are the structural similarities. Both books, Mr. Anderson points out, include a section divided “into three distinct subsections, each subsection covering a single specific event in Nietzsche’s life": attending a recital of the prelude to Wagner’s Parsifal, discovering Dostoevsky, and learning of an earthquake in Nice, France. Such writerly decisions were hardly compelled by the bare facts of Nietzsche’s life.
The Nietzsche volume was Young’s first foray into biography, and some observers attribute the problems to an outsider’s insensitivity to the standards, and difficulty, of the genre. “Of course Young would be completely worried about the originality of his philosophical ideas,” says Paul S. Loeb, a professor of philosophy at the University of Puget Sound and a member of the journal’s board. “What is interesting to me is that the philosophical community hasn’t really responded to the controversy. They aren’t trained as biographers or historians, so they aren’t sensitive at all to the question of plagiarism as it pertains to ‘raw historical facts.’” He was the journal’s book editor when Mr. Anderson’s piece was published, and he helped to vet it.
But Ray Monk, a professor of philosophy at the University of Southhampton, in England, and author of Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (and of a forthcoming biography of Robert Oppenheimer), finds it hard to understand how a philosopher could embrace high standards of originality in one arena (ideas) but not another (relating a life). He has no specific knowledge of this case but says, “I take it that Young has been criticized not for relaying the same facts as Cate but for taking over Cate’s presentation of those facts—and in that case, then, we’re in exactly the same territory as plagiarizing someone’s ideas.”
“I’d be surprised,” Mr. Monk says, “if philosophers didn’t get that.”
As of now, the situation is at something of a standoff. Mr. Young says that he has identified passages in the book that need correcting beyond those Mr. Anderson has supplied, and that he has asked Mr. Anderson to pass along any examples that didn’t make the original article.
But he remains adamant about his book’s originality. He declined a phone interview but responded to e-mailed questions twice. “What I would like to emphasize,” he wrote, “is that the story of the life I have made out of the basic historical data is uniquely mine. ... From the many responses I have received from readers it has become clear to me that (rather unexpectedly) I have had the literary capacity to communicate to the reader my own intense involvement in the—ultimately tragic—events of Nietzsche’s life.”
Yet Mr. Anderson, in his most recent written response to Mr. Young, says, “No one with Professor Young’s book in hand can be confident that he is reading Young rather than Cate until Young provides unambiguous evidence that he has himself sorted carefully through both works and identified and corrected each and every reproduced passage.”
Early on, he tracked down Curtis Cate’s stepson, Michael J. Aminoff, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, and has kept him informed of developments in the exchange. Dr. Aminoff is skeptical that the situation can be cleanly resolved.
“There was sort of a muted apology by the other author,” he says, “but I’m not sure that’s going to help Curtis Cate or his book, which has now been supplanted by the other one. I don’t know if there is any simple solution to the problem, except that this might serve as a cautionary tale.”
