By Merrill Balassone, USC News Service
November 19, 2013
Martin Krieger is an intellectual switch-hitter, first earning a doctorate in particle physics before turning his focus to city planning and the environment. Now a professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy, Krieger has spent 15 years documenting everyday Los Angeles, taking tens of thousands of photographs that capture slices of life in the city. With his recent book, The Scholar’s Survival Manual (Indiana University Press, 2013), Krieger looks back on his 45 years in academia and offers advice to students, professors and administrators on how to avoid becoming “academic roadkill.”
Merrill Balassone: What’s your best advice to USC freshmen about starting a successful college career?
Martin Krieger: USC is such a large and diverse place that undergraduates will do well if they have some focused reason for attending: the band, mastering a subject that matters to them, being in Los Angeles or joining the entertainment industry. For many students, success in college may well mean maturity, learning new social and organizational skills, and making connections in the world they wish to join. I am more of a nerd, so to speak, so college success for me was learning to think like a physicist and getting to know the great thinkers and writers in our traditions.
As for new professors, the secret is to take advantage of the privilege of being a professor. Find research and writing you want to do, make teaching something that supports and develops your research, teach undergraduates as well as graduates. If you discover that the life of research and writing is not for you, find another position in another institution where your strengths are just what they want.
MB: What inspired you to make such a drastic shift from your academic work, from particle physics to urban planning?
MK: I liked physics — still do — and my training and teachers are still my touchstone. My other touchstone was the Great Books that were the foundation for the requirements for my undergraduate education. What I discovered was that I was not comfortable working in large teams, and that I was not so adept working with equipment. So when I received the PhD, I knew that I had to find another role. I met some of the faculty in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley, they invited me to visit for half a semester, and I ended up staying in the field by the kind graces of my deans. I had some nice ideas, I worked hard to learn another field, and at 29 I had a home-run publication in a major journal. But only when I was about 41 did I get a suitable job (at USC!).
As for photography, I have always had an interest in it. In about 1998, I was passing by Playa Vista’s site on the 405 freeway, and I got the idea that it would be good to photographically document this major community development. Also, I started photographing various phenomena such as hundreds of storefront churches or all the LA Department of Water and Power electrical stations. I discovered I was a collector. My advantage was that I saw urban processes and history in the world’s phenomena, and so my systematic photo documentation was actually deeply grounded. It was less about art and more about social science. And much to my surprise, I could get grants to do this work. What seems like a drastic shift — in fact several shifts over the years — felt more like following my nose, and again and again capturing survival from the jaws of defeat. My nine books divide into those about planning and design, those about how physicists think and do their work. When I think of decision-making, my model is Augustine’s Confessions.
MB: Why did you decide to write The Scholar’s Survival Manual?
MK: My motives in writing about scholarly life on my blog were twofold: I hated watching people make big yet avoidable mistakes. And what was good enough for me was not good enough for others — I could protect them. Moreover, it was a way of writing it down rather than have it floating around in my head, seething, getting me upset or angry. I was on the University Committee for Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure for a number of years, perhaps half my time at USC. In my role, for six years I read all the dossiers from all fields at all ranks, so I saw a broad range of fields and problems, and along the way I learned lots about other disciplines and professions. Marty Levine was then the vice provost for faculty affairs, and we would discuss my observations. When he looked at my blog, he encouraged me to make it into a book. At first I was reluctant. But Marty was persistent, and then when I took all the postings at that point [700+], and sorted them and discarded repetition, I could see how it might well be a book. Still, lots of editing, advice from the publisher who was interested in the book and further editing was needed to make it into something that worked. I tested it out on some students, and they thought it useful. I should note that over the years, students and junior faculty told me they found my blog postings helpful as well. What I was saying was useful, although nothing I said was new. I found a way of penetrating people’s defenses and encouraging them to act rather than be defensive. It helped that I was willing to make fun of myself. Coming from New York [Brooklyn], it seemed that I was much more direct than most of my colleagues, although I just thought I was saying what was obvious.
MB: If a survivalist relies on a pocketknife and a compass, what is the academic’s most important academic survival tool?
MK: Keep working: research, writing, teaching. For if you don’t do research and writing, if they are not the center of your being, you will be eaten by all sorts of unsavory characters. If you do your research and writing, in part as a defense against chaos, and attend to your family, you are centered and bulletproof, you have a core that will be your North Star.
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A question they asked, but was excised from the published interview because of length considerations:
MB: You describe plagiarism as an academic IED. Why? Has it become a bigger problem in recent years or has technology just made it easier to uncover?
MK: When I discovered that in two classes almost all my students had lots of plagiarism
in their papers, I had to address the problem. Most of them did not think they were plagiarizing, and that what they were doing was OK. (A few students told me that those other students
should have learned the rules about plagiarism in high school.) When I brought up the issue to the classes and to their advisor, it
did not go well. The rules say you have to report it to a
suitable judicial office and when I did that, it got even worse.
I was not trying to penalize the students. Their grades had already gone in before I discovered the plagiarism. I just wanted to make sure they did not continue in that mode. For if they continued to plagiarize unknowingly then their dissertations or theses would become the equivalent of IED's, ready to explode on them if someone just happened to look, especially after they filed and they received the degree. Digital versions of dissertations and theses are readily available.
To confirm my concern, I checked a sample of doctoral dissertations, in a variety of fields, and the "Similarity Scores" are often about 5%-12%. The Similarity Score is what the Turnitin program provides after going through the document, indicating where any copying might have taken place. I set the program not to count stuff in quotation marks, or the bibliography, or any phrase that would appear to be copied that is less than ten words long. (You can adjust all these. The program marks all the problematic passages even if they are not counted in the Score.) You have to look at the marked up document to make sure the program is really indicating copying.
Students want to be aware of such technologies, much as they are aware of automatic cameras that capture illegal left turns. You never want to say, "I am not a cheater," and then be confronted with a Turnitin-marked-up copy of your paper.
Politicians are regularly caught copying without acknowledging the source, sometimes in a speech or newspaper column, sometimes in their dissertations. Their salience as public actors, and the presumptions we might have that they are ethically decent, makes these revelations particularly awkward.
I was not trying to penalize the students. Their grades had already gone in before I discovered the plagiarism. I just wanted to make sure they did not continue in that mode. For if they continued to plagiarize unknowingly then their dissertations or theses would become the equivalent of IED's, ready to explode on them if someone just happened to look, especially after they filed and they received the degree. Digital versions of dissertations and theses are readily available.
To confirm my concern, I checked a sample of doctoral dissertations, in a variety of fields, and the "Similarity Scores" are often about 5%-12%. The Similarity Score is what the Turnitin program provides after going through the document, indicating where any copying might have taken place. I set the program not to count stuff in quotation marks, or the bibliography, or any phrase that would appear to be copied that is less than ten words long. (You can adjust all these. The program marks all the problematic passages even if they are not counted in the Score.) You have to look at the marked up document to make sure the program is really indicating copying.
Students want to be aware of such technologies, much as they are aware of automatic cameras that capture illegal left turns. You never want to say, "I am not a cheater," and then be confronted with a Turnitin-marked-up copy of your paper.
Politicians are regularly caught copying without acknowledging the source, sometimes in a speech or newspaper column, sometimes in their dissertations. Their salience as public actors, and the presumptions we might have that they are ethically decent, makes these revelations particularly awkward.
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