All British scholarship traced to one 1961 bus queue abstract
A sector-wide review has concluded that every paper published since the Kennedy administration is a paraphrase of four pages on queueing at bus stops, and vice-chancellors have decided the simplest remedy is to stop pretending otherwise.
Britain's universities have formally retired the concept of academic originality after integrity software concluded that every paper published since 1961 is a paraphrase of one conference abstract on queueing at bus stops. Vice-chancellors have opted to issue laminated certificates rather than investigate four million academics. Nobody involved has read the abstract.
The higher education sector has arrived, at last, at the only conclusion its own machinery permitted. After eighteen months of automated cross-checking, the newly assembled Standing Committee on Prior Art announced on Thursday that the concept of academic originality has been decommissioned across all British universities, effective at the start of the next teaching term, on the grounds that it no longer describes anything that exists.
The finding, contained in a 340-page document that the committee cheerfully concedes is itself derivative, is that every peer-reviewed paper published in any discipline since 1961 can be traced through an unbroken chain of paraphrase to a four-page conference abstract on the mathematics of queueing at bus stops. The abstract was delivered in a draughty hall in the Midlands to an audience of eleven, nine of whom left early.
"We ran the corpus," said Professor Marcus Halliwell-Prynne, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Integrity Assurance at the University of North Wessex, addressing reporters in a wood-panelled room built by people who believed knowledge accumulated. "Every paper. Physics, literature, oncology, the entire discipline of business studies. The software reported a match. Not a partial match. A match."
Asked whether the software might be wrong, Professor Halliwell-Prynne said the software had been procured at considerable expense and was therefore, by the standard logic of institutional purchasing, correct.
The franchise in decline
Those of us who have covered the integrity beat since the days when a scandal required a photocopier and a guilty conscience will recognise the shape of this immediately. Originality was always a sequel. The first instalment was the printing press, which was genuinely startling. Everything after that has been a reboot with a larger budget, weaker dialogue and a distressing reliance on the previous film's cast.
What we are watching now is the fourth act of a franchise that ran out of ideas somewhere around the invention of the footnote, and has spent the intervening centuries selling the same plot to a new generation of eighteen-year-olds at rising prices. One is reminded, inevitably, of every empire that decided the honest solution to an unwinnable audit was to abolish the audit.
The committee's chair, Dr Priya Vellacott, was admirably unsentimental about the implications.
"We had two options. We could investigate four million academics simultaneously, which would take approximately nine hundred years and require every remaining member of staff to investigate themselves. Or we could accept that human thought is a very long game of telephone and issue everybody with a certificate. We chose the certificate. The certificates are laminated."
Under the new arrangements, all published research will carry a standard acknowledgement noting that the work descends from the 1961 abstract, in the same way that all bread descends from a field. Universities will retain their citation systems for what Dr Vellacott described as "morale purposes". Doctoral candidates will still be examined, but the requirement to make an original contribution to knowledge has been replaced with a requirement to make a contribution of a broadly reasonable size.
Reaction, such as it is
The response from the sector has been the response of a body that has already survived three restructurings and does not intend to be moved.
Gareth Molloy, commercial director of the text-matching firm Verifidex, welcomed the decision and confirmed that his company would be launching a new product suite in the autumn. "Detection is a mature market," he said. "The growth area is absolution. We are moving from telling institutions what went wrong to telling institutions that nothing can go wrong, which customers find considerably more restful and are willing to pay a premium for."
Librarians, who have known this for decades and were never asked, declined to comment beyond a brief statement from the Association of Research Librarians noting that the 1961 abstract had been requested from the stacks twice in sixty-five years and returned late on both occasions.
Not everyone is content. The Society for the Preservation of the Novel Thought, a body of forty-two members founded in Harrogate in 1987, has lodged a formal objection arguing that at least three ideas since 1961 have been genuinely new. Pressed to name them, the society's secretary said the list was being prepared and would be circulated once it had been checked against the software.
Where this leaves us
The practical consequence is a great deal less than the announcement suggests, which is the reliable consequence of all such announcements. Papers will continue to be written. Committees will continue to meet, and will continue to produce documents describing the work of other committees. Somewhere in the Midlands, in a box, sit four pages about bus stops that now underwrite the entire intellectual output of a nation, and which nobody involved in Thursday's press conference had actually read.
Professor Halliwell-Prynne was asked, finally, whether the sector had considered the possibility that the 1961 abstract might itself be derivative of something earlier. He paused for a long moment, looked at the panelling, and said the committee had decided not to run that query.
