John decided to draw our attention at this morning’s meeting to his Jan. 10th Opinion Journal piece on Armstrong Williams and his paid endorsement of No Child Left Behind. He raised the sticky question of what is and what is not ethical in the word of opinion, editorial, endorsement and ghost-writing. And, of course, John gave us his opinion.

If I paraphrase correctly, John reported that his youthful, hard-line stance was that ghost writing was unethical because it didn’t identify the true author; the named author therefore got undeserved credit (or blame).
The more mature John Hood’s practical stance, as I understand it, is that ghost writing and editing is not unethical if it represents the true beliefs, opinions, etc. of the named author. This is done all the time in political speechwriting, for example and deemed perfectly OK.

Despite my inclination to be dogmatically hard-nosed, I agree with John’s take, so far as it goes. If I approve a message that I didn’t write, or that was written by me but edited substantially?even to the point that it contains little of my original material?it still may be ethical for me to claim it as my own. However, and John should know this, that doesn’t cover all of the bases, ethically speaking.

Suppose I am a physicist, and my original work contains errors in physics, ones that I myself am not competent to recognize or to correct. If a ghost writer or ghost editor/physicist comes along and corrects those errors, and I allow the the result to be published under my name, I am a fraud. I have proclaimed myself to be an expert, and claimed credentials, in an area in which I am not truthfully competent.

Were I the errant physicist, I would certainly have approved the corrections, and endorsed the end product to avoid professional embarassment. Is this ethical? It meets John’s stated “ethics test” for ghost authorship?the author approves the message. I maintain that it is nevertheless both unethical and fraudulent.

It doesn’t matter whether the ghost writer/editor in this case is content to be an unrecognized hired gun.There is a big ethical difference between faking the substantive skills you claim to have, and simply asking someone to fine tune your prose/presentation. I argue that this difference is as relevant in K-12 education (the subject area of the Williams Opinion Journal piece), higher ed, economics, statistics, pop singing, or literature, as it is in science.

However blurred at times, there is a line between fraud and editorial support, and I feel most uncomfortable dismissing it with an “author approval” standard.