Dershowitz generally employs one or two full-time researchers, three or four part-timers, and a handful of students who do occasional work—all paid at $11.50 per hour. (Since Dershowitz doesn’t get enough in the $7,500/year research budget the law school accords him, he often has to pay that hourly rate out of his own pocket.) Several students who have worked with him describe his hiring practices as almost arbitrary—barely looking at résumés, hiring anyone who asks him for a job, sometimes having his wife interview applicants, and often forgetting those who’ve worked with him in the past. One long-serving researcher was a local high-school student.

Several of his researchers say that Dershowitz doesn’t subscribe to the scholarly convention of researching first, then drawing conclusions. Instead, as a lawyer might, he writes his conclusions, leaving spaces where he’d like sources or case law to back up a thesis. On several occasions where the research has suggested opposite conclusions, his students say, he has asked them to go back and look for other cases, or simply to omit the discrepant information. “That’s the way it’s done; a piecemeal, ass-backwards way,” says one student who has firsthand experience with the writing habits of Dershowitz and other tenured colleagues. “They write first, make assertions, and farm out [the work] to research assistants to vet it. They do very little of the research themselves.”

When one student couldn’t find a desired source for an HLS professor’s project, a Harvard research librarian commented, “Isn’t that the opposite of how you’re supposed to do it?” Other students point out that Dershowitz has been at the law school for four decades, and thus even his most apparently off-the-cuff suppositions are based on a long career of reading and practicing law. And Dershowitz does acknowledge researchers in his books.

The “atelier” is no longer the privilege of the long-tenured professor, though. One of academia’s up-and-coming darlings is Roland Fryer, an assistant professor in the economics department who began teaching at Harvard just last year. Fryer is a media star: He has appeared on CNN and been written about in the New York Times, Esquire, and this issue of 02138 (see page 34). Fryer’s group, the American Inequality Lab, works on a half-dozen or more major research areas at a time. To do so, Fryer now employs seven full-time “project managers,” mostly recent college alums, and works with dozens of others. The students, generally recent college graduates like David Toniatti, each manage a research project, from designing the methodology to collecting the data and running the numbers. Fryer writes the final papers, for which he is accorded primary authorship. “It’s him casting a vision, us working through the details, and him correcting it,” Toniatti says. “Everyone can run the regression; it’s really the idea that counts.”

Different fields have different customs; what wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the economics department might raise havoc in English. But across the academic board, the celebrity culture poses a dilemma for young scholars: Should they simply churn out the one or two serious books necessary to get tenure, and then ignore the writing of such books to focus on opportunities that bring more exposure and money? After all, writing scholarly tomes is probably the least glamorous and least lucrative of the many opportunities open to a Harvard professor, and thus one of the easiest to either outsource or abandon.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the natural case study for this question. Gates does hugely significant work at Harvard, running the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, fundraising, and helping to build the department of African and African-American Studies. But he may be even busier on non-university business, whether it’s producing documentaries for PBS, writing for the New Yorker and the New York Times op-ed page, serving as a judge for the Pulitzer Prizes, chairing a foundation, traveling and lecturing around the world, serving on the boards of nine museums and cultural institutions, even helping the United States Postal Service pick its stamps.

As a young academic, Gates wrote two books, Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey, revered among literary scholars for their theoretical insights on how to study and analyze African-American literature. Those may well be the last important scholarly books Gates will ever write. His literary work now tends to be more cursory—introductions, overseeing the production of an encyclopedia backed by Microsoft, publishing his PBS work. No one seems to care: In October 2006, Gates was named the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor—a university professorship being the highest honor Harvard awards its scholars. The endower of Gates’ chair, Alphonse Fletcher Jr., is also the endower of the foundation that Gates chairs, the Fletcher Foundation.

For better or worse, Gates’ career, and the huge rewards that he has reaped from it, send the message to young scholars that scholarship is not an end in itself but a means to an end—to easier work, better-paying gigs, greater mainstream acclaim. At which point, the tough grind of academic writing can be farmed out to other, more-junior scholars—and possibly lesser minds—pulling their way up the academic ladder.

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