The Corruption of Awards
The Antoinette Perry Award
Dunkirk NY – The Tony Awards will soon be given out. It’s the cap of the awards season that starts at the beginning of the year and goes through a succession of the arts: movies, music, and now theatre. I thoroughly dislike awards in the arts. They glorify one of the things I think has caused the theatre to become disconnected with people – the desire for recognition and fame. They also promote a certain amount of corruption. The objective of some productions is clearly to win some sort of award so as to have it make more money. I think Christopher Guest caught this aspect of human behavior most perceptively in his movie For Your Consideration.
But I shouldn’t pick on the arts alone. I live in two worlds, and I see the same thing in both. Academia is not immune from this process. While there are many academics worthy of recognition for their work, there are also many more academics who like to collect awards as résumé builders and ego builders.
Just this past week I discovered a situation on my campus which defies belief. On my campus we have several types of awards, ranging from local campus awards to awards given by the Chancellor at the statewide level. Some award-winners have been worthy, others questionable. Some probably got their awards deservedly, and some probably because they had the right connections and influenced the right people. In academia, of course, everyone will deny any hint of corruption or influence-peddling (or they will talk about in the hallways), because academia must always defend the perception that it is above the machinations of the outside world, even when such types of influence-peddling reach this level.
We will be awarding the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and Creativity to a professor on our campus who, during the nominating process, has been “investigated” on a charge of plagiarism. The “inquiry” determined that it had all been just an “honest mistake” on the part of this professor, and determined that while a certain “similarity” may have existed between the professor’s work and that of someone else in the field, the similarity was “unintentional” and can therefore be safely disregarded. Continue Reading »
