My personal nerdosphere of interest (that’s the Berkman Center/Harvard Law School quadrant of the cyberlaw sector of the whole sort of general technology mish-mash) has been lit up the last few days, following the Daily Beast’s publication of an essay on Harvard’s Berkman Center and Prof. Jonathan Zittrain. A lot of the commentary, from people I know and people I don’t, has condemn the article and its author, one Emily Brill. The article relates to conflicts of interest, so I should admit mine up front: I just graduated from HLS, made a lot of connections with the Berkman Center, and (although we’re not close) did enough work with JZ to regard him as a brilliant professor and a great human being. In spite of all this, I thought there were enough potentially valid points in the essay to warrant mention, and I thought I’d take a minute away from bar review to do so here.

Don’t get me wrong: surrounding the good stuff is a morass of points that are petty, dumb, or wrong. I have no reason to agree with Brill’s innuendo that Prof. Zittrain or anyone else at the Berkman Center is in any way corrupt — far from it. And, well, when you’re writing an article that’s going to upset a small but tightly knit community, you owe it to your own reputation to avoid all the common mistakes that are going to make that community use the phrase “hack job.” Let’s start with the silly stuff: even a little bit of searching would reveal plenty of online record of Zittrain’s sudden, severe illness earlier this year. (I’d link it here, had he not publicly asked for a little privacy after news of his illness hit the web and offers of help poured in). So yes, his excuse for not returning Brill’s emails was a real one.

Looking at the bigger picture, Brill frames her story around a seminar offered by HLS in Palo Alto over this most recent winter term, which Zittrain led and she attended. Now, I’m only capable of an ethical appeal, but look: I don’t know how you spend three weeks in a class led by Zittrain without coming away thinking, at a minimum, that he believes in what he’s saying. If nothing else, I don’t know how you spend three weeks in class with JZ, see the man’s relationship with his iPhone, and come away thinking that he was a single-minded opponent of Steve Jobs… Just so we’re clear: I hold the people I’ve met at the Berkman Center in the highest regard, and I can’t honestly believe anyone involved with it is ready to auction his or her research conclusions to the highest bidder.

But apart from the salacious accusations, I was struck by one thing in the article.

No one has alleged that anyone at Harvard Law School has formulated opinions because he or she was paid to. But Berkman and Zittrain, due in no small part to the force of Harvard’s branding, have become increasingly important players in Internet policy and media circles. The appearance of conflicts matter; even if such conflicts are not the stuff of life and death, as they might be in medical research, they do impact legislation, stock prices, and consumer choices.

The Fortune article I linked above may have been right to classify this paragraph as an editorially mandated walk-back. But it makes a real point: the appearance of conflicts does matter. When I say “blah blah only capable of an ethical appeal,” you’re right to dismiss it as bullshit, because who the hell am I? But when the Berkman Center speaks, well, it’s somebody. To be sure, one of the things that makes Berkman projects so cool is that they don’t simply ask you to take their word that the Internet is like this or like that, they actually go out and show you. But as our society is learning, not all research is created equal. All the talent, methodology, and press releases in the world won’t save research that doesn’t look credible. Prof. Larry Lessig, another HLS affiliate quoted in the article, reminded us of money’s effect on trust in institutions only last fall.^[1]

Brill cites the Center’s “relaxed approach” to ethical guidelines. Though I was never in a position to discover it, I wouldn’t be surprised if that charge were accurate — the Berkman Center has a relaxed approach toward a lot of things, and that’s part of what makes it such a great organization. But as articles like this get written and questions like Brill’s get asked, that approach might inhibit some of the Center’s work, and actually work a net loss on its institutional capital. I hope it doesn’t, and I don’t think it should, but I think it’s a useful prospect to consider more directly.

Actually, that’s another thing that bothered me about the article’s reception. To pick on that Fortune article again, its author introduces Brill herself into the debate in his third paragraph, and uses her identity — well-connected socialite, recently passed over for a Berkman job herself — as a frame for his response. Now, I’m happy to admit that “reporting on reporters” is part of the blogger’s stock in trade. But another part of it is surely collecting the facts, right? And no matter who collects them, they’re worth considering, right?

I didn’t take last winter’s Difficult Problems in Cyberspace course with JZ, but I took a version of it earlier in 2009. Had I taken the second version in sunny California, I would have been very interested to learn that the funding came from Microsoft, but I didn’t learn that until reading Brill’s piece. It sounds like the students in the class didn’t, either. That’s investigative journalism. That’s the kind of fact-finding that, if my Difficult Problems class is to believed, is dying out and ought to be encouraged — even if the facts it turns up are a little uncomfortable.

Update: I just received an email from Larry Kramer, dean of Stanford Law School and the person responsible for organizing and funding the Difficult Problems class. He disputes Ms. Brill’s characterization of the Microsoft money, and I agreed to post his comment to the article:

To say that Professor Zittrain’s class at Stanford was funded by a “special grant” from Microsoft is highly misleading. The class was an experimental and unusual arrangement that involved bringing Harvard students to Stanford for a special three-week joint class. It was arranged long before the grant from Microsoft was even in the works. The grant, in turn, was secured with room for discretionary uses and with no mention of the Zittrain class. We subsequently decided that we could use some of these resources to fund Zittrain’s class, which was within its general terms. But while we did, as a courtesy, let Microsoft know later that we had used a portion of their grant for this purpose, we did not seek their permission. Nor did we inform either Professor Zittrain or the class of the source of funding, as it was irrelevant under the circumstances. Dinners for the three weeks were catered because to fit the course into this short time frame required meeting for many hours each evening, including through the dinner hours.

To my mind, Dean Kramer’s explanation is perfectly credible, and sounds a lot more like how I would imagine a one-off law school class would be funded. It may well be that the central “revelation” in the Daily Beast story is bunk, and there’s no story here at all. So, let me temper my already limited defense of Brill’s reporting — it’s hardly investigative journalism to just make stuff up. Still, maybe it’s an opportunity to remember how the appearance of bias problem works. Even when such an appearance is unfounded, it can interfere with an organization’s capacity to operate in the real world.

If I were a cynical man, I’d say this is less the latest in a consistent First Amendment jurisprudence or a courageous defense of animal rights, and more a custom-ordered talking point for the Sunday morning talking heads. “What do you mean Obama is entitled to pick a justice as liberal as Bush’s justices were conservative? Look at Alito just this week!”

Several days later Murray asked me about a story known as the most read passage in White Noise. We turned 12 pages into the book, around where Delillo’s developing Murray’s character. There were cereal boxes and corduroy.  Something had happened with a woman in Detroit. Soon the allusions started coming to mind. THE MOST READ PASSAGE IN WHITE NOISE. I remembered having read five separate analyses of this passage before we reached the passage. Even then, there were 40 grad students and a full professor of English peering over our shoulders. We shrugged and went along. All the people had hornrims; some had lattes, multicolor highlighters, and an air of smug hyperliteracy. A man near the front murmured symbols and referents — impressions of the passage taken from his elevated spot. We turned around and watched the readers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in the little book.

“No one reads the passage,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve read all the interpretations of the passage, it becomes impossible to read the passage.”

He fell silent once more. People with literature degrees left the elevated site, replaced by others.

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every reading reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man near the front murmured symbols and referents.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We read only what the others read. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all great books.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are reading about reading,” he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

“What was the passage like before it was analyzed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other passages, how was it similar to other passages?”

I thought of the idea for this blog post a few summers ago, when I had graduated college and finally got around to reading White Noise. I’d heard a lot of praise for the book, so I picked it up from my school’s library while I still had borrowing privileges. As soon as I got to the break on the twelfth page, though, I got a sense of déjà vu — wheels might have turned subconsciously  when I’d been introduced to Jack and Murray in the opening pages of the book, but as soon as I read about their trip into the country, I knew I had read it before. Ah, yes, “the most photographed barn in America!” I had indeed already read this excerpt (from, I think, the same webpage I just linked), because after encountering several number of references to it in other contexts, I had had to see what all the fuss was about. Various invocations of The Barn Scene haunted my undergraduate career, and I don’t think I ever even took a proper English or Lit class. It’s a terrific scene in a book I enjoyed a lot; it’s just a little bit overanalyzed, you know?

I was reminded of this scene last night on my flight home for the holidays, as I read David Foster Wallace’s essay on television and irony, which quotes the passage at some length. I would have to excuse Wallace’s reference passage even if he had treated it superficially (you can be sure he didn’t!), since “E Unibus Pluram” itself was published only a few years after White Noise. Anyway, both the book and the essay are great reads, and for today’s reader they might elicit a feeling of intellectual and pop culture nostalgia. Which, I’m sure an abler critic than I could argue, is the idea.

¹ I thought including a footnote to illustrate DFW’s writing style would cross the border into parody, but I couldn’t help it when I discovered, upon checking to make sure “idiolect” really meant what I thought it did, that one of Wordnik’s usage examples is a reference to DFW’s own.