<p>If you right click on the document and then click on Document Properties, you see that the listed author is not Helen Dragas but John Ullyot, a senior vice president at Hill & Knowlton. It had been reported in various outlets that the BoV had hired Hill & Knowlton to help with PR, so it is not a surprise that H&K would be involved. But it is major gaffe to leave fingerprints on the pages.</p>
<p>do you think that he wrote it, or that he reviewed and approved it, maybe made some edits to it and was the final person to save the document? </p>
<p>I am not the most versed in how/who’s name is saved in the properties section of the document, so my question may show my ignorance. If so, sorry!</p>
<p>@vlines: It is certainly possible, for example, that Dragas wrote a draft in an e-mail and then Ullyot copied the e-mail text into a Word document and edited it. When he saved the Word document, his name would have shown up as author. I cannot imagine that she sent him a Word document and then he changed the listed author manually.</p>
<p>Based on my experience, I’d estimate that 90% of the documents issued by high-level university administrators have in fact been written by someone else, whose name does not appear on the document. The high-level administrator might have changed a word choice or two, and possibly eliminated a semi-colon. Usually, though, the author is intra-university, rather than outside.</p>
<p>On a related point, I heard someone discussing state school finances on the radio yesterday, and they were saying that the state of VA provides only 6% of U VA’s budget, yet they get to appoint the board of visitors, or whatever they are called, and exert significant control over the institution.</p>
<p>Just to add: I am not condoning the practice. It’s a bit weird in a university where the same action in a course would get a student expelled.</p>
<p>It is possible that there’s some “work-made-for-hire” issue with the university ghost-writers, where the true author de facto surrenders the copyright. Anyone know?</p>
<p>90% of the documents issued by high-level officials of anything have in fact been written by someone else. It’s not an honor-code violation because when someone is issuing a statement in his or her official capacity, what’s important is not so much who decided where the paragraph breaks and commas go as whose ideas are represented and whose endorsement the document has.</p>
<p>I would bet anything that, whether or not Helen Dragas changed so much as a word of this statement, it represents her views (or the views she would like to express, not the blind rage she must be feeling all the time these days) much better than it represents the views of John Ullyot, whoever he is. (He went to Harvard, so he is unlikely to be as misty-eyed about Virginia and T. Jefferson as she and her statement are.) It was written for her, to be her statement, and she endorsed it, so it’s hers.</p>
<p>This isn’t limited to officialdom, either. It’s not much of a secret that Jay Leno and David Letterman don’t come up with all the jokes in their nightly monologues themselves. Or that the entourage of every successful rapper contains a couple of guys (and sometimes women) who are very helpful in coming up with new rhymes.</p>
<p>As a technical matter, yes, it’s a work for hire, just like most ghostwritten works.</p>
<p>JHS: I am concurring in part and dissenting in part. The instances I have seen first-hand involve high-level official saying, “Let’s do something with X Corporation,” or “Let’s establish Y Institute.” The rest of the thinking is done by the writer, including the transformation of the “something” which was unspecified into some actual thing, as well as all of the detailed plans. The written document does get the endorsement of the high-level administrator. I still don’t like it after seeing it all of these years.</p>
<p>Quant (and vlines) – What do you think about Presidential speeches? Should George Bush have stopped in the middle of his inaugural address and said, “'Thousand points of light! Isn’t that great? Let’s all give a hand to the young woman who wrote that for me, and most of the rest of this speech, too!”</p>
<p>I think a lot depends on shared understanding of the conventions. It’s not uncommon to hear of a Presidential speech writer. I think that people in general understand that the President does not actually write the speeches. However, I believe that the President usually makes a substantial contribution to their content (unlike some of the university administrators, at least locally). This is aside from particular turns of phrase, of course.</p>
<p>On campus, one doesn’t tend to hear about the people who proposed the ideas, developed the plans, and wrote the documents for the administrators. I would guess that many faculty think that the documents are developed and written by the administrators themselves. If the people who did the work were openly acknowledged, I think the situation would be different.</p>
<p>There was a situation recently at my university where negotiations between department X and department Y over terms of a supposedly money saving merger were going on. The dean preempted negotiations and released a MOU very advantageous to dept X. When the metadata revealed that the chair of department X had actually written the MOU, uproar ensued and the provost overruled the dean and cancelled the merger.</p>
<p>Moral of the story–be aware of your metadata.</p>
<p>It was meant to be gently sarcastic–I don’t think most faculty would be surprised to learn that administrators farmed out the writing of plans, or any other kinds of documents.</p>