New post: Limit Case
I argued back in Planned Obsolescence that the limit case of scholars' belief in collaboration was the co-authored dissertation; if we could not imagine such a thing -- how it would work, how it would be assessed, how it would be valued and rewarded -- we would at least unconsciously maintain the pre-eminence of the individualistic single-author/Great Man mode of production within the academy.
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https://kfitz.info/limit-case/
@kfitz
I see your great man and raise you "one on one teaching" as the motivating principle: typically graduate study represents the most intimate teaching experience a student can get, with ready access to hands on personalised supervision.
But even so, already one of the greatest difficulties a graduate student faces is lack of supervision, and introducing means allowing the supervisor to dodge this duty to their students by having them formally take over co-authorship doesn't seem very beneficial for the students.
Just in general, how does having a co-author help the student? Have to say "no, I didn't write all of that" doesn't seem like it will help a non-academic career, except if co-authorship was the only thing that allowed completion at all.
Maybe it can be beneficial in some specific circumstances, but it seems too open to abuse by faculty looking to escape responsibility for it to be a general feature.
