The Gripes of Academe

Journalist Gail Sheehy, 39, a splashy writer for New York magazine on such eye-catching subjects as hookers and Black Panthers, attended a New York lecture in 1973 that changed her life. Deep in personal crisis at the time and armed with a foundation grant to study genetic engineering, Sheehy heard Yale Psychologist Daniel Levinson outline his theory of adult life stages (TIME, April 28, 1975): that grownups go through life cycles and crises just as predictable as the adolescent stages outlined by Erik Erikson and the childhood stages (terrible twos, noisy nines) charted by Spock, Piaget and others.

It was--and is--a very tentative field for anything like precise study. Such theories, in fact, have been greeted with skepticism by orthodox psychologists, but Sheehy was enthusiastic. She switched her focus from genetics to adult development, talked to Levinson and two other researchers with strikingly similar findings, U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist Roger Gould and Harvard Psychiatrist George Vaillant, and plunged into her own life-cycle interviewing. The results: one of the most successful series of articles in New York magazine's history, and a $37,500 advance for a book (Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, due this month from E.P. Dutton).

The book ranges from the typical patterns of the 20s (establishing oneself and cutting links to parents) up to the mellow 50s when the "midlife crisis" of fading purpose and strength presumably has been faced. Though the book seems a bit like a sprawling rewrite of the four New York pieces, Dutton feels it has a bestseller on its hands. Sheehy believes she has "made a bridge between journalistic and academic methods." As the author tells it, she learned her anthropological methods from Anthropologist Margaret Mead in a post graduate year of study at Columbia. Sheehy contends that Passages could easily have been published as a doctoral dissertation to establish her credentials in psychology.

Several academic researchers are less kind, dismissing Sheehy's work as garbled Pop psychology. Worse yet are charges that the lady has unfairly ripped off her professorial mentors. Says Levinson: "She is incomplete, to put it mildly, in acknowledging her use of my published and unpublished material." Many of Sheehy's findings were indeed reported earlier by academics; where she does cite experts they tend to be introduced as mere spear carriers in her own pageant. Levinson, for example, outlined the "mentor phenomenon"--that in middle age a man feels the need to promote the fortunes of a younger worker. In 1970 Margaret Hennig, co-director of Simmons College's graduate program in management, reported on the importance of mentors to women in corporate life. Gould wrote about the marital disharmony that comes from projecting conflicts with parents onto the spouse. Yet Sheehy insists that most of the book is original, including her portraits of "the piggyback principle" (wife living her life's dreams vicariously through her husband's career), "the sexual diamond" (men and women are most alike before age 18 and after age 60 but dangerously different in the middle years), and "Switch-40s" (men acquire feminine characteristics, and women adopt masculine ones in mid-life).

Fiscal Balm. Hennig, at least, has no gripe. "She used my stuff, but this is real life and I'm not upset about it. She gave me credit." Gould, however, was furious, and filed a plagiarism suit against Sheehy and Button. The case was settled out of court: Gould received $10,000 and 10% of the book's royalties. Gould says he fed Sheehy material for four months while her agent and his lawyer haggled over financial terms for doing the book together. He charges that Sheehy's second New York magazine article--"Why Mid-Life Is Crisis Time for Couples"--was "lifted whole from an unpublished lecture of mine, with only a few minor changes," and that 57 passages from Passages were taken directly from his work. Sheehy says she made clear at the start that Gould was to be a paid consultant on her book, not a collaborator, and insists that the psychiatrist's mid-life lecture was "in the public domain and properly credited." Clearly she thinks she ought to be taken seriously as an independent researcher, but the ruffled professors think otherwise. For Gould, at least, there is some fiscal balm in the situation. With his cut of the $250,000 paperback sale, he has already made $35,000 on Passages before a copy has been sold.

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