Being the hardened cynic that I am, I immediately turned to snopes for a thorough disbunking of the story. Unfortunately it looks like it's a new one and there's no answer as yet.
I think you misunderstand the point. She said she doesn't know if the story is true. And it doesn't matter.
It's a thought experiment.
I doubt a professor in our time would actually do it for real. I am convinced the outcome would be pretty much as described in the story, if it was tried in real life.
Odd, really, that cooperation seems to be an outcome rather than competition and sluggishness, but I guess we all tend to forget that there's an actual goal for university work.
Socialism in politics is not about cooperation being the outcome, it is about cooperation being the beginning.
I am sure that cooperation will likely be the outcome if the group is left to its own devices. But I am equally convinced that laziness will be the outcome of the group is started on the premise of cooperation no matter what.
I run into this very issue at home. My flat mate and I play StarCraft a lot. We play against the computer and we cooperate. Part of the game is the acquisition of colonies as early as possible and we have experimented with two methods of getting those colonies:
1. We say in advance who gets which colony.
2. We both try to catch as many colonies as we each can without regard to whether the other also has enough.
The first is clearly cooperation and socialism, the second is competition and capitalism.
And our results were consistently that if we use method 1, we invest very little energy in getting those colonies quickly (because there is no pressure from the partner) and then find that some of the colonies we wanted and assigned to each other were taken by the (computer) enemy already when we finally arrive. But when we use method 2, we try to outrun each other and finally take all the colonies before the (slower) computer does.
Now we always use method 2.
Socialism does work. I have seen it work. It works for families (a typical family is a socialist economy). It works for kibbutzim in Israel (kibbutzim are communal farms, my father once worked on one). But I have never seen it work outside those examples.
