A Bad Month For Academia: Cheaters and Hangings
Sometime in the 2000s, when I was a post doc at the lovely Salk Institute in Sandy Ego, California, US, I crossed the road to reach the UC San Diego Campus, and spent an hour at the UCSD bookstore. I found two books which I decided to buy: Their Morals and Ours, by Trotsky (conclusion: Trotsky was an idiot), and a volume about theoretical computer science (conclusion: a hard field).
When I went to the check out with these two books, Trotsky’s book cost 2.99$, while the hard-cover computer science volume cost something like 90$. “Morals are cheap! Haha.” joked the dude with the big beard at the checkout counter when he saw how much the book on morals only cost.
Morals are Cheap should be the motto for a lot of major academic institutions all over the world. The last month showed that rather clearly.
Mark Fraudster-Lavigne (or something like that), the president of the famous Stanford University, stepped down recently in response to heavy data fraud in several of his publications. Some commission at Stanford concluded that it wasn’t really his fault, kind of, despite the publications with the bad data contributing to his standing, with him as the senior author in many of them. He got all the glory, but he didn’t really know what was going on in his labs (poor guy), so he’s not to blame. Doesn’t that mean that he wasn’t supposed to be an author on these papers then? This is either a case of crass cheating, or of crass negligence in being non-involved in the research which ended up in publications with his name on. And, yes, of course he got to keep his well-paid Stanford faculty job. There can be misconduct, by the occasional bad actor. How it’s handled indicates if there is a cultural problem in academia.
HCC
On the other coast of the US, a woman whose name I can’t remember and whom I’ll refer to as Harvard Cheater Chick (HCC) pulled off a particularly bizarre stunt: As a researcher in dishonesty (a social psychologist) she was dishonest with her own data. This is the kind of story which, if you wrote it in a novel about the workings of academia (kind of a drab genre anyway) the first set of readers – your friends, not some literary agent yet – would tell you get outa here this is stupid. Also, HCC supposedly made a million US$ last year from her uni salaries and from peddling her pseudoscience to the gullible media and to business folks looking for guidance. Academic cheating doesn’t just aim for petty prestige in the ivory tower.
Yes, I personally think that vaccines are effective ect ect, but can you really blame the general public for its shrinking trust in academic science?
Bangladesh: They are Serious People
Interesting news about academic misconduct also reach us from Bangladesh. There, an academic cheater was about to be unmasked by his colleague; the cheater had some political connections, and it seems he hence deemed that he could get away with murder. So he and some henchmen killed the other professor. They were caught quickly, and two of them were hanged in July. Not the type of slap-on-the-wrist legal system like in Euroland. Serious people.
I understand of course that the dude was hanged for murder, not for the academic misconduct which then made him commit a murder, but this might be the first time that an academic cheater got executed? A more consequential system than the one they have at Stanford.