27 more academic scandals
This is the eighth installment in what has become a regular series:
These articles always seem to perform well, probably because my audience is heavily academic, as per the poll I ran showing that 31% of my subscribers have a PhD and 25% work in academia.
According to the US Census Bureau, only 1.2% of the US population has a PhD.
I have nearly 10,000 subscribers in 111 countries, but the bulk are American… I don’t need to run a poll to find this out:
Note: there are hundreds of ‘academic scandals’ that have happened recently involving Israel/Palestine — endless boycotts on campus, hunger strikes, protests, fights, etc. I chose not to include any of these because I have a policy against blogging about the Middle East.
#1 - Florida fires all DEI staff
This story goes first because it is the biggest news of the month — on March 1st, the University of Florida fired all DEI staff (13 full-time positions + 15 administrative DEI roles) and will redirect the $5 million in savings towards recruiting new faculty.
University of Florida Eliminates All D.E.I.-Related Positions (New York Times)
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion employees will no longer have a job at UF (Gainesville Sun)
University of Florida fires all DEI employees in compliance with state law (Fox News)
University of Florida terminates all DEI positions to comply with new law (The Hill)
University of Florida Guts DEI Offices and Fires All Staff Over New Statute (Daily Beast)
University of Florida Closes Diversity Department, Fires All DEI Staff (National Review)
Bureaucrats are already attempting to skirt the new law by rebranding DEI.
At UFlorida’s College of Pharmacy, for example, DEI has been rebranded into “Accessibility, Belonging, and Community” (ABC), while UFlorida’s Law School rebranded the ‘‘Dean for Inclusion’’ to the ‘‘Dean for Experiential Learning and Engagement.’’
The person who deserves the most credit for this development, aside from DeSantis, is
, who has been at the forefront of the fight against DEI in Florida for years. He wrote this article over a year ago, calling his shot, and now succeeded.
#2 - Alabama bans DEI funding at universities
Three weeks later, Alabama copied Florida in banning DEI:
Alabama governor Kay Ivey signed a bill into law on Wednesday effectively banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public schools and universities.
The legislation, known as S.B. 129, prohibits local boards of education, public institutions of higher education, and state agencies from maintaining or funding DEI programs that promote “divisive concepts” such as guilting someone over their race or sex. Additionally, all public schools, universities, and agencies in Alabama have the authority to “discipline or terminate the employment of any employee or contractor who knowingly violates this act,” the legislation reads.
…
The signing of the anti-DEI bill comes after Florida’s numerous steps to ban DEI. In January, the board of governors of the State University System of Florida officially banned its public universities from using state and federal funds for DEI programs. The University of Florida eliminated all DEI-related positions on its campus earlier this month.
#3 - Texas bans DEI funding at universities
Just yesterday, Texas followed!
The University of Texas has announced that, following the mandate of the state legislature, it will unwind its DEI bureaucracy. Specifically, administrators will close down its DEI division, require some DEI deans to return to teaching, and eliminate other DEI positions altogether.
This is the culmination of a year-long campaign to abolish DEI and restore the principle of colorblind equality.
Many states are following Alabama, Florida, and Texas… but it’s moving fast and hard to keep track… I probably need to do a deep dive to get a comprehensive picture of DEI at a state-by-state level, but it certainly seems to be a nationwide trend, in red states at least.
#4 - Another Harvard Plagiarism Scandal
Not to be a blatant Chris Rufo booster, but he is involved in many of the top scandals this month, so it makes sense to keep linking to him. Just like he called his DEI-in-Florida shot in advance, a couple of months ago, Rufo declared a ‘‘plagiarism war’’:
In March he delivered the most recent blow in that war, breaking a new plagiarism scandal at Harvard:
Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article titled “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”
Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.
According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”
Weirdly, the Harvard professor in question, Christina Cross, followed me on Twitter the day it broke, although I had nothing to do with this story.
After this scandal broke, a group of professors got together to write an open letter defending her:
Statement Regarding Alleged Plagiarism
March 21, 2024
We are deeply concerned about this false allegation of research misconduct. The purpose of these public data resources is to provide a shared platform for the conduct of innovative and rigorous research. They are a public good. In that context, we fully expect that researchers who use these data will accurately and consistently describe and represent these resources, exactly as in the manner reported by Dr. Cross. Part of the alleged misconduct was Dr. Cross’s accurate usage of a data resource’s proper name. We, of course, do not want researchers renaming public datasets, just as astronomers would not want researchers to rename the Hubble Telescope. In addition, basic descriptions of a dataset’s sample, measures, changes in sample size over time, and the study background need to be discussed and described consistently.
It’s not simply that Dr. Cross’s writings do not constitute plagiarism. Rather, her description of a large public dataset in this standardized way is simply good research practice - helping to ensure replicability and transparency. Indeed, this is a common practice among our user communities, and it should remain so to ensure high quality scientific research.
The Harvard Crimson covered it, as did most mainstream outlets:
The allegations against Cross mark the fourth in a rapid series of anonymous plagiarism complaints of varying severity lodged against Black women at Harvard amid a growing right-wing attack against diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education.
Cross follows former Harvard president Claudine Gay; Sherri A. Charleston, Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer; and Shirley R. Greene, a Title IX coordinator at the Harvard Extension School, who have all faced plagiarism allegations since December.
The Crimson says that: ‘‘the allegations against Cross are the weakest of the four,’’ and, although it’s still plagiarism, I tend to agree.
This is the main paragraph that Dr. Cross plagiarized, a bland description of data:
Sure, copy-pasting this data description technically violates Harvard’s policies, but I don’t think it’s the end of the world, she’s not stealing concepts. This is like getting caught driving 50 mph in a 40 mph zone.
Marginal Revolution wrote an article last week to that effect, saying isn’t a huge deal, In Defense of Plagiarism:
In short, the focus of any charge of plagiarism should not be on whether someone else’s words have been used. The use of other’s people’s words is a necessary condition for plagiarism but it’s not sufficient. The focus should be on whether readers have been harmed by a fraudulent use of other people’s ideas and words. Focusing on the latter will dispense with many charges of plagiarism.
It’s noteworthy that Marginal Revolution comments section strongly disagreed with the blog post.
The American Sociological Association then put out a statement defending her:
The consensus on EJMR is that both the defenses and attacks are way too partisan; the truth lies somewhere in between ‘‘she is an angel’’ and ‘‘she is a devil’’.
Finally, Christina Cross herself put out a statement:
The ending of this story is yet-to-be-determined… Harvard says they are looking into it, but I expect maybe a light slap on the wrist, probably not even that.
After this all went down, New York Times columnist Charles Blow referred to it as a ‘‘racial propaganda war’’:
At which point CR challenged him to a debate:
Blow did not respond to the offer to debate.
I don’t think so, at least.
#5 - Georgetown Professor Still Employed After Fraud
In February, Hindenburg Research, the most famous short-selling fund in the world, put out a research report titled: Renovaro BioSciences: A Worthless AI Shell Game With A Murderous Magician Past
Renovaro, previously known as Enochian BioSciences, is a biotech firm focusing on cancer and infectious diseases, recently merged with AI company GEDi Cube, valuing Renovaro at approximately $567 million.
The most scandalous thing here is that the co-founder of this biotech firm hired a hitman:
CEO Mark Dybul, who has worked with Anthony Fauci and held significant positions in global health, joined the company in 2017. The company's co-founder, Serhat Gumrukcu, was praised for his innovative work but was charged in 2022 for hiring a hitman in a scam-related murder.
But he also fabricated his academic history,
A week after the indictment, on June 1st, 2022, we released a report showing how “Doctor” Gumrukcu had faked his entire academic history, including forging his Russian medical degrees. In reality, Gumrukcu was a Turkish magician who had fled Turkish authorities after being charged over allegations that he faked being a doctor to steal money from a terminally ill cancer patient.
These fabricated credentials might be enough for an academic scandal in its own right, but that is not the focus of this scandal for our purposes.
I am including this story because a reader sent me a note saying:
‘‘I am bringing it to your attention because of their CEO, Mark Dybul. Given the history in the article, I am STUNNED to see that he is STILL a professor at Georgetown University’’
So I will oblige and highlight the professor in question:
https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/contact/00336000014RjeLAAS/mark-dybul-md
If you have any scandals you feel I should include in the next iteration, please email me:
chrisbrunet@protonmail.com
Since this is a scandal about Georgetown professor, I would be remiss if I did not plug my Georgetown investigation:
#6 - McKinsey DEI fraud
I was blown away when I tweeted this a few days ago….
…and it turned out to be one of my most popular tweets ever, with 2M impressions and 10.6k likes!
People really, really hate McKinsey and DEI.
Since there is so much proven demand for this topic, and this study debunking McKinsey’s DEI research is breaking news (it was published this week), I am going to write a long-form article about it next week. In the meantime, go read the underlying EconJournalWatch article directly:
I am told that I should also share David Barker's new EconJournalWatch article, which appears in the same journal issue as the McKinsey article, because it is ‘‘the fourth and greatest of his series laying the temperature~economic growth literature to waste.’’
This article seems to be a big deal. I am happy to share it, but I am hesitant to endorse anything about Climate Change… because I don’t know anything about Climate Change.
After publishing this peer-reviewed article, the author wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal to make it more digestible to a broad audience… reading that article is probably a better use of your time:
Indeed, his description makes it sound like a big deal:
I debunked research by the Federal Reserve and top academic economists on the economics of climate change. An author of a paper I debunked then said that three professors from Stanford and Berkeley had done a much better analysis of temperature and growth in an article they published in Nature. I took up the challenge and scrutinized their article. My critique appears in the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch.
The Nature article is in the top 0.1% of academic economics publications by citations, and it has received glowing press coverage. I downloaded their data and found that, as with the other articles I debunked, the results don’t hold up under scrutiny.
Lastly, the editor of EconJournalWatch, where all this research is published, Daniel Klein, published another op-ed in the WSJ two days ago:
# 7 - Centre for Heterodox Social Science
Eric Kaufmann is a great guy to follow on Twitter, and last month launched a Centre for Hereodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham:
He also started a substack.
It’s a must-subscribe if you are an ‘anti-woke’ academic.
It’s true scholarship:
#8 - Moretti (2021 AER) fails to replicate
Michael Wiebe is an economist who does amazing replications on his website, this latest one is a bombshell:
I will skip straight to the conclusion:
Coding errors that just happen to magically skew the results to turn them statistically significant.
Classic.
Enrico Moretti is an Italian economist and the Michael Peevey and Donald Vial Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Moretti (2021).
His paper that fails to replicate is published in the American Economic Review, the top economics journal in the world. The example I always use to describe AER scandals is: imagine a medicine paper in the New England Journal of Medicine was totally bogus. It should be a big deal!
This is not the first ‘‘coding error’’ to plague the AER. Last year, an AER paper was retracted after a Princeton professor fortuitously fudged his code:
The question now is how they will treat this coding error, will it be the same as the previous coding error, and retract it? Or will they sweep it under the rug?
I asked the AER editors, I am waiting to hear back:
The second half of this article is paywalled. Sorry. I almost never paywall articles, but I need to start providing bonus content to paying subscribers. I hope you understand.
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