35 More Academic Scandals
It’s been a few months since I published the 6th installment in this series:
A huge percentage of my readers are professors, so they appreciate having interesting/new scandals curated for them.
Or, at least, my audience *used* to be heavily professors, before I went mainstream.
Now, I am not so sure.
EDIT: sorry retired people. I can only list 5 options in a poll.
If you don’t care about academia, here is a reminder: Karlstack is split up into 5 sections: Economics, Academia, Politics, Crypto, and Personal. To opt out of “Academia” you can click the “Settings” button (at the top right corner of your screen) and then click “Manage Subscriptions.”
Some of these scandals are from a few months ago, some are from this week.
1: Northwestern Cancels Former Trustee
I am partial to boosting fellow Substack writers, so I am starting with this one about Northwestern... You should subscribe to
!2: Northwestern pimps out cheerleaders (allegedly)
I am putting this second because it is also about Northwestern, and I try to group similar scandals.
This Northwestern cheerleader filed the lawsuit back in 2021, alleging she ‘‘suffered sexual assaults and harassment at multiple events by fans, alumni and donors’.’
Sad.
The case has been working its way through the courts for the past couple of years, and the most recent update is that a judge just ruled it can proceed to trial (h/t to Scott Greenfield who runs the blog Simple Justice) :
3: Retraction at the Journal of Accounting and Economics
I am surprised that this retraction in a major journal has gotten zero coverage — not a single person has mentioned it, or seems to care. The author, Jody Grewal, obtained her PhD from the famously corrupt Harvard Business School in 2019 and is now an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Toronto.
She played this masterfully.
Initially, two years ago, she labeled the withdrawal of her paper (people say the data was fudged, but nobody seems to know what the smoking gun is) as a 'temporary' retraction…
… then deleted her Twitter account to avoid backlash, and waited for a full two years, until it was eventually permanently retracted sometime in late 2023.
This lengthy slowplay of a boring accounting paper ensured that nobody cared enough to cause a fuss over it, so she got away with it and will suffer no career repercussions.
I reached out to her for comment, no reply.
4: Job postings for academic economists down 14.7% in 2023
5: LSAC Will Eliminate Logic Games From LSAT In 2024
For the 2024-2025 testing cycle, the LSAT will undergo an update to its structure.
Starting with the August 2024 LSAT, the multiple choice portion of the test will consist of two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section, plus one unscored section of either Logical Reasoning or Reading Comprehension.
This change is the result of extensive research, and is designed to ensure that every test taker can demonstrate their logical reasoning skills to the best of their abilities.
The LSAT will continue to assess the reasoning, reading, and writing skills that are essential for success in law school and the practice of law.
6: Georgetown professor fired (resigned?) following Karlstack investigation
First I covered this story…
And then one of the professors was scrubbed from the faculty directory…
And then he was downgraded from associate professor to adjunct professor…
… now been removed from the finance faculty page entirely (https://msb.georgetown.edu/faculty-research/finance/ ) as well as the directory:
gg
7: 40 allegations of plagiarism against Harvard's Chief Diversity Officer
In a hilarious twist to the Claudine Gay saga, a month after Claudine Gay stepped down amid accusations of rampant plagiarism, Harvard’s ‘‘Chief Diversity Officer’’ was hit with 41 allegations of plagiarism. These are detailed in a formal complaint as reported by The Washington Free Beacon on January 30th.
As of now, there's no clear update on the fate of the Chief Diversity Officer, following the recent complaint. Given the timing, it's likely that Harvard has only just commenced a formal investigation into the matter.
The position of 'Chief Diversity Officer’ didn't even exist for the first year 383 years of Harvard's history — they only invented it in 2020 — so here is a crazy idea — rather than replace her, just eliminate the position.
8: Fraud at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
In the same week, Harvard was hit with yet another huge fraudulent data scandal…
9: Harvard neuroscientist accused of fake data and plagiarized images across 21 paper
… and a few days later, Harvard is hit with yet ANOTHER huge plagiarism scandal!
Top Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Khalid Shah allegedly falsified data and plagiarized images across 21 papers, data manipulation expert Elisabeth M. Bik said.
In an analysis shared with The Crimson, Bik alleged that Shah, the vice chair of research in the department of neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, presented images from other scientists’ research as his own original experimental data.
Though Bik alleged 44 instances of data falsification in papers spanning 2001 to 2023, she said the “most damning” concerns appeared in a 2022 paper by Shah and 32 other authors in Nature Communications, for which Shah was the corresponding author.
A common denominator in these two new Harvard scandals is that the fraud was discovered by someone named Elizabeth Bik:
Shah is the latest prominent scientist to have his research face scrutiny by Bik, who has emerged as a leading figure among scientists concerned with research integrity. She contributed to data falsification allegations against four top scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute — leading to the retraction of six and correction of 31 papers.
I had never heard of her before:
Here is a puffpiece about Bik from 2020:
10: Harvard is suing its insurance provider
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/31/harvard-sues-marsh-usa/
In the latest development in the University’s effort to recoup up to $15 million in legal fees incurred over a nearly decade-long legal battle over its affirmative action policies, Harvard has sued its insurance broker, Marsh USA.
Harvard filed the suit on Wednesday in Suffolk County Superior Court, alleging that Marsh cost the University up to $15 million in legal fees by failing to notify Zurich American Insurance Company, one of Harvard’s insurers, of the affirmative action lawsuit within the appropriate time frame.
Harvard’s filing accuses Marsh of “breach of contract” and “tortious violations of the professional standard of care.” According to the suit, these caused Harvard to lose access to excess insurance coverage for defense costs and other affirmative action lawsuit-related expenses beyond the $27.5 million covered by its primary insurance provider, American Insurance Group.
11: Pisa 2009 Parental Education is miscoded
This is great work by SEBASTIAN JENSEN, you should subscribe to his Substack:
He finds that ‘‘The PISA 2009 dataset coded maternal education as paternal education, and vice versa.’’ Given that this dataset has been utilized in untold thousands (?) of research papers, the mislabeling of such a critical variable is a significant concern. How many papers are completely wrong as a result?? And nobody will ever look into them, or fix them — classic.
12: The American Economic Association publishes ‘‘minority list’’ of job market candidates
Hilariously, if you look at the pictures of the minorities on the list, many are just straight-up white Spanish people. It’s mind-boggling to me that they think they deserve affirmative action. I am not sure whether I hate them for grossly abusing the system, or love them for abusing a broken system.
The AEA did not respond to my request for comment.
Speaking of white Spanish dudes identifying as minorities….
13: Latino prof wins discrimination suit against black female dean, a ‘‘CRT expert’’
https://www.denverpost.com/2024/02/16/paul-campos-cu-boulder-lawsuit-settled/
The University of Colorado Boulder has reached a settlement agreement with a professor who filed a discrimination and retaliation lawsuit in June.
CU Boulder Law Professor Paul Campos netted a low six-figure settlement. The university agreed to pay all his legal fees and permanently remove Law School Dean Lolita Buckner Inniss as his supervisor. Both parties signed a dismissal of all claims on Tuesday.
“I’m extremely happy,” Campos said. “I got substantial compensation, and more important than that, I had (Innis) removed as my supervisor permanently.”
In the settlement agreement, CU Boulder denies any wrongdoing or responsibility.
…
Campos claimed in the lawsuit that he was discriminated against with unequal pay because of his Latino ethnicity and punished for taking paternity leave as evidenced by a low annual review score. When Campos reported the discrimination, he alleged he faced retaliation from Inniss and the university.
Here is a longer blog post that Campos wrote himself last week:
14: Australian professor of management fired over tweet
A few days before Christmas, of Professor of Human Resource Management at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology was fired over an edgy tweet.
I was going to write up a summary of this event, but the fired professor started a Substack! In his first post, he described the incident and how you can help:
15: ‘Fat’’ is now an admissions criterion in Canadian Ph.D. program
I was the first to find this tweet advertising that you are eligible for a PhD at Queens University if you ‘‘identify’’ as fat:
So I QT’d it…
And after I tweeted it out, the job posting went viral, racking up nearly a million views and 443 angry responses:
16: How to be a Public Historian
This Substack tells the story of how a historian published & heavily publicized a claim, arguing that it had dramatic political implications. It emerged that there was *no evidence* for the claim. Now the journal’s editors & other insiders circle the wagons: they say truth doesn’t matter if the politics is right!
17: The Iowa Board of Regents votes to eliminate DEI
On November 15th:
The changes to Iowa’s DEI programs include: eliminating university-wide “DEI functions that are not necessary for compliance or accreditation,” reviewing “all college, department, or unit-level DEI positions to determine whether DEI specific job responsibilities are necessary for compliance, accreditation, or student and employee support services” and eliminating all that are not, and reviewing “the services provided by offices currently supporting diversity or multicultural affairs in other divisions of the university to ensure they are available to all students.”
18: Chris Edmond fired from the University of Melbourne
Chris Edmonds is a youngish superstar economist in Australia.
Last month, he was terminated from the University of Melbourne following an incident involving a PhD student.
In an email to his colleagues he states, "I made terrible mistakes" and also admitted to sending several emails to a student that were characterized as "angry and unprofessional."
If he is admitting, in a lawyered-up letter, that he sent ‘‘angry and unprofessional emails’’, you can be sure they were REALLY angry and unprofessional, whatever they were, serious enough to be fired over.
The student he is speaking about provided a statement to the Australian Financial Review saying she felt Dr. Edmond’s email about the circumstances of the relationship was “misleading”.
“My complaint described a systematic pattern of deliberate and persistent discrimination, intimidation, and bullying by exclusion that has occurred over a period of 12 years after I finished my PhD and continued through to this year,” she said.
I don’t have too much empathy for this guy because he is an insufferable shitlib on Twitter who spent years aggressively cheerleading lockdowns and histrionic Covid hysteria. He also has me blocked on Twitter.
“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”
―Sun Tzu
19: Shanghai University of Finance and Economics has a demon king named Xu Guoxiang
This post was making waves on Chinese social media:
Even after translating it into English, I had a hard time following along. Slash, I am not willing to put in the effort to figure out these complicated and esoteric Chinese power dynamics. So I asked ChatGPT to summarize it:
In this complex narrative, a stock trading book in mainland China, initially borrowed by Xu Guoxiang, sparks a series of events at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Xu Guoxiang, who plagiarizes from the book, rises to a professorship and eventually becomes department chair, engaging in unethical and manipulative tactics. Along with his associate Cong Shuhai, Xu Guoxiang orchestrates the removal of several colleagues and engages in power plays, causing chaos and disruption in the university's academic environment.
Their tactics include bullying, manipulating promotions, and blocking career opportunities of others. Despite being exposed to various underhanded strategies, including academic and administrative manipulation, Xu Guoxiang's and Cong Shuhai's influence grows. They are involved in intricate plans to suppress and discredit colleagues, particularly Mao Changxuan, leading to widespread collateral damage within the academic community.
The narrative also follows the victims of these manipulations, detailing their struggles and eventual outcomes. The situation culminates in a broader examination of the ethical and moral dilemmas faced by the academic staff at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, as well as at Shanghai Business School and SISU Xianda College, highlighting the widespread impact of such power dynamics in academic institutions.
20: Sociology Sentenced to Death by Florida U System Board of Governors
21: Not Again, Paul!
Long-time readers of Karlstack would know that not only is Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham is an enemy of free speech, but he is also a plagiarist:
After being exposed 2 years ago, and being the butt of the joke on EJMR for 2 years as a plagiarist, last month EJMR seems to have caught him again:
It’s hard to say if this is really plagiarism, or just a similar idea, because only the abstract is online so far.
But EJMR already jumped to conclusions:
I emailed the authors for comment but did not receive a reply.
As they haven’t posted a working paper yet, I am sure they are furiously rewriting it to make it clear this is a unique contribution and totally-not-the-same paper as the obscure one from 12 years ago.
22: Rishi Sunak: "From today, foreign university students can't bring family to UK"
Too little, too late.
The UK’s annual net migration has seen an increase from 607,000 in 2022 to 672,000 in 2023. A tiny reduction in family reunifications won’t make any difference to the overall trend, but hey, at least Rishi gets to look tough while flooding the UK with Indians.
23: Amid diplomatic tension, Indian student visas processed by Canada in Q4 of 2023 dropped by 42%
Speaking of Indians:
The expulsion of 41 Canadian diplomats from India at the peak of the diplomatic row between the two nations last year has had an unexpected fallout.
According to latest data sourced from the Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) portal, compared to October-December 2022, the number of Indian student permit applications finalised by Canada in the last quarter of 2023 dipped by nearly 42 per cent.
In October-December 2023, Canada decided (referred to as “finalised” on IRCC website, which means that decisions, both positive or negative) just 69,203 permit applications by Indian students. This marked a significant decrease from the 1.19 lakh applications processed during the same period in 2022. The decrease in total permits by Indian students finalised by Canadian authorities between 2022 (3.63 lakh) and 2023 (3.07 lakh) was 15 per cent.
24: Econ profs at JMU find teaching evaluations unfair
https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-spat-over-teaching-evaluations-roils-a-department
When economics faculty members at James Madison University received their annual evaluations this summer, some of them were taken aback. Had their teaching gotten much worse all of a sudden?
Six economics professors who spoke with The Chronicle said their overall performance scores, which encapsulate teaching, research, and service, dropped — most by at least 2 points on a 9-point scale in a single year. For five professors, lower teaching scores were to blame.
The teaching evaluation — conducted by the academic-unit head for economics, who leads the department and supervises its faculty — didn’t capture teaching well, faculty members said.https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/2/13/greene-administrator-plagiarism-allegations/
25: Author Identifies as ‘‘"White occupier’’ in peer-reviewed journal
The journal Healthcare Management Forum has a contributor self-identify with the label "White occupier."
This is the official peer-reviewed journal of the Canadian College of Health Leaders…. because, of course, it is.
Very Canadian.
26: University of Tennessee rebrands DEI to ‘‘access and engagement’’
As reported by the campus newspaper of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, UT is rebranding its Division of Diversity and Inclusion as ‘‘Division of Access and Engagement’’ to try to get around lawmakers and the public, which have caught on to the scam.
‘‘They literally admit they’re just doing this name change to trick Tennessee legislators into thinking they aren’t a DEI office when in fact they are.’’
27: 74 US colleges are still coercing students to take COVID vaccines
"Harvard is the only Ivy League that still requires students to show proof that they have taken either the initial COVID vaccine series (which is no longer available) or the most up-to-date booster even though no such requirement exists for faculty and staff,” Lucia Sinatra, the co-founder of No College Mandates, tells The Dossier.
“How does this make any sense from a public health perspective? It doesn’t. It is discriminatory, arbitrary and capricious, and the fact that students let it stand speaks volumes about allegiance to their ideological beliefs over their pursuit of truth.”
28: Inside Ohio State’s DEI Factory
When John Sailer published this investigation in the WSJ on November 20th, it made waves, and dominated Twitter for a news cycle:
A search committee seeking a professor of military history rejected one applicant “because his diversity statement demonstrated poor understanding of diversity and inclusion issues.” Another committee noted that an applicant to be a professor of nuclear physics could understand the plight of minorities in academia because he was married to “an immigrant in Texas in the Age of Trump.”
These examples come from more than 800 pages of “Diversity Faculty Recruitment Reports” at Ohio State University, which I obtained through a public-records request. Until recently, Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences required every search committee to create such a report, which had to be approved by various deans before finalists for a job were interviewed.
In February 2021, then-president Kristina Johnson launched an initiative to hire 50 professors whose work focused on race and “social equity” and “100 underrepresented and BIPOC hires” (the acronym stands for black, indigenous and people of color). These reports show what higher education’s outsize investment in “diversity, equity and inclusion” looks like in practice. Ohio State sacrificed both academic freedom and scholarly excellence for the sake of a narrowly construed vision of diversity.
29: Henry Rodger’s Research Center at Boston University Implodes
You may be wondering who Henry Rogers is — it’s the birth name of ‘‘Ibram Kendi X’’, and I deadname him as a sign of disrespect.
Since launching his ‘Center for Antiracist Research’ in 2020, he has raised more than $50 million for the center…. which is now broke and in disarray, implementing mass layoffs.
Where did all the money go?
They didn’t produce any research.
An Ambitious Antiracism Center Scales Back Amid Allegations of Poor Management (New York Times)
Fanfare, Then Fallout at Antiracist Research Center Reveals Other Fractures (Inside Higher Ed)
The best writing on this is from David Decosimo, an Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University, who wrote a strong letter predicting this very downfall in 2020:
30: Florida Approves Classic Learning Test for Use in College Admissions
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-laboratory-of-the-states/
Students can take the exam in place of the SAT or ACT. It’s the latest push by Gov. Ron DeSantis to remake his state’s education system.
By Dana Goldstein
Sept. 8, 2023, 5:02 p.m. ETFlorida’s state university system approved on Friday the Classic Learning Test for use in undergraduate admissions, elevating the little-known exam as an alternative to the SAT and ACT.
The vote from the system’s board of governors is the latest push by Gov. Ron DeSantis to remake Florida’s education system, from the elementary school curriculum to college. The CLT is currently taken mostly by religious home-schoolers and private-school students.
The governing board approved the exam over the objections of its faculty representative, Amanda Phalin, a business professor at the University of Florida. She said she could not yet support use of the CLT, as it is known, because it lacked “empirical evidence that it is of the same quality as the SAT or ACT.”
The CLT tests similar skills to the SAT and ACT. But in the exam’s English section, there is less emphasis on contemporary fiction and memoir, and more on Christian thought and excerpts from the Western canon — C.S. Lewis, Saint Augustine, Erasmus.
The CLT started in 2015 as a for-profit company, and, up until now, mostly Christian colleges accepted its scores.
31: Pickett critiques Criminology's 6+ month reviews, is ousted from Crim editorship
The drama began when Justin Pickett, a professor of criminology at the University of Albany, tweeted out a 9-tweet thread shitting on the top journal for massive delays and incompetence:
Two hours after posting that thread, he was removed from the paper’s editorial board.
So he put them on blast:
And then the timing turned out to be a coincidence?
Weird.
I am not sure I believe the past president, he’s probably doing damage control.
But who knows, maybe it is really a coincidence.
“We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.”
― C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
32: U. Louisville Doubles Down on Race-Based Admissions
University of Louisville’s President Kim Schatzel recently told faculty “we’re going to drive a truck through experience with race in terms of our admissions.”
The comments referred to campus leaders’ apparent plans to use what some consider a loophole in the Supreme Court’s recent decision to outlaw affirmative action in college admissions.
…
But Mike Zhao, president of the Asian American Coalition for Education, told The College Fix “only factors related to the applicant as an individual, not members of a racial group, can be considered during the college admissions.”
When asked specifically about Schatzel’s statement, Zhao called it “a blatant violation of the Supreme Court’s recent rulings.”
33: Brown employees, students donate 27 times more to Democrats than Republicans
From 1999 to June 2023, 74,656 donations totaling $2,840,386 were made to federal election committees by individuals who indicated themselves as an employee or student of the University at the time of their donation. Ninety-five percent of these funds were given to Democratic candidates and left-leaning organizations. Four percent supported Republican candidates and right-leaning organizations, and 1% supported those with no party affiliation.
Overall, Brown employees and students donate 27 times more to left-leaning candidates and causes than to right-leaning ones.
34: Cambridge University students say they 'feel unsafe' after Conservatives book out hall for dinner
More than 200 Cambridge University students have signed an open letter expressing concern about their “safety” after the Tory association booked out the college’s hall for dinner.
A number of prominent politicians have been members of the 102-year-old society, including Home Secretary Suella Braverman and former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.
Here is the dinner that was deemed unsafe:
Here is the student that complained the dinner made him feel unsafe:
35: University of Nebraska trims the fat
My take on this is the opposite of most vocal people on Twitter — I have the same take every time a crappy school eliminates a crappy program — they are doing the students a favor.
I can’t imagine that the Philosophy/Theater/Journalism program at UNebreska-Kearney has +EV job outcomes, or has produced any notable philosophers, actors, or journalists… and I mean that in the nicest way possible.
A couple of months after the proposal to eliminate these departments, Nebraska lawmakers then moved to eliminate tenure entirely. Seems like they are having budget problems:
At least a dozen Nebraska lawmakers are backing a bill that would eliminate tenure for university and college professors.
The bill's sponsor said, it would bring back accountability to professors trying to push their ideology, but others call it an assault on academic freedom
That’s it for today!
I actually have twice as many curated stories ready to publish, but today’s article is already 4,000+ words, I decided to break it up into two parts.
So I’ll have a new ‘‘academic scandals roundup’’ soon!
Even though studies show that most studies are total bullshit, I'd still like to propose one, in the spirit of intellectual inquiry:
If Americans could design, create and install an academic culture adamantly opposed to free speech, thought and inquiry, that always chose cowardlly careerist conformity over excellence or integrity, that spitefully attacked any dissenters, that was made by and for a caste of clueless bumbling hypocrites who imagine themselves brilliant radical truth-tellers but are completely blind to how the rest of the country sees them and how much they embody all the things they claim to hate (such as bigotry, intolerance, ignorance etc)—could we come up with a system any different than the one we have now? What would be different?
Great job, Karl!
I'm a retired - but now I say "recovering" - college professor. Will celebrate 10 happy years of retirement in May.