It used to be that you’d hear about fraud in academic research about once a decade, but now it’s closer to once a month that some professor is shamed by revelations that his work was bogus.
In today’s Martin Center article, UCLA’s Walt Gardner explores this problem. He writes, “Once a rarity, research fraud is on the rise at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. What is most disturbing is that the fraud in question too often involves tenured professors with sterling reputations who betray the public’s trust.”
The profs frequently have their result in mind and then manipulate the data to support it. Things are so bad that a group called Retraction Watch has been formed to keep tabs on papers that have been withdrawn as a result of findings of fraud — and there’s undoubtedly more that isn’t caught.
Money, Gardner observes, is the driving force here:
In the past, universities were reluctant to hold their faculty accountable for misconduct because research brought in millions of taxpayer dollars. Schools still want the money, of course, but the fear of exposure on the Internet or consequences in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings has left them with little choice but to intervene. That explains what happened at Harvard, Stanford, and CUNY most recently. It also applies to the other elite universities, including Duke and Cornell, that have hosted misconduct over the past few years.
Now that the problem is out in the open, it’ll be solved, right? Gardner isn’t optimistic:
With hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, universities will continue to openly denounce fraud, but they will covertly fight anything that threatens to reduce the federal dollars flowing into their coffers. Shrinking student populations, declining government support, and growing resistance to tuition increases on the part of the public make universities reluctant to be part of the research-fraud solution. It’s not a hopeful picture.