Fraud and deception in academic scholarship has become a big problem. We have hordes of professors publishing stuff because that’s what gets them tenure and advancement. But quite often, they have nothing to say and merely fill up pages in journals with low standards. And sometimes they simply fabricate data to make their notions look well-founded. It’s a gigantic waste.
A recent book by a professor at Harvard Business School sheds a lot of light on this problem, and I review it today for the Martin Center.
The author is Max Bazerman, who was caught up in a case of fraud when a paper he had co-authored was, years after its publication, shown to be based on bogus data. That was not his doing, but when he tried to find out what his colleagues had done, they stonewalled. Eventually the paper was retracted.
That got Bazerman interested in the problem of academic fraud, and his book does an excellent job of recounting a number of egregious cases that have come to light. He offers sound ideas for universities and journals to prevent fraud.
But his book misses the root cause, namely that our higher education system subsidizes academic research to an enormous degree. We pay professors not to teach, but mostly to sit around and crank out research that’s often politically tendentious or just plain silly. I liken it to the program the Dutch government had for years, subsidizing art, which led to huge expenditures on art that nobody wanted. We subsidize academic research with similar results.