integrity or irony?
the culture of “publish or perish” in academia
According to the National Science Foundation (an agency of the federal government, like the NIH), less than half of Americans with a postgraduate degree have a “great deal of confidence” in scientists in 2024; among those with a high school degree or less, that number falls to under a quarter of adults.
We hate to start an article like a teenager beginning their research paper at 11pm the day before the due date, but these statistics are sobering enough to deserve primacy.
Recent controversies about the academic track records of a series of distinguished researchers at highly illustrious universities have undoubtedly worsened the situation, especially with it all entangled in oppositions to campus-wide responses to the Israel-Palestine conflict and subsequent student protests. In an attempt to not overextend our expertise and maintain some semblance of readership, we’ll avoid stepping too far into that minefield — but suffice to say, it’s barely the tip of the iceberg of questionable behavior in academia. Trust in science has been declining for years before the current news cycle, with Pew Research surveys consistently reporting declines in respondents’ evaluation of science’s impact on society since at least 2016.
But why? Why is public trust in the most venerated experts in their fields so low in a high income, highly educated country known for producing a large plurality of the research that guides humanity forward?
Because they are fallible — this alone is not surprising, as they are only human, and until the AI monster comes for their jobs (and probably even beyond), they will continue to be. But the system of checks and balances we have in academia is failing; and combined with social forces that go against the very essence of the scientific process, the house of cards is beginning to topple, hard.
Following allegations published in the university’s own student newspaper by an undergraduate student, former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne was investigated and subsequently cleared of academic misconduct; still, he resigned in 2023, facing the investigation’s conclusion that his lab produced data that failed standards of scientific rigor — in other words, it was not intentional malfeasance, but negligence. Former Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned in early 2024 following accusations (by conservative commentators, it deserves to be noted, considering Gay’s status as a prominent researcher on the intersection of gender, race, and public policy as well as a strong driver of the DEI movement) of plagiarism — the opinion of the writers is that these accusations, which having light merit in the form of insufficient citation and duplicative prose, has more political motives than just the preservation of academic integrity.
A more serious situation arises in the recent case of Francesca Gino, a prominent behavioral science researcher at Harvard who, last year, was found in a 1300-page investigative report conducted by the university to have “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” falsified data in her research (on honesty — the irony is lost on no one), She was then placed on unpaid administrative leave by the university and responded by filing a lawsuit against Harvard as well as Data Colada, a blog run by a team of three academics who investigate faculty research and originally uncovered her allegedly faulty research; the suit is ongoing. She was also recently accused of plagiarism in multiple works; jury’s still out on that one, but suffice to say, it doesn’t look good. Another Harvard celebrity, neuroscientist Khalid Shah, is accused of data falsification and image plagiarism/manipulation across a score of papers by Elisabeth M. Bik, a data manipulation expert who has been instrumental in outing many high-profile researchers for purported falsification and fraud in recent years.
While surely the prestige of these universities has played a role in how high-profile these cases have been, it’s difficult to ignore that even the highest caliber academic institutions are not immune to falsification and integrity issues — much in the same way we all wondered about these schools after Operation Varsity Blues. We would not be remiss to wonder if the ultra-competitive nature of academia, especially at Ivy League levels, may even be part of the problem: if it’s publish or perish, and if no one is going to pay attention to important research that confirms our current understanding or does not provide groundbreaking new ideas, it’s easy to see why researchers fudge the numbers to meet their quotas and establish their reputations. Their research probably won’t be verified (until now, with the advent of more sophisticated tools and the efforts of independent fact-checkers) because replication is decidedly unsexy, and they might not make tenure unless and until they publish something revolutionary.
It also creates an avoidable structural and cultural problem when we so unequally venerate institutions like Stanford and Harvard — not only does it incentivize people to do anything they can to “make it” to this level, but it pushes the message that only “the best and brightest” are capable of producing important, high-quality research when this is completely false and utterly ridiculous. Researchers at all kinds of universities can discover something worthwhile, and results are a function of luck as much as they are about asking the right questions — if we only reward the innovative, we risk only bothering to find an answer to small minority of possible research questions.
It would be hard to discuss this topic while completely avoiding its political aspects. One of the more peculiar results of the ongoing polarization of American society into firmly conservative and progressive camps has been an increasingly firm association between higher education and the progressive side, particularly among conservatives: those Pew Research studies we mentioned earlier consistently show that the decline in trust in science is starkest among self-described conservatives, and Republican lawmakers in several states have made large productions out of “eradicating liberal bias on campuses.” There’s no doubt that some proportion of misconduct accusations made against high-profile academic figures are politically motivated — as alluded to earlier, this article was in part inspired by Claudine Gay’s recent predicament at Harvard — but we don’t think this should detract from instances of misconduct if the allegations later turn out to be substantiated. The potential consequences of shoddy research are simply too high to be offended by conservatives gleefully dunking on the “liberal intelligentsia.” The prototypical example may be disgraced former physician Andrew Wakefield’s since-retracted 1998 Lancet article claiming a link between MMR vaccines and autism — although the research was entirely discredited shortly after publication, the myth remains persistent, with vaccination rates in some regions still below the levels they were at prior to the publication of the paper.
Once bad science is out in the world, correcting the misconceptions it generates can be a lot more difficult than simply “taking it back”. With the way mainstream media reports on scientific research, even relatively mild discoveries can be blown out of proportion to create an attractive headline, and many people either don’t read the full article or only retain a distorted snapshot of the facts; with research that is fully misleading, the consequences can be much worse. Between word of mouth and news of retractions not spreading nearly as far as the original headline, people can hold on to incorrect information for a lifetime. And when the institution of science is part of the problem, people can hold fiercely to beliefs that have since been discredited — it’s human nature to be reluctant to admit wrongness, even if it wasn’t your fault.
Too many of our current solvable problems in the world stem from this sort of bad science, not to mention the real harm it can cause in fields like medicine. Academia needs an overhaul, or trust in the scientific process may fade for good.