Not quite a year ago, I wrote a pair of posts about allegations of widespread plagiarism in the engineering college at Ohio University. The allegations were brought by Thomas Matrka, who, while a student in the masters program in mechanical engineering at OU, was appalled to find obvious instances of plagiarism in a number of masters theses sitting on the library shelves — paragraphs, drawings, sometimes whole chapters that were nearly identical, with no attribution at all to indicate a common source.
Pretty appalling stuff. But back in November 2005, the OU administration didn’t seem to see it as a big problem — at least, not as of problem of the magnitude Mr. Matrka saw. But Mr. Matrka’s efforts have finally had some effects. Chickens are coming home to roost not only for the students who plagiarized in their theses, but for the faculty members who seemed willing to let this conduct slide.
Category Archives: Current events
The consequences of a chilly climate in the academic workplace.
After my post yesterday suggesting that women scientists may still have a harder time being accepted in academic research settings than their male counterparts, Greensmile brought my attention to a story in today’s Boston Globe. It seems that almost a dozen professors at MIT believe they lost a prospective hire due to intimidation of the job candidate by another professor who happens also to be a Nobel laureate. Possibly it matters that the professor alleged to have intimidated the job candidate is male, and that the job candidate and the 11 professors who have written the letter of complaint are female; I’m happy enough to start with a discussion of the alleged behavior itself before paddling to the deep waters of gender politics.
But first, the story:
MIT star accused by 11 colleagues
Prospective hire was intimidated, they say
By Marcella Bombardieri and Gareth Cook, Globe Staff | July 15, 2006
Eleven MIT professors have accused a powerful colleague, a Nobel laureate, of interfering with the university’s efforts to hire a rising female star in neuroscience.
The professors, in a letter to MIT’s president, Susan Hockfield , accuse professor Susumu Tonegawa of intimidating Alla Karpova , “a brilliant young scientist,” saying that he would not mentor, interact, or collaborate with her if she took the job and that members of his research group would not work with her.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they wrote in their June 30 letter, “allowed a senior faculty member with great power and financial resources to behave in an uncivil, uncollegial, and possibly unethical manner toward a talented young scientist who deserves to be welcomed at MIT.” They also wrote that because of Tonegawa’s opposition, several other senior faculty members cautioned Karpova not to come to MIT.
She has since declined the job offer.
Don’t do the misconduct if you can’t do the time.
A long time ago, I blogged about Dr. Eric T. Poehlman, formerly of the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He’s no longer there because he was caught falsifying and fabricating data in the “preliminary studies” sections of numerous grant proposals submitted to federal agencies and departments.
Today comes the news that Dr. Poehlman will be doing some time for his crimes. From the Burlington Free Press:
A few words about Ward Churchill.
I’m not going to do this to death, partly because others will and partly because Churchill isn’t a scientist. But, given that I’m working the ethics beat at ScienceBlogs, I ought to give you the ethical crib-sheet:
- Plagiarism is bad.
- Self-plagiarism (that is, recycling stuff you’ve written and published before without indicating that you’re recycling it) is bad.
- Ghost-writing pieces for other “scholars” in what purports to be a scholarly anthology might be acceptable under some possible set of circumstances, but it’s fishy enough that it’s probably best presumed bad.
- Citing pieces you’ve ghost-written for such an anthology in other works you’ve produced without indicating that you’re actually citing yourself is bad.
- Citing pieces you’ve ghost-written using the author of record’s name as support for a point you are trying to establish (by making it look like other authors agree with your analysis of the facts) is very, very bad.
- The badness in these behaviors lies in their deceptiveness. Essentially, they are all different ways of lying to your audience and the community of scholars trying to build good knowledge in your area.
- Universities, as institutions charged with maintaining academic integrity, have a right to cut loose professors who engage in this kind of bad behavior. Indeed, if a professor habitually engages in these bad acts, the university probably has a duty to fire this bozo.
Beneath the fold, I approvingly quote Eugene Volokh. (Yeah, I’m surprised too.)
We need more knowledge (and less spin).
It’s no surprise that the scientific and medical research in which the public tends to show the most interest is the research that is somehow connected to practical issues, like living longer and healthier lives. Scientists who depend on public monies to support their investigations have gotten pretty good at painting the “so what” for their findings.
The problem, of course, is that the “so what” painted for a non-scientific audience is frequently oversimplified, glossing over a lot of the complexities that the scientists deal with daily. It’s hard to cram complexities into a sound bite. As well, these sound bites telling us why a certain finding matters often play into the pre-existing biases and social expectations of the non-scientific audience at which they’re aimed. Unfortunately, this can persuade that audience that, with a particular finding, we know all that we need to — or, perhaps, that we at least know enough to justify particular ways of doing things (surprise!) toward which we were already inclined.
Consider, for example, a New York Times op-ed piece by Marianne Legato on gender and health. She writes:
What emerges when one studies male biology in a truly evenhanded way is the realization that from the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It’s not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood — and underappreciated — vulnerabilities inherent in men’s genetic and hormonal makeup. This Father’s Day, we need to rededicate ourselves to deepening our knowledge of male physiology.
On the surface, this sounds reasonable. But Echidne of the Snakes worries that it is not only vulnerable to being spun, but also engages in some oversimpliciation and spin itself:
I feel as angry about this reverse take on the relative health of the sexes, and the reason for my anger in both cases is the same one: Discussions like these may or may not be the springboard for better health research, but they certainly will be used to perpetuate the status quo of power imbalances between the sexes.
The inevitable follow-up to the last breastfeeding post.
I think after this one, we’ll be ready to move on to cow (or soy) milk and solids!
My last post on the breastfeeding issue pointed you to an academic examination of some of the claims being advanced in support of the superiority of breastfeeding. Joseph from Corpus Callosum left a detailed comment expressing some dissatisfaction with that examination. You really should read the whole comment, but his main points are roughly:
- You can find evidence that supporters of breastfeeding are biased, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t also biased.
- In a body of scientific literature, we ought to weigh not only how recent a study is, but also its quality. (So, for example, it may be fine to rely on an older study over a more recent one if the older one is better — where “better”, of course, would be judged by scientific criteria rather than on agreement with the result you were hoping the research would support.)
- It’s not enough to simply point out flaws with the scientific case that is being made to support breastfeeding if there exist reasonably rigorous studies that shed light on the issue (especially if they end up supporting the conclusion for which the shoddy case is being offered as support).
It’s hard to argue with Joseph’s points. The Goldin et al. didn’t give a comprehensive analysis of all the available literature. Then again, it seems like it was intended as a rapid response to a news item that was creating a buzz. As I noted in my last post, the scientific research is certainly suggestive that breastfeeding is a Very Good Thing as far as infant health is concerned. The contentious issue seems to be how big the risk of not exclusively breastfeeding. And here, I’m not sure I’m in complete agreement with Joseph’s take on things. He writes:
What are the real benefits of breastfeeding? Statisticians weigh in.
A few days ago I pondered the ethical dimensions of breastfeeding given a recent article trumpeting its astounding benefits for infants and mothers. Those ethical considerations took as given that the claims trumpeting in the article were more or less true.
Today, I want to point you to an examination of those very claims by Rebecca Goldin (Director of Research, Statistical Assessment Service, Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences at George Mason University), Emer Smyth (Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at Univ. of Pennsylvania), and Andrea Foulkes (Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst). Will it surprise you that the data don’t seem to support the conclusion that breastmilk has miraculous powers?
Reproducibility and retracted papers.
From The New York Times:
A chemistry professor at Columbia University who in March retracted two papers and part of a third published in a leading journal is now retracting four additional scientific papers.
The retractions came after the experimental findings of the papers could not be reproduced by other researchers in the same laboratory.
It’s a problem if published experiments are not reproducible — but what kind of problem it is might not be clear yet.
Breast-feeding and SUV-driving: what are the ethically relevant differences?
I’m not sure I realized it while I was writing it, but my last post (on whether scientific knowledge about the benefits of breast-feeding imposes any particular obligations) has me thinking about another kind of case where scientific knowledge might — or might not — bring ethical consequences.
That case? Global warming.
My big question, thinking about these two instances where scientific knowledge, individual decisions, and public policy all coalesce, is what the relevant differences are.
The science on breast-feeding (and what we ought to do about it).
There’s an interesting article in the New York Times about efforts by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to promote breast-feeding. Proponents of breast-feeding point to quite a lot of science that supports advantages — for child and mother — of breast-milk over formula. But there’s also a real question about what we (i.e., individual families making choices, DHHS, employers, and society as a whole) ought to be doing in light of this information.
From the New York Times article: