Free Republic

For a long time, people (including me) have been calling for major changes in higher education. Now someone is doing something about it. Hedge-fund tycoon Bill Ackman is waging war to make universities accountable. Ackman started his campaign by demanding the resignations of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, Harvard President Claudine Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth after the trio’s shambolic performance before Congress on antisemitic harassment on their campuses. Magill and Gay are now gone, and Kornbluth is worried. Penn’s board of trustees pushed Magill out pretty quickly. Gay, being a diversity hire, was harder...

Academic dishonesty and crime are alike: ... When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year,” wrote the student who sits on Harvard’s honor council.. When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation ‘unanimously stand in support of’ her ... Gay’s plagiarism, the Harvard Corp. showed that its commitment to academic integrity was as phony as its other ideals. ... serious academic-integrity offenses, are too often ignored or excused—much like petty crimes in cities with left-wing governments....

Harvard University covered up a high-level investigation into whether its controversial president was a plagiarist — and used an expensive law firm to threaten The Post over our own probe. ... Harvard did not disclose that it had conducted a plagiarism investigation into its president Claudine Gay when she appeared before Congress last week. ... Anne Williamson, of Miami University, Ohio, said she was “shocked” by the parallels to her work and one of Gay’s papers and said: “It does look like plagiarism to me.” ... The 27 instances were in two academic papers published in two peer-reviewed journals between...

A top Florida State University professor whose research focused on race in the criminal justice system abruptly left his post in the wake of years-long allegations of academic fraud. A Fellow of the American Society of Criminology, Eric Stewart has had six research studies retracted, blemishing FSU’s top-ranked criminology department. Stewart was first accused of falsifying data in 2019 by Professor Justin Pickett of the University of Albany, who co-authored a 2011 study with Stewart. The study tested if the public’s prejudicial views impacted their desire for harsher sentences for black and hispanic Americans. The published findings were that as...

Wednesday I wrote about a trio of academics who wrote bogus papers and submitted them to supposedly serious journals to see if nonsense could be passed off as insight given enough earnest social justice framing of the ideas. What they found was that seven of the 20 bogus papers they wrote were accepted for publication. Apparently, the line between serious feminist scholarship and complete sophistry is pretty thin. Dubbed “Sokal Squared” after a similar stunt by Alan Sokal in the late 90s, the hoax has generated a lot of feedback among academics. One of the most positive take came from...

The mainstream media have some egg on their face today after being forced to retract their reports on a gay-marriage study that was found to have been based on fraudulent research. IMG_0004The study, which appeared in the December 12, 2014 edition ofScience, claimed that support for same-sex marriage among voters increased with the use of door-to-door canvassing, especially if the canvasser was gay. Supporters of gay marriage, who were excited about the results, have now been brought back to reality after one of the authors of the study, Donald Green, a Columbia University political scientist, asked Science to retract the...

An awful 146-word term paper littered with grammatical errors that is barely even readable has become a potent visual symbol of the University of North Carolina's fake classes scandal. The one-paragraph essay on civil rights icon Rosa Parks earned an A- and was exposed by former UNC professor Mary Willingham, who spent 10 years teaching UNC's athletes before she turned whistleblower on alleged classroom corruption. The shocking essay came to light during an ESPN documentary timed to coincide with the March Madness basketball competition. It contains allegations that UNC athletes in danger of failing were encouraged to sign up for...

WASHINGTON -- From time to time, I put down my duties of writing about politics and other human follies and pick up a book, often a book of poetry, often by W. B. Yeats. The other night I read Yeats' poem "The Fiddler of Dooney." It is a little masterpiece, but then Yeats wrote so many masterpieces. It begins: "When I play on my fiddle in Dooney, Folk dance like a wave of the sea; My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet, My brother in Mocharabuiee. " And on it dances for a few more stanzas, delighting the eye and the...

(CNN) -- Early in her career as a learning specialist, Mary Willingham was in her office when a basketball player at the University of North Carolina walked in looking for help with his classwork. He couldn't read or write. "And I kind of panicked. What do you do with that?" she said, recalling the meeting. Willingham's job was to help athletes who weren't quite ready academically for the work required at UNC at Chapel Hill, one of the country's top public universities. But she was shocked that one couldn't read. And then she found he was not an anomaly. Soon,...

The smartest genius President evah is nothing more than a carboard cutout. A fraud. Doesn't exist. We don't even know how he did in school because to this day his transcripts are sealed. Turns out now that when he was an instructor at the Chicago, his colleagues who were actual Professors didn't like him and didn't want him. Obama's position was obtained through political channels. Is the President's resume accurate when it comes to his career and qualifications? I can corroborate that Obama's "teaching career" at Chicago was, to put it kindly, a sham. I spent some time with the...

The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers. It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious...

Former U.S. vice president Al Gore addresses the UN Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen December 15, 2009. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, right, follows with Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store a discussions with ministers from Nordic countries on Greenland's ice sheet at the UN Climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, Monday, Dec. 14, 2009. With a week for the climate summit to end, the split between the developing and developed world became sharper as ministers of the world's nations started to arrive for a crucial second week of climate talks.

Hien T. Tran, the California Air Resources Board scientist who was the lead author and project coordinator of the study justifying the air board's sweeping new efforts to limit diesel emissions, is being investigated by air board officials over allegations he lied about having a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California at Davis. "We're going to take the appropriate actions if this is true," Leo Kay, ARB's director of communications, told me. James E. Enstrom, an epidemiologist with the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, raised the questions about Tran's qualifications in a Dec. 10 letter to the air...

At the University of Chicago no man looms larger than Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate who led the “Chicago school” of economics and who died in 2006. When the university announced plans for a $200m economics institute in May, it seemed fitting that the centre should be named after him. But a small war broke out. On June 6th more than 100 faculty members wrote to the university’s president to protest against the institute. Armed with academia’s common weapons, indignation and verbosity, they said they were all “disturbed by the ideological and disciplinary preference implied by the university’s massive support...

The level of “academic” discourse on the Middle-East reached a new low—quite a feat considering some of the old lows—when the notorious Jewish anti-Semite and Holocaust-justice denier Norman Finkelstein wrote a screed suggesting that I be targeted “for assassination” because of my views on Israel. The obscene article was accompanied by an obscene cartoon drawn by “Latuff”, a frequent accomplice of Finkelstein. The cartoon portrayed me as masturbating in rapturous joy while viewing images of dead Lebanese civilians on a TV set labeled “Israel peep show,” with a Jewish Star of David prominently featured. The cartoon aptly represents the content...

Last May, a Korean report in Science magazine prompted headlines around the world by declaring it had made tremendous advances in the heretofore disappointing field of embryonic stem cell (ES cell) research. It has now prompted much soul-searching in media land. “How could we have been fooled?” reporters are asking themselves in print. Well, wake up guys, because the major science and medical journals have been fooling you for years. And what appeared to be a trickle when I first wrote on it in 1999 has become a torrent. In fairness, for many submitted papers it’s quite difficult for journal...

In our secular, post-religious society, the figure of the cassock-clad priest has been replaced by that of the white-coated scientist. Dispensing wisdom from the laboratory -- his every word is awaited breathlessly by a world thirsting for knowledge. It's all very well having secular shamans, but when they're caught cooking the holy books once too often, the faithful start to get worried. Scientific fraud, like that perpetrated by South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk, is not new. Newton did it; Dalton did it; even Sigmund Freud did it. In more recent times, IQ researcher Sir Cyril Burt committed fraud,...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Proving science biasBy Patrick J. MichaelsPublished December 29, 2005 Advertisement Two recent events underscore the predictability of global warming distortion by those who gain from exaggeration. The events were the Montreal Conference of the Parties that signed the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. Both took place in early December.     The sheer volume of hype was impressive. Following are the headlines, along with sources, generated on the afternoon of Dec. 7, first from the Montreal U.N. conference. (University news sources are those...

Embattled Colorado Professor Files Complaint Against Texas Detractor The Associated Press Published: Jun 9, 2005 BOULDER, Colo. (AP) - University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, whose essay comparing some Sept. 11 victims to Nazis led to an investigation into his scholarship and ethnicity, has filed a complaint against one of his accusers. Churchill's complaint to Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, accuses assistant sociology professor Thomas Brown of academic misconduct. Brown has alleged Churchill fabricated crucial details in his argument that the Army committed genocide against Indians in the 1800s. In an e-mail to The Denver Post Wednesday, Brown said Churchill...

Special report: The Churchill files The charge: Misrepresentation Are Ward Churchill's claims of American Indian ancestry valid? Our findings: Genealogical records, DNA dont support assertions. By Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News June 9, 2005 Eleven-year-old Joshua Tyner was hiding in a tree near his family's backwoods Georgia home when marauding Indians shot him and he fell dead to the ground. That's how the old family legend goes. So much for old family legends. Searching for a link: Ken Tyner, 64, of San Diego, is a distant relative of Ward Churchill. Tyner underwent DNA testing last year and found that his...