Naughty Scientists

And why they often don't get fired

Written and not published early 2023. Given the Francesca Gino situation, I thought now might be the time. But also, I’m sick of looking at it in the drafts.

An iron core of finance sits at the center of every university administration.

Yes, there are fine words about ‘education’ on the brochures. But they really should say ‘education, but not at the expense of fiscal management and expansion’. The most liberal universities still have Trustee boards liberally salted with former public company executives, lawyers, and corporate raiders.

Do not take my word for it, try this for yourself.

Find the most painfully progressive institution that comes to mind. The kind the American right likes you haul over the coals because they once put a puppy in a tent on exam day to cheer their students up, and called it Emotional Support Safe Space Therapy Dog, which is marketing, and not Look At The Puppy, It’ll Be Fun And It Only Cost $200, which is what it is.

Leaf through the background of their most senior management. You will find far more Marks and Spencer than Karl Marx.

This is why you need to be very discerning when people shit on about The Incredible Wokeosity Of The Modern University. ‘The university is a left-wing institution! good lord, all the diversities! the cancels!’

This is sometimes true - there are people being occasionally screamed off a podium - but (a) fewer than you think, and (b) in any immediate macro sense the phenomenon is a distraction at best. It is occurring at the same time these institutions are nearly 50 years into a program of brutal workforce casualisation and bean-counting, balanced against a carefully maintained structural oversupply of academics, and while universities are fighting staff industrial action to a standstill.

In other words, this:

The modern fancy university business model is essentially a hedge fund with books, and those that aren’t would like to be. Their preferred strategy involves casualising their entire workforce, from senior professor to janitor. The ‘left wing loonies’ you see on the tin are perpetually treated as an annoyance that needs aggressive cost minimisation.

In this world, fancy researchers with enough scientific awards to stack up and use as an ottoman are assets. They are a source of marketing and press releases and prizes and invited talks and indirect funding, and they bring all their rich mates with them, and you. do. not. destroy. assets. Fiduciary duty to the institution is paramount.

This is true both in the indirect sense, in that Naughty Scientists are bad publicity, AND the direct sense as government grants won by staff pay the additional negotiated rate the university has with the government for indirect support. In the US, if a professor secures 1M in government funding, the median university gets a separate payment of ~700K. Other countries have similar systems.

Indirect costs are sufficiently important that some universities will not allow staff to apply for private funding that doesn’t get them paid as well. In other words, if someone wins 100K to keep their lab going from a source that does not also pay indirect costs to the university, the institution:

(a) will not let you take the money if you are awarded it, or
(b) will not even let you apply for it in the first place, and decline to process your application for it, or
(c) negotiate with you directly to determine how much of your money they are going to keep.

Someone who brings big government money for their own lab also brings big government money for the university. So, they don’t like to fire them, tenure be damned.

It does not matter how overheated people get on The Socials about their behaviour. A thousand screaming digital banshees of any political flavour means dick-all to the Board of Trustees. Left-wing people complaining about right-wing speakers. Right-wing people complaining about left-wing safe spaces. Management considers you all equally worthless, they did not see your clever tweet, and do they not give a fleck of shit about anything you have to say. Any problems you cause are scrub fires in the forest of perpetual revenue. They read the P&L, not your tweets, and the P&L says keep the money and protect the brand.

So, if someone causes a problem sufficient to garner attention for their bad behaviour - delay, distract, minimize, memoryhole. Start an investigation, if you must, with an aggressively restricted remit (“We have no direct evidence that Researcher A invented data for Study B in particular”) - this can be used to clear someone. If you must hand out Grave Consequences, then sign them up for extra training, hit them with a stick in the town square, make them apologise, ban them temporarily from Something Serious, but do not fire them.

It is not just universities, all other academic institutions have similar minimization strategies like this. Journals protect their profits and reputations, so do scientific societies and peak bodies, so do individual departments… and so do universities.

Earlier this year, when I needed occasional distractions from a fairly torrid situation at work, I amused myself by spending a month intermittently stockpiling this point in particular. I would prefer to show you, rather than simply tell you, that the normative position of these institutions to malfeasance is KEEP IT QUIET.

Senior researcher at Hunter College uses grant money to pay for parties and scuba trips, university ““failed to take any action” or report the fraud to NIH”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/01/28/jeffrey-parsons-hietikko-hunter-college-settlement/

“[]… The university was reluctant to shut down the OpenAg project even after he told top university officials about the misrepresentions as early as 2018 because it was held up as a success for the university's fundraising efforts.”

https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2023/02/08/judge-in-whistleblower-lawsuit-against-mit-hears-d.html

“The Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences says it will not retract a paper on anemone fish behavior even though a lengthy university investigation found it was made up.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/journal-declines-retract-fish-research-paper-despite-fraud-finding

Paraphrasing because it’s in French: More than 20 scientific articles from a researcher contain re-used and/or doctored figures. The response by the institution was to correct these papers, not retract them. They also declared it was one huge accident (which took place over several years, just one of those rolling accidents that kept on happening), and disciplined the researcher with… a month off work.

https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2022/12/05/une-affaire-d-inconduite-scientifique-agite-un-laboratoire-de-recherche-en-chimie_6153035_1650684.html

"The scientists ... said that the inquiry discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public."

https://stanforddaily.com/2023/02/17/internal-review-found-falsified-data-in-stanford-presidents-alzheimers-research-colleagues-allege/

You can see the dates in those URLs correspond to when I was looking. I did not have to look hard.

Strategic inaction, denial, and even just a blanket refusal to accept facts are the default position, everywhere. It does not matter whether your local fuss concerns sexual harassment, money, abuse, or research misconduct, or how if internal advocates for justice are involved (or if those advocates are powerful themselves), or if investigative processes are horribly biased. The institution sees no delta in an investigation and removal.

Unless.

UNLESS.

A tipping point is reached, beyond which the goose is cooked. You cannot employ Jeffrey Dahmer or Pol Pot, or - more realistically - someone convicted in a real court of fairly minor crimes, or has done a sufficient quantity of a sufficiently blatant fraud.

While there is tremendous heat and noise from both political sides about the various scandals that do break through into the newsmedia:

• Naughty licentious left-wing professor brings box full of vintage porn into class, claiming it has didactic qualities! Tres scandal!

• And she was fired! This is an unacceptable attack on academic freedom!

• No it isn’t! Perversity! Rabble!

… all this is merely the gas bubbles that ignite on the surface of a much deeper swamp, which people are far more unwilling to reckon with: that there are a lot of very naughty scientists, and only occasionally do their misdeeds catch up to them.

And the tipping point is an alarmingly long way down a continuum of dishonesty.

CONCLUSION

For whistleblowers: this is a cautionary tale. Document aggressively. Realise how exposed you are, because this is what you are fighting.

For people interested in forensic metascience: this is a big part of the inevitable evolution of the ‘just stick your findings on the internet and move on’ model - fighting this means years of emails and waiting, during which you can do almost nothing to accelerate the process.

For people claiming ‘something should be done!’ on the internet: welcome to reality.