Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned in August after an investigation revealed serious flaws in research he oversaw decades ago.
Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned at the dawn of the new year amid mounting allegations of plagiarism dating back to her college days.
Subsequently, Neri Oxman, a former top professor at MIT, was accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia, among other sources, in her dissertation. Her husband, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, has been one of Dr. Gay’s most persistent critics. And he has promised to search the archives of the MIT faculty and its president, Sally Kornbluth, for plagiarism.
The attacks on the integrity of higher education have come fast and furious in recent years. The federal Varsity Blues investigation, which accused wealthy parents of using bribery and fraud to secure spots for their children at resume-building colleges, sparked a debate about merit and the admissions game. The Harvard affirmative action lawsuit exposed how Asian-American students must perform at a higher level to gain admission. And protests over the war between Israel and Hamas have accused administrators of tolerating anti-Semitism on their campuses.
Now the focus has shifted to what is perhaps the soul of higher education: science.
There are differences between the cases: Dr. Tessier-Lavigne and Dr. Gay were the faces of their institutions, while Dr. Oxman is a former faculty member who was well known in her field of computational design. Defenders of Dr. Gay and Dr. Oxman say that canceling words is minor, and that they were not accused of stealing ideas. And unlike Dr. Tessier-Lavigne they did not have to withdraw any papers.
But recent controversies have fueled skepticism that some scientific studies are not as rigorous as they claim to be.
“It strikes me that this is a problem of the universities themselves,” said Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, which maintains a database of retracted articles that now numbers more than 46,000.
“They have tried in every way possible to avoid acknowledging how common misconduct is in academia, and what that does is give ammunition to sometimes — let’s face it — malicious actors who want to undermine the trust or reputation of an institution, ” said Dr. Oransky.
There will probably be more to come. A conference Commission has announced it will investigate a “hostile takeover” of higher education by “political activists, woke educators and partisan administrators.”
Over the past two decades, an entire industry has emerged focused on fact-checking research articles, including Retraction Watch, the Center for Open Science and Data Colada, a blog dedicated to debunking research based on incorrect data.
The number of retracted research articles has increased dramatically over time, to more than 10,000 withdrawals According to the journal Nature, this is an annual record, compared with about 400 papers in 2010, when Retraction Watch began its work, Dr. Oransky said.
This may be partly because controls have been stepped up, he said. Nature also blamed the rise of paper mills.
“What’s different this time is the levels at which this seems striking – Harvard and Stanford,” said Dr. Oransky. “These are cataclysmic events.”
Dr. Gay, a professor of government and African and African American studies, requested a handful of corrections to quotes and references in her dissertation and scholarly articles. But she stuck to her work and an outside panel cleared her of scientific misconduct.
A review board concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist, had not personally engaged in or known about data manipulation, but that “there may have been opportunities to improve laboratory oversight and management.” He agreed to retract three papers and correct two more.
Dr. Oxman, a celebrated architect and designer, apologized on social media for some attribution errors in her dissertation.
Not everyone thinks that academia is full of deceit.
Stephen Voss, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, said he was shocked that some academics, in their attempts to defend Dr. Gay, had suggested that plagiarism was common within their ranks.
“I saw some of these defenses from Claudine as false admissions of misconduct that is not actually occurring at the level her defenders wanted to suggest,” said Dr. Voss. “The ‘it goes on all the time’ argument.”
Dr. Gay is accused of using two passages from Dr.’s work in her dissertation. Voss has copied, with only a slight paraphrase.
Dr. Voss said it didn’t bother him, as he had been her teacher at Harvard, helping teach her quantitative analysis, and later her colleague in the same laboratory. “It would have been very natural for her to take ideas from me,” he said. “The story of Claudine Gay will force everyone to be a little more careful with quotes.”
The Internet and software like Turnitin, which focuses on academic publishing and research, can make detecting plagiarism easier. And plagiarism watchers are waiting to see what the future of artificial intelligence will bring — more plagiarism or better detection?
But until now, that software has been used more against students than against teachers and administrators.
Many scientists fear that attacks on research will be used by politicians, donors and even other scientists as a pretext to attack their ideological enemies.
“Broad suspicion of intellectuals and academics is a rich vein in American culture, and recent events have supported this,” said Dr. Voss.
Mr. Ackman, head of the hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, has been an outspoken critic of Dr. Gay’s leadership at Harvard, from her handling of anti-Semitism on campus to her support for diversity, equity and inclusion policies. The accusations of plagiarism against her became part of his attack.
After Dr. Gay had announced that she would resign from her presidency but remain on the faculty, Mr. Ackman posted on Students have to withdraw for much less.”
Mr. Ackman declined to comment for this article.
Such attacks worry Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant who also runs the website Plagiarism Today. “There’s a lot of concern that tensions are high and that the people doing the evaluations don’t necessarily have academic research or journalistic integrity in mind,” he said.
Just as new allegations against Dr. Gay were pouring in until the day before she resigned, they have been continued against Dr. Oxman. On Thursday, Retraction Watch posted a blog item proverb that her dissertation took about 100 words without citation or attribution from a 2000 article in Physics World. The blog said it learned of the overlap through Steve Haake, a sports engineer who wrote the original article.
“I have never intentionally presented anyone else’s words or ideas as my own,” said Dr. Oxman said in an emailed statement Friday through a spokesperson for her husband, the day after the Retraction Watch item appeared. “While writing a 330-page dissertation, I missed a few footnotes and some quotation marks. If AI software had been available in 2009, I could have avoided these mistakes. The mistakes are simply a function of my humanity.”
Yet the attacks on scientific integrity will certainly continue. “While President Gay’s resignation is welcome news, the problems at Harvard are far greater than those of any one leader, and the committee’s oversight will continue,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican who heads statement from the House Education and the Workforce Committee, following Dr. Gay’s resignation on January 2.
There was a similar crisis of confidence in universities in the 1980s, when questions were raised about plagiarism and fabricated data in scientific research, including at Harvard. Al Gore, then a Democratic representative from Tennessee, and Representative John Dingell Jr., a Democrat from Michigan, among others held hearings on oversight.
Academics said misconduct in the investigation was rare, and politicians claimed it was underreported, a history published by federal agencies. Many of the witnesses downplayed the problem or said that criminalizing scientific fraud would create a climate of fear that would hamper research.
In the current dispute, Harvard responded through a defamation lawyer at The New York Post first accusations made of plagiarism against Dr. Gay. Mr. Ackman, in his letter to X, has hired lawyers and demanded that Business Insider – which first reported the plagiarism allegations against Dr. Oxman – “suspend” his stories.
“I wouldn’t say history is repeating itself, but there are shadows of it,” said Dr. Oransky. Neither side, he predicted, is likely to back down. “These are really high stakes.”
Kirsten Noyes And Alain Delaqueriere contributed to research.
