[ed. note - Not much to say about the SOTU. Instead, here's a moldy old CNS piece from 2002 on the Bellesiles scandal, part of our ongoing Satire Clearance. Off to NYC again today, posts resume late tomorrow or Friday.]
New Haven, CT - The academic world was rocked by another scandal today with the publication of a new Yale study which accuses a pair of prestigious Cornell researchers of plagiarism, in a previous report detailing academic fraud by a Princeton professor, in an even-more previous paper exposing cheating at Columbia.
The new report marked a new skirmish in an ongoing scholarly battle that has raged for more than a year. In September 2000, renowned Princeton psychology professor Victor Agee published a monograph in the Journal of Social Psychology measuring test-cheating behavior among undergraduate students at Columbia. The results of Agee's cheating study were widely cited in the popular press, and he quickly gained fame as a television talk show panelist.
In June 2001, Agee was suspended after two Cornell University statisticians, Dipak Sharma and Peter Millard, published a paper in the journal Biometrika accusing Agee of data manipulation and outright falsification. The results of their study were widely cited in the popular press, and the pair quickly gained fame as television talk show panelists.
According to Yale historian Alan Levin, however, Sharma and Millard's expose of Agee was in large part plagiarized from a 1993 University of Michigan paper chronicling fraud in a Duke study of cheating at the University of California, which itself appears to have been plagiarized by Agee. The report is set to appear in the new edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Late this afternoon, Levin was forced to cancel several television talk show appearances to defend himself against charges that he was engaged in an inappropriate relationship with NYU professor Olivia Nolan, editor of The Journal of University Ethics.
Copy Cats
News of another scandal was greeted with muted sadness in the byzantine, tweedy halls of academe, already shell-shocked by ethics charges against dozens of its prominent stars, including historians Steven Ambrose and Doris Kearns-Goodwin.
Like Ambrose, Kearns-Goodwin had recently been embroiled in a plagiarism controversy. Critic charge that her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: Oh God, Why Won't They Call? contained several passages that appear to be copied, almost verbatim, from articles in Hyannisport Dreamboats and Teddy Teenbeat Poster Pullout Special.
Kearns-Goodwin denies the charges, but the controversy has led to her suspension on several television talk show panel programs including The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, Hardball, The New Hollywood Squares, ESPN Baseball Tonight, Madam Cleo's Psychic Friend Network, QVC Beanie Baby Hour and Norm & Steve's Zoo Crew on Rockin' FM 102.5, Tulsa's 50,000 Watt Drivetime Chainsaw.
While she awaits a ruling from the Harvard Board of Governors, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Kearns-Goodwin says she will continue to fight her case while moonlighting at the Cambridge Kinko's Copy Supercenter.
"I have also created a fascinating new athletic game, which I call 'Baze-Boll'," she added.
Resume Padding
Across state in Amherst charges of resume falsification plague Mount Holyoke historian Joseph Ellis, a vocal defender of President Clinton during his impeachment trial and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history for DNA Jungle Fever: Thomas Jefferson, Monticello's Mandingo Love Machine.
Holyoke officials suspended Ellis in 2001 after he admitted he "may have overstated the record regarding my Vietnam service." In contrast to his vita, in which Ellis had claimed to be "America's numero uno Rambo badass killing machine" and later "the supreme national spiritual leader of the antiwar movement," college investigators discovered that Ellis had spent much of the Vietnam war as a go-go dancer on the popular NBC-TV teen music program Hullaballoo!
It remains to be seen if Ellis can redeem his reputation after the incident, but he has reason to be hopeful. Two icons of the campus Left, Rigoberta Menchu and Edward Said, have survived similar revelations. Menchu, who has written books based on her life as impoverished Central American campesina, and Said, who claims a childhood in Palestinian slums, have seen their careers flourish even after it was revealed they were in fact the 1963 Homecoming Prince and Princess at toney New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois.
Long accustomed to off-field scandals, the college sports world was also rocked by a resume padding scandal earlier this year. The venerable Notre Dame football program released George O'Leary only a few days after naming him head football coach, when O'Leary admitted that he had falsely claimed a varsity letter and two college degrees in his biography.
When contacted, officials in Oslo refused to say whether O'Leary will be asked to return any of his six Nobel Football Prizes.
Atlanta Confidential
Another academic superstar facing ethical brickbats is Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles, author of The Arming of American Morons. Bellesiles earned critical praise and the prestigious Bancroft Prize for the book, which challenged the conventional notion that early Americans were heavily armed.
"It now appears that few, if any, 18th or 19th century Americans owned guns," says Bellesiles in the book's conclusion. "To the contrary, it is clear that most Colonial Americans abhorred firearms, and spent most of their incomes on espresso machines, yoga classes and Eames chairs."
In Bellesiles' thesis, the current proliferation of guns in American society is a relatively recent phenomenon, which he traces to a secret 1963 marketing agreement between weapon conglomerates Daisy and Red Ryder and Boy's Life magazine.
Gun control advocates were quick to embrace Bellesiles' book and its Second Amendment implications, but some questioned his methodology. Bellesiles dismissed early charges of shoddy scholarship as propaganda from the pro-gun lobby, but a persistent stream of criticism from fellow academics soon put him on the defensive.
After repeated requests from fellow historians Bellesiles could not reproduce his original data, citing a freak flash flood that wiped out his 5th floor office in late 2001. Data recovery efforts were further hampered after Bellesiles explained that he had used a complicated data recording method involving index cards, Navajo hieroglyphics, invisible ink and an Etch-A-Sketch.
Other researchers attempting to locate Bellesiles' source data discovered that San Francisco probate records - a chief source cited in his book - were, in fact, destroyed in the city's 1911 earthquake. Bellisiles later hypothesized that the records were in the courthouse in Nacho Burrito County, which researchers were also unable to find.
Last week Emory administrators sent a letter to Bellisiles asking for a response to the growing criticism, but this time the professor was himself missing. When last seen he was in a secluded river wilderness outside Atlanta, paddling a canoe with Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds and a strange looking mountain boy with a banjo.
Fears at the Faculty Club
Some in the academic community worry that the steady stream of recent ethics controversy will leave their profession with permanent scars. Others worry that the spate of resignations and suspensions weaken the tenure system and its guarantees of intellectual freedom.
They point to the experience of Harvard Business Review Editor Suzy Wetlauf, who last week resigned amid disclosures that she was in a "romantic relationship" with General Electric CEO Jack Welch, TV real estate pitchman Ron Popeil and the board of directors at Enron. She also resigned her position as a tenured exotic dancer at the Harvard Business Review's exclusive "Veri-Tas-Tee" gentleman's club.
Still, other members of the professoriate have weathered storms of controversy. Princeton philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer withstood a firestorm last year after suggesting that human children "are no different, morally, than dogs or cats" and suggested that "government agencies should randomly round up children, grind them up and sell the kibble to Purina." Many fellow academic ethicists were shocked by Singer's plan for its endorsement of a government-private sector partnership.
Singer's experience gives some hope to Princeton's Agee, currently embroiled in the complicated 6-way cheating-fraud-plagiarism scandal. "This is really an overblown case of petty faculty politics," says Agee of his case. "These go on all the time."
He points to the ongoing feud between Harvard President Lawrence Summers and star African-American Studies professor Cornell West. Last year West threatened to lead an exodus of Harvard's black faculty to Princeton after Summers obliquely criticized West's recording of a hip hop album.
According to sources, Summers accused West of being a "punkass newjack sucka MC," having "whack flow" and "not representin.'"
West angrily defended his rapping skills, retorting that "Tha C-dog be rollin' hard and gots his shiznit on point" and that he was a "Ninja on the mic." He accused Summers of jealousy and sexual impotence, noting that "old punk fool ain't no stunta like the C-dog."
The bitterness over the incident has subsided, but tempers flared briefly when West, Summers and their posses crossed paths in Harvard Square after a faculty hydraulic car-bouncing competition.
Agee believes his own feud with the other researchers in the cheating-fraud-plagiarism scandal will also be settled peacefully. "When the smoke clears, I hope we can all get back to what we know best," says Agee. "Writing grant proposals."
Agee is hopeful that he will be able to return to Princeton after his suspension, but faces a grueling review by his peers. He is optimistic about he chances, but says he has made backup career plans.
"Contrary to that tired old adage about doers-versus-teachers, I have marketable skills outside academics," says Agee.
"If worst comes to worst," he explains, "there's always journalism."
Nothing compares with the fraud perpetrated by the
University of Toronto on me. See this:
http://ca.geocities.com/uoftfraud/
(If this site is banned on your internet server,
see it as Cached on Google query "university of
toronto fraud")
And still more - nothing, not a word could be
published about this fraud! I feel like I am in
a former Soviet Union and the press is serving
corrupt university and the corrupt government.
Michael Pyshnov.
Posted by: Michael Pyshnov | March 19, 2004 at 09:18 AM
Only a strangely demented mind could find so many examples of academic malfeasence and spin them all into such a great yarn. I am humbled. By the way, your discovery of the Opera, Scumbaggio, was perhaps the funniest thing that I have ever read. I almost miss the Clintons. Forget that.....
Thanks for all the years of brilliant humor, and
Best regards
Posted by: John Zienka | January 21, 2004 at 06:49 PM