Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Let no one else's work evade your eyes.

For some reason my epistemic ecosystem is kicking up several second and third-order opinions or analyses regarding academic dishonesty.  No known causal reason for this.  In doing so they connect a couple or three dots which should have all along been obvious but which I have not seen commented on.

Fresh off the debacle of charges of bias, antisemitism and plagiarism against former Harvard University President, there is an increasing focus on the moral, ethical, and academic snake pit which Harvard has become.  

I have seen two or three articles mentioning the relatively recent fracas at Harvard which offers a striking contrast with the case of Claudine Gay.  As a reminder, Claudine Gay was the child of a Haitian concrete tycoon who was born and raised in wealthy and genteel circumstances in the US.  She was promoted to president of the Harvard University on the grounds of an anemically thin academic career.  She had eleven published papers, and no books, and no recognizable academic honors.  Her field was the very closed field of group victimhood studies.

In contrast, also contemporaneously at Harvard, was Roland Fryer.  A scholar's scholar.  From Wikipedia.

Roland Gerhard Fryer Jr. (born June 4, 1977) is an American economist and professor at Harvard University. Following a difficult childhood, Fryer earned an athletic scholarship to the University of Texas at Arlington, but once there chose to concentrate instead on academics. Graduating cum laude in 2+1⁄2 years, he went on to receive a Ph.D. in economics from Pennsylvania State University in 2002 and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago with Gary Becker. He joined the faculty of Harvard University and rapidly rose through the academic ranks; in 2007, at age 30, he became the second-youngest professor, and the youngest African-American, ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2011 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 2015.

Fryer began his research career studying social image and segregation, and then moved toward empirical issues, particularly those concerning race and ethnicity. His work on the racial achievement gap in the US led to a stint as Chief Equality Officer for New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which role Fryer implemented a pilot program rewarding low-income students with money for earning high test scores. In 2019, he published a controversial analysis arguing that Black and Hispanic Americans were no more likely than white Americans to be shot by police in a given interaction with police.

MacArthur fellowship and John Bates Clark Medal - those are some serious academic chops.  He apparently is quite a livewire.

Fryer is married to Franziska Michor, a professor of biology at Harvard. They met in 2006, as members of the Harvard Society of Fellows. He "...courted her by betting a dinner date on whether he could find evidence that smoking reduces cancer..."

He has performed stand-up comedy at The Elbow Room, in West Hartford, Connecticut, inside of their basement comedy club "Stand-Up Underground."

Regrettably for Fryer, he happens to be black and his research routinely overturned popular Mandarin Class narratives and preferred believes.  Luxury beliefs even.  Such productivity, innovative research, and  academic rigor could not be allowed to stand.  Harvard got right on the case.  With Gay as a participant in the academic mob attack.  

In 2019, a series of investigations at Harvard determined that Fryer had engaged in "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature" against at least five women, that he had fostered a hostile work environment in his lab, and also cited unspecified conduct violations regarding Fryer's grant spending and lab finances. As a result, Harvard suspended Fryer without pay for 2 years, closed his lab, and barred him from teaching or supervising students.

In 2021, Harvard allowed Fryer to return to teaching and research, although he remained barred from supervising graduate students for at least another 2 years. Fryer apologized for the "insensitive and inappropriate comments that led to my suspension", saying that he "didn’t appreciate the inherent power dynamics in my interactions, which led me to act in ways that I now realize were deeply inappropriate for someone in my position."

Whether the allegations ever had merit is unclear.  They occurred in the period of the MeToo Movement and the Women's Marches on Washington when there were a plethora of well-founded but also unfounded allegations against famous or powerful men (and not so famous or powerful men as well.)  In that period of time, allegations of sexual misconduct became career-endingly toxic but also clearly simply a tool to beat political or ideological opponents.  See the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing for contemporary examples of unproven, indeed, unsupported, sexual misconduct allegations being used purely and solely for political purposes.

Fryer had many supporters such as Glenn Loury at Brown University.  He observed.

Roland Fryer is the most gifted economist of his generation. Not the most gifted black economist of his generation, the most gifted economist of his generation. Period.

He was tenured at Harvard at the age of 30, he was awarded the American Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, he received a MacArthur “Genius” grant, his publications appeared in some of the most distinguished journals in the field, and his scholarship was regularly covered in the mainstream media. His research upends many commonly held assumptions about race, discrimination, education, and police violence. It is tremendously creative, rigorous, and consequential scholarship, and it cannot be simply written off because it happens to challenge the status quo.

To do the kind of work Roland does, you have to be more than brilliant. You have to be fearless. And I cannot help suspect that now Roland is paying the price for pursuing the truth wherever it leads. Several years ago, he was accused of sexual harassment by a disgruntled ex-assistant. In my opinion and that of many others, those accusations are baseless. But Harvard has used them as a pretext to shut down Roland’s lab, to curtail his teaching, and to marginalize him within the institution.

I’ll not mince words. Those at Harvard responsible for this state of affairs should be utterly ashamed of themselves. They have unnecessarily, heedlessly tarnished the career of an historically great economist. Again, I can't help but suspect that they have effectively buried vital research not because it was poorly done but because they found the results to be politically inconvenient. “Veritas” indeed.

Gay was one of the academics who architected Fryer's suspension and punishment.

The fate of Fryer is a study in contrasts.  First rate mind, voluminous productivity (Researchgate notes 154 papers versus Claudine Gay's 6 papers), high profile and rigorous field, multiple awards and recognitions at the national and international level.  And then there is Gay.  Yet the star was hobbled on the thinnest of allegations while the sloth was pushed into the presidency on the thinnest of bases.  

And when it came to tribulations, Harvard went after Fryer like a junkyard dog while defending Gay against allegations without even bothering to investigate them, much to their later embarrassment.

There you have the Fryer affair - a tawdry and ham fisted assault on an academic star because he was revealing truths unacceptable to the Mandarin Class.   And in the Gay affair, you had the untrustworthy rallying behind the indefensible.   

Fryer, Gay - who's next?  Well . . .  then there is the current Francesca Gino affair.  From Wikipedia:  

Francesca Gino (born 1977/1978) is an Italian-American behavioral scientist.

In June 2023, after an investigation concluded that she had falsified data in her research, she was placed on unpaid administrative leave from her position as Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and as head of HBS's Negotiation, Organizations and Markets (NOM) unit.

The entry is skimpy, presumably because there is a lot of lawfare going on.  The Data Colada folk got involved.

In or before 2020, a graduate student named Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about networking. According to Ziani, she was strongly warned by her academic advisers not to criticize Gino, and two members of her dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted criticism of Gino's paper from it. In spring 2021, Ziani conducted a replication of Gino's study, failing to obtain any of the effects Gino had reported, and concluding "that there was almost no way the paper’s effect size could have been naturally generated" (as summarized by The New Yorker). Ziani, together with a collaborator, subsequently alerted Data Colada, a team of three behavioral scientists known for investigating faulty research, who had been independently developing concerns about Gino's work since 2014. Later that year, the Data Colada team contacted Harvard University about anomalies in four papers by Gino. Harvard subsequently conducted its own internal investigation with the help of an outside firm, which discovered additional data alterations besides the cases raised by Data Colada.

In June 2023, after the internal investigation had resulted in a 1200-page report that found Gino culpable, Harvard Business School placed her on unpaid administrative leave. As described by the dean of HBS, "[a]fter a comprehensive evaluation that took 18 months from start to completion, the investigation committee—comprising three senior HBS colleagues—determined that research misconduct had occurred." Around the same time, Data Colada published four blog posts detailing evidence that the four papers (all of which had been retracted or set to be retracted at that point), and possibly others by Gino, "contain fake data."

In response, Gino has filed a defamation suit.  

It appears to me that Ziani and the Data Collada people have the goods on Gino and that what we are seeing now with the defamation suit is merely a tactic in salvaging what can be salvaged from a ruined career.

Gay, Fryer, Gino - What else?

I am sure more could be uncovered but this morning's observation that hit me closest was one I have should have noticed a while ago.  Principally because I was serendipitously singing along to the song within the past month.  Mary Pat Campbell connected the dot for me this morning in Plagiarism and Faked Data in Academia. 

Tom Lehrer is a professor emeritus in mathematics from Harvard and University of California and who released nearly half a dozen albums of musically and lyrically clever songs in the late 1950s and mid 1960s.  They have been long a favorite of mine and many of them I used as children's songs when the kids were, well, still children.  

Among his songs was . . . Lobachevsky.  The lyrics are:

(spoken) 

Who made me the genius I am today,

The mathematician that others all quote?

Who's the professor that made me that way?

The greatest that ever got chalk on his coat.

(sung) 

One man deserves the credit,

One man deserves the blame,

And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.

Hi!

Nicolai Ivanovich Lobach ---

(spoken) 

I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.

In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:

Plagiarize!

Plagiarize!

Let no one else's work evade your eyes.

Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,

So don't shade your eyes,

But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize ---

Only be sure always to call it please "research".

(sung) 

And ever since I meet this man my life is not the same.

And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.

Hi!

Nicolai Ivanovich Lobach ---

(spoken) 

I am never forget the day I am given first original paper to write.

It was on analytic and algebraic topology oflocally Euclidean

metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifold.

Bozhe moil

This I know from nothing.

But I think of gtreat Lobachevsky and get idea --- ahah!

(sung) 

I have a friend in Minsk,

Who has a friend in Pinsk,

Whose friend in Omsk

Has friend in Tomsk

With friend in Akmolinsk.

His friend in Alexandrovsk 

Has friend in Petropavlovsk,

Whose friend somehow

Is solving now

The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.

And when his work is done ---

Haha! --- begins the fun:

From Dnepropetrovsk to Petropavlovsk,

By way of Iliysk and Novorossiysk,

To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk

To Tomsk to Omsk to Pinsk to Minsk

To me the new will run,

Yes, to me the news will run.

And then I write

By morning, night,

And afternoon,

And pretty soon

My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed,

When he finds out I publish first.

And who made me a big success and brought me wealth and fame?

Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.

Hi!

Nicolai Ivanovich Lobach ---

(spoken) 

I am never forget the day my first book is published.

(sung)

Every chapter I stole from somewhere else.

Index I copy from old Vladivostok telephone directory.

Thie book was sensational!

Pravda --- well --- Pravda --- Pravda said:

(**)

'1t stinks!"

But Izvestia --- Izvestia said:

(**)

'1t stinks!"

Metro-Goldwyn-Moskva buys movie rights for six million rubles,

Changing title to "The Eternal Triangle",

With Ingrid Bergman playing part of hypotenuse.

(sung)

And who deserves the credit?

And who deserves the blame?

Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.

Hi!

It is a wonderfully entertaining song.

Double click to enlarge.

And how could I have not thought of it all during Claudine Gay's travails?  Forget Lobachevsky.  Harvard sang of Lobachevsky and then it produced Claudine Gay.  

In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:

Plagiarize!

Plagiarize!