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0 pointswoofie115y ago0 comments

I went to MIT. MIT has procedures involving NDAs and non-disparage agreements to cover up academic fraud. Academic fraud widespread, at least in the departments I worked with, and the Institute can apply *a lot* of pressure to get people to shut up. Except for anonymous web forums, I did.

I'm sorry, but this isn't letting the individuals off the hook, any more than accusing the KKK of being racist isn't letting a particular KKK member off the hook, or a mafia of engaging in extortion letting any particular member off-the-hook.

There are no effective, enforceable structures for stopping academic fraud. Most people who've engaged in it did not become persona non grata, let alone been fired; most continue to hold tenured academic jobs. Worst-case outcomes are a multiyear slap-on-the-wrist of some kind. That, combined with intense competition, led some people to cheat. Eventually, when it turned out to work okay, it became a culture of cheating.

Yes, the individuals involved should be punished, but much more important are:

1) Procedures for getting crooks out of the academy

2) Reducing competition, so there aren't the intense incentives to cheat

3) Implementing transparency. Why do universities get to use taxpayer dollars (grant / tuition overhead) and charitable contributions to cover up this stuff? Governance should be transparent and open. Data should be transparent and open whenever possible. NDAs and non-disparage agreements should be off-bounds.

4) Big money should be out. Yes, I know how much the typical professor gets paid, but the million-dollar salaries for presidents, Nobel laureates, and similar high-ranked positions distort things.

5) Related to the prior, conflict-of-interest provisions should be just a couple orders of magnitude more enforceable. The industry<->academia and especially startup<->academia pipelines help ground things and prevent things from getting detached, but if you're doing research to start a startup to make a few million dollars, that tends to apply extreme pressure to bake data.

6) Hiring and promotion structures shouldn't be so impact-focused. The easiest way to have impact is to tell politically-popular lies. P-hunt for data that shows liberals are smarter than conservatives, atheists are more open-minded than evangelicals, racism is wholesale, wokeness is the way to solve it, and so on. On this list, the really most harmful is when you reach correct conclusions from false data (much more so, even, than false conclusions from false data).

... and so on. This should happen wholesale, across academia, to be eligible for federal grants or tuition subsidies.

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bobthechef5y ago

Any worldly institution that operates this way will implode. Establishment academia has lost a great deal of clout, deservedly so. It's going to collapse sooner or later because people aren't intoxicated by the mirage of establishment academia like they used to be. Eventually, new schools and institutions will emerge that will better conform with human nature and human needs that will replace these obsolete and failed institutions of today. The example of the Benedictines is probably especially meaningful. When the Roman Empire fell, it was the Benedictines that preserved what they could and around which new communities formed that hunkered down for the long winter. European civilization then sprang from these Benedictine communities. And frankly, not just academia is collapsing, though academic rot is often one canary in a coal mine for other manifestations of cultural and social rot and itself a symptom of rot higher up the chain.

rdtwo5y ago

Maybe it will happen but it will likely take a couple human lifetimes to get there

woofie11OP5y ago

Yeah. It ain't happening. I thought Harvard would take some flack when people noticed 43 percent of white students admitted are legacy, athletes, or related to donors or staff. That blew over in a week. Varsity Blues did nothing either.

Liberals will have faith in elite schools. Conservatives will have faith in churches. Liberals will distrust religious organizations, and conservatives will distrust the academy. We're polarized enough that scandals probably won't change that.

MIT had a huge Epstein cover-up. They did an investigation, threw everyone who came forward under a bus, and did nothing to faculty who partied with ladies on Epstein's island. If you'd like references:

* MIT's factfinding report mentions no faculty visits to the island

* Epstein's web page has a ton of photos of himself with top MIT faculty on the island. Those are the tip of an iceberg -- he didn't bother posting photos with lower-tier faculty, many of whom partied there too.

* News reports indicate Epstein coerced one of the girls to offer herself to Minsky.

By all accounts, Minsky declined and behaved with all propriety (he was there with his wife), but he was far from the only one on the island, and at least rumors suggest others weren't as proper. Are rumors true? That's kind of the point of a fact-finding report.

This became super-visible within some MIT communities, and I kinda expected MIT to implode. It didn't even merit a news story. MIT just shut down internal mailing lists where this was being discussed.

Even if a scandal did do something, the endowments are now astronomical. A mere scandal won't shut anything down.

I believe the only way to do this is to place restrictions on government funding. Institutions which use NDAs, non-disparage agreements, don't respond to FOIA-style requests, don't publish in the open, don't share research data when reasonable (e.g. except for PII), and otherwise shouldn't receive federal funds, shouldn't receive foundation funds, and shouldn't receive alumni donations.

That's hard, but I'm not sure if impossible. Elite schools have a lot of power in government, but things are over-the-top enough that if this isn't brought under control, this isn't getting kept bottled up forever. Brands will suffer.

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