During a brief stint working for Congress decades ago, I used the expression “cheaters, liars, and robbers” to help locate the three House office buildings: Cannon, Longworth, and Rayburn. Those three words unfortunately describe much academic misconduct that is potentially shaking the very foundation of trust and support in American higher education.
Cheaters
Cheating pervades campuses. With the help of new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), students have others (machines) write papers for them. Professors do the same thing, churning out fake papers, which are then submitted to multiple journals. Prominent publishers like Wiley and Springer are alarmed and have rather publicly had many papers retracted or even shut down journals particularly flagrant in the publication of false research. Learning and discovery are advanced by telling truths, not lies, and professors seeking job security, income, and academic fame are increasingly cheating in the reporting of research results. It happens in teaching, too. Professors make inappropriately low demands of their students and award ludicrously high grades to get good student evaluations, sometimes a factor in salary and tenure decisions. University cheating sometimes occurs outside academic core areas, such as when the University of Michigan football program underwent a still unresolved investigation over sign stealing used to help win games.
Liars
Lying is one form of cheating that has gained favor. Prominent university figures like Harvard President Claudine Gay were found to have plagiarized a good deal in building their resume that led to ultimate university leadership. Scarcely a month goes by without some new plagiarism scandal. Steal other people’s ideas and claim them yourselves. Much university lying arises from a failure to disclose campus sins—keeping them under wraps. I was struck during the deplorable attack on Professor Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania when Professor Wax said black Penn Law students, in her extensive experience, were academically weaker than others; the then Penn Law dean said that was not true. One of them was lying. Who was telling the truth? My money is on Professor Wax. Non-disclosure is quasi-lying. Several universities have tried to hide large grants from foreign nations supporting activities at cross-purposes with U.S. foreign policy—the Chinese Confucius Institutes are a good example.
Robbers
The ultimate goal of much campus misdeeds is stealing money—robbery. By creating a fake resume of illegitimate publications, professors hope to gain higher salaries, more outside grant support, and job security—costing universities large sums of money. Others, such as so called “development” or “advancement” administrators, often engage in expensive travel of dubious value. Top university officials use expensive private aircraft to go to ball-throwing contests—football games—having little to do with learning and discovery. Occasionally, there are other forms of theft by nonacademic administrators, such as when someone in the business office awards a lucrative contract for printing to a company which he or some close relative secretly owns. Nepotism often is at work. I know of a family at my university where at one point some years ago six members had obtained good jobs, some without a truly legitimate open search, several with rather dubious qualifications.
Solutions
It is not easy to eliminate lying, graft, and corruption, but some things need to be reassessed. Perhaps tenure, a valuable perk, should be awarded less frequently and removed more easily. Harsher penalties for sins as plagiarism and falsified academic findings seem certainly in order—should plagiarism conducted using government funds be considered a crime punishable by job loss and even prison time?
Rewards and punishments are less pronounced in academia relative to for-profit business. Great academic success might lead to a promotion and $25,000 a year more income, while the rewards for business success are greater—but the costs of failure are also dramatically higher as well. Few truly mediocre universities actually close, but far more businesses do. “Creative destruction” in the private business sector has worked to help us create a society with great prosperity. As a birth dearth and declining public support come to higher education, maybe a closer emulation to competitive market processes could have positive effects. An alternative perspective: a decline in faith in God, a growing contempt for the rule of law, and a deterioration in traditional values more generally may be adding to the growing sins apparent in the academy.
Image created by Jared Gould using AI text-to-image
It sounds like academia must be horrible. But Richard Vedder managed to tolerate it well enough to retire as a Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University. I trust that it wasn’t really that awful.