Commentary
Last summer, I wrote about “Harvard’s Big Problem”—the problem of having so many people want to attend the school that it causes endless complications for its admissions office. It is a “problem” that many struggling colleges wish they had.
Since then, as you know, Harvard has found itself grappling with a much bigger problem—experiencing the public humiliation and disgrace of having an ugly cheating scandal come to light—not among the student body but among both the university’s administration and faculty.
In the most highly publicized case, the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, was alleged to be a frequent plagiarist. In a move of shocking pusillanimity, the Harvard Corp.—the dozen or so people who are the legal chiefs of all of Harvard’s activities—unanimously praised Ms. Gay, reassigning her from administration to faculty at the same salary of more than $800,000 per year.
Unfortunately for Harvard, Ms. Gay wasn’t the only highly visible official accused of cheating. A few months after Ms. Gay’s peccadilloes came to light, it was revealed that Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri A. Charleston, was accused of 40 instances of plagiarism. And with grim irony, Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School known for her work on dishonesty and unethical behavior, has been accused of falsifying results in at least four of her published papers.
How widespread is the alleged cheating at Harvard? Who knows? It may have been enough that applications to Harvard fell by about 5 percent in 2024, while applications to other universities with elite reputations rose. That’s just a blip. Harvard’s longstanding prestige and its powerful reputation for having connections with many of the country’s power centers mean that it is in no danger of falling to second-class status. Obviously, tens of thousands of applicants felt that the value of the Harvard brand was far more important to them than egregious ethical lapses.
However, it isn’t just Harvard that we need to worry about but also our country.
Academia, in general, is rife with fraudulent research. For example, writing in Reason, author and science correspondent Ronald Bailey said that “the journal Science and Engineering Ethics reported that more than 15 percent of researchers had witnessed others who had committed at least one instance of research misconduct (falsification, fabrication, plagiarism), while nearly 40 percent were aware of others who had engaged in at least one questionable research practice.”
According to a report in The Guardian published earlier this year, “tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals” and “medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.”
The Guardian also reported that more than 10,000 papers published in research journals were retracted last year alone, and that number is believed to be only “the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud.”
A study of dozens of trials in government-funded control-trial medical research found that 44 percent contained false data. This has serious implications for public policy. It raises the question as to how trustworthy the various assertions put forth by government agencies reporting on climate change are.
A survey from 15 years ago found that 34 percent of scientists receiving federal funding “have acknowledged engaging in research misconduct to align research with their funder’s political and economic agenda,” according to the Foundation for Economic Education. Given the way that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention behaved during the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems likely that such misconduct may be even more extensive today.
The fact is that “official science” sometimes involves “adjusting” data. For example, according to multiple sources, such as Tony Heller of the Real Climate Science website and climate analyst Paul Homewood, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has repeatedly revised temperature records from decades ago downward while tweaking more recent measurements upward. The NOAA also, according to a special report from The Epoch Times earlier this month, “fabricates temperature data for more than 30 percent of the 1,218 [U.S. Historical Climatology Network] reporting stations that no longer exist.” Yes, it actually records as actual data temperature readings from imaginary stations.
Cheating, plagiarism (a form of theft), fake science, data fudging, and fabricating are endemic and far-reaching. Even the president of the United States committed plagiarism in law school, but that hasn’t kept him from ascending to the highest position in the land.
We can all think of instances we’ve read or heard about in which everyone from college coaches to orchestral conductors to business executives to members of Congress have falsified their resumes. Dishonesty is rampant. The message to our children is sickening: “Hey, kids, the way to get ahead in the USA is to lie and cheat and steal.”
What this means for the future of our society is unknown, but it suggests a larger breakdown of morality, justice, and honest government (apologies to those of you who view “honest government” as an oxymoron). In fact, just a few days ago, a Rasmussen poll sponsored by The Heartland Institute showed that 28 percent of all voters say that they “would engage in at least one kind of illegal voting practice in order to help their preferred candidate—either President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump—win the 2024 election.” This is startling. In an age of 50–50 partisan splits and razor-thin election margins, it should alarm us all.
The cheating scandal at Harvard is huge on its own, but in the context of a society that seems to have lost its moral anchor, cheating seems more like an existential threat to our country. We clearly need a moral revival. Our children deserve better.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
