Maybe LaCour is hoping to bluff his way through the whole thing? That's certainly something I've seen in students caught plagiarizing, usually with a series of increasingly panicky stories, presumably in the hope that the whole thing will simply blow over if it's allowed to go on long enough.
I guess since the consequences of admitting to the whole thing would likely be that he had to leave the field and find a new career there's not too much downside to putting up a fight. Pushing back long enough that people stop paying attention makes him controversial but the whole thing is maybe salvageable, whereas doing that and it failing only leaves him in the same place that confessing up front would since the people he'd be ruining any reputation with aren't going to be ones he deals with anyway.
Yeah, I dunno. Last I heard, the problem was that LaCour couldn't or wouldn't produce the original survey information. As related here, co-author Green says:
I brought their report to the attention of Lynn Vavreck, Professor of Political Science at UCLA and Michael LaCour's graduate advisor, who confronted him with these allegations on Monday morning, whereupon it was discovered that he on-line survey data that Michael LaCour purported to collect could not be traced to any originating Qualtrics source files. He claimed that he deleted the source file accidentally, but a Qualtrics service representative who examined the account and spoke with UCLA Political Science Department Chair Jeffrey Lewis reported to him that she found no evidence of such a deletion. On Tuesday, Professor Vavreck asked Michael LaCour for the contact information of survey respondents so that their participation in the survey could be verified, but he declined to furnish this information.
I assume LaCour is now suggesting that he will be providing this information. Maybe he will. Who knows. "I accidentally deleted the file" sounds pretty bad, though.
Maybe there was a flood in LaCour's office that destroyed all of his original survey information.
LaCour isn't the only one faking data: https://fauxphilnews.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/kripke-resigns-after-allegations-of-academic-fraud/
Hey, now. That headline initially took me aback, but okay. Who knew that the professional philosophical world produces an equivalent of The Onion?
Back on the LaCour thing: I think what surprises me the most is that Green agreed to co-author a paper based on surveys he'd never seen, and apparently didn't ask to see.
Is that normal in the sciences? You receive some graphing and charting and number-crunching of (alleged) data, and you say, "Okay, let's write this up, jointly."
Perhaps it is.
The quote in 2 certainly makes it seem that LaCour is completely fucked. How was teaching at Princeton, bro?
How was teaching at Princeton, bro?
Who are you talking to?
9: Is that considered a problem, then? I don't really want to see the entirety of social science research cast into doubt, but I remain surprised.
The cynic in me thinks this can't be the first time he's done some kind of academic misconduct, and maybw he's learned from before that denying and appealing often works in college.
I've certainly written papers with co-authors where I didn't double-check their part of the number-crunching, and vice versa, though I've never written a (non-theoretical) paper where I didn't have access to the data, and would be very reluctant to do so.
The "Irregularities" write-up is very convincing, and what's quoted in 2 is, if anything, even more damning.
I think it really depends on the nature of the collaboration. I've published papers with people whose expertise was in a technique I know very little about in terms of the workaday details. Even if they showed me their raw data, they could show me nonsense and I would have no way of knowing.
That's why many journals now have footnotes where the specific contributions of each author are explicitly noted.
Social science, of course, may work very differently.
There should be some weirdness in the money trail here too... That is, someone's grant was presumably supposed to pay the survey company and presumably didn't. Did that money go to LaCour? Did it just never go out and no one paid attention? You'd expect there to have been some conversation about how much money would be appropriate. I guess if the financial people weren't tied into that discussion the profs wouldn't know whether the money got spent or not without following up explicitly with someone. But at any rate it should be a quick way to 100% confirm or deny whether the surveys took place. Either some accountant at UCLA has a record of the money going out or the money didn't go out.
The baller move would be to say that the success of the Irish referendum confirms his work far better than any kind of data integrity ever could.
14: According to the story I read, there were no grants.
Yeah from what Ibfollowed it sounded like maybe he invented grants that allegedly paid for the invented data.
Yeah, that LaCour hasn't fully grasped how fucked he is is only mildy interesting.
I believe Green was mainly involved with the study design. It was a well designed study.
11 - That's almost always the case with academic fraud, right? I mean, once you're talking graduate school or beyond someone who tries something usually does it because they've succeeded before.* (That's why a professor getting caught plagiarizing, for example, almost always turns out to have done it repeatedly in the past and once people know to go looking it all starts to come out.)
Unless LaCour has a really amazing story (and "give me a week and I'll tell you" sounds almost exactly like "hold on I need to think of something here") he wasn't panicking at the last minute or anything, but planning out a fairly detailed con.
*Or in at least one memorable case for me, though with an undergraduate, failing to get away with it in the past. If you're retaking a course because you failed it after got caught plagiarizing (twice!) is a bit confusing. But even then I'm guessing the student had been doing it for years in other courses, which would have been in the business school. (Majoring in marketing! No one was surprised.)
I've never put my name on a paper where I didn't either check all the details myself or at least have a good argument that they were approximately correct. But I've definitely had coauthors who didn't check any details at all--in the most extreme cases, coauthors who did nothing except skim the draft and ask a few simple questions, basically engaging with the project only at the level that an alert audience member at a talk might. So if I had been doing something fraudulent, they wouldn't have caught it.
(Of course, I would strongly object to letting such people be co-authors at all if they didn't in some way have a strong influence over my hiring and/or promotion.)
It seems like someone could game that inattention in order to gain advantage or amusement. You could just write up a bunch of data, invite them to be a coauthor and then beg off due to 'too much other work' or let them submit the paper after 'accidentally' leaving your name off it or something. Then you could either reveal that they had committed fraud, or hold it over them as blackmail material! If you did the former it would put them in a really awkward spot because "no (accuser's name) committed the fraud blame him!" is like the least convincing defense imaginable.
20 and 21 fall in the category of "comments I really shouldn't write, at least under my usual pseud," don't they?
Depends on what kind of fraud you were doing.
11.2: The only con I can see getting him out of this is if he reveals it was a Sokaling of Science, his thesis committee, and his co-author, with prior approval from the IRB at his real institution.
24: What kind of fraud do you have to do to get ahead here?
I don't understand how inventing a grant would work. Surely the advisor would be involved somewhere in the grant procuring process.
Most likely an old, powerful one.
26 - He got a relatively prestigious mentor at a different school and a co-authorship on a paper at a good journal and a job at Princeton which he might not have gotten otherwise. The events leading up to that look planned out enough that it's totally believable that that was his long term intention, and he thought that no one would notice or look into things more seriously.
14, 16, 17: Certainly the grants no longer appear on his CV.
30: I agree that it really doesn't look like the sort of situation one slips into by accident, or even by spinning out of control. I was just trying to come up with anything which might even semi-exonerate him...
One could imagine him only hatching the fraud plan after failing to get any funding. That's still horrible, but one can at least understand it better.
It's a bit bizarre that his more famous coauthor and his advisor weren't getting the grants for themselves. It seems crazy to think that a grad student could raise that kind of money on his own.
1. Deny, deny, deny.
2. The senior author has cut and run very effectively.
3. The grants are all fake. This makes the PhD supervisor (Vavreck) look really, really bad IMO--worse than the opportunistic co-author, in many ways. I don't know the supervisor myself, but she seems like a recognizable academic type.
Could someone with keys to this place make 20, 21, 23, and this one presidential or something? I President Dumbass should stop quasi-publicly criticizing his elders until tenure.
2. The senior author has cut and run very effectively.
So the senior Ivy League professor gets to just run off like that? With no further questions asked (about his judgment, if not his integrity), and no apparent harm to his reputation?
That's as good of a definition of "senior" as you are likely to find.
35: Your secrets are safe, Señor Presidente.
¡Gracias! But I prefer to be known as "Supreme Director."
Bernardo O'Higgins has my favorite presidential name of all time.
It's not clear to me what Green is guilty of that should result in a big hit to his reputation. It seems the main thing he did wrong was being a moderately lazy in a way that's just incredibly common among senior academics (namely, not digging enough into the boring stuff done by junior colleagues). I mean it is going to be a small hit to his reputation, in that everyone is going to remember this embarrassing story whenever they think of him, but unless he had a reputation as a real micromanager it's not really going to change his reputation all that much.
The advisor and the department are in a trickier situation. *Someone* should have picked up on the grant fraud.
Grant fraud really confuses me. I'm used to, at least with the agencies/programs I deal with, only faculty even being eligible to apply for grants. How does a grant student even plausibly get a grant or get control of the money for an existing grant?
Uh, "a grad student," not "a grant student."
I have to admit I never thought of just putting that I'd received a million dollars in grants on my CV in order to get a job at Princeton.
This is Green's CV -- I imagine that his collaborations with grad students (he has also co-authored a paper with one of the guys proving that LaCour was a fraud) are more a case of a senior guy investing in the future of his field than cynical credit-seeking. I also think that papers where the lead author is a grad student and the second author is a bigshot are pretty clearly not going to be studies where the senior guy is the one responsible for collecting the data and punching it into SAS or whatever.
So would this kind of fraud be harder in arXiv or other emerging systems?
More links to the story here: http://retractionwatch.com. This is a great blog to follow for anyone interested in scientific misdoing.
I love that one of them is just "Anonymous grant." Why not just increase the amounts on your other fake grants?
Wait. People get "anonymous" grants? Grad students get anonymous grants? At that point are you listing your mum, dad, girlfriend, rich mate that never lets you buy a round, but trying not to say so?
Have we spoken intensively enough about Joe Morrissey? Just reading his Wikipedia entry and came across this:
"Frequent episodes of unethical, contumacious, or otherwise inappropriate conduct mar Joseph D. Morrissey's career as prosecutor and private defence attorney," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit noted in September 2002. The court said, "Evidence ... demonstrates Morrissey's 15-year history of contempt citations, reprimands, fines, suspensions, and even incarcerations arising from unprofessional conduct mostly involving an uncontrollable temper, inappropriate responses to stress and dishonesty."[6][13]
The Axact Foundation could offer consortia grants to aspiring CV builders. Consortia members include include Barkley, Columbiana,...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/world/asia/pakistan-widens-inquiry-into-fake-diplomas.html
Where is Smearcase? I would really like to know of good, in-print recordings of Lucia di Lammermoor.
The fake grant could be a case of telling different stories to different people. To Vavrek: "Green has a grant for this". To Green: "Vavrek and I have a grant for this".
The real scandal will be when it is revealed just how many parking spaces he had allotted to his department.
I wonder if no one thought to be suspicious about the grant just because no one has ever faked having a grant before. It's a brand new frontier in fraud!
There is sort of a The Producers air around the whole business.
OT to essear: I have now read The Buried Giant and it has erased any sense at all that Ishiguro writes clunky prose when (I take it) he isn't trying to.
The fake grant could be a case of telling different stories to different people. To Vavrek: "Green has a grant for this". To Green: "Vavrek and I have a grant for this".
He listed himself as the PI on all of them.
Did he make false claims about federal grants (NIH & etc.)? I imagine there's interesting potential for trouble if you do that.
He semi-wisely kept it to private foundations.
Privatization for the win!
(Of course, for the well-established that's one of the big "benefits" of privatization across the board--potential crimes become something less.)
OT to essear: I have now read The Buried Giant and it has erased any sense at all that Ishiguro writes clunky prose when (I take it) he isn't trying to.
Wait, does this mean that it is or isn't clunky?
I really need to get this, if only for the LEGO M.O.D.O.K.
http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Hulk-Lab-Smash-76018
46: I imagine that his [Green's] collaborations with grad students (he has also co-authored a paper with one of the guys proving that LaCour was a fraud) are more a case of a senior guy investing in the future of his field than cynical credit-seeking.
It's fine to give the seal of approval to the work of graduate students as long as you've actually examined their work. If you haven't, well ... your seal of approval isn't worth much at all.
But "examined their work" is not equivalent to "checking to make sure that the raw data weren't completely made up." There are plenty of things that can be examined while assuming that the co-author is not lying to you about where the data comes from.
68 is right. On the writing papers with graduate students, you sort of have to do that if you want to advance and/or not be a huge asshole.
For values of "you" that are tenured faculty at a Ph.D. producing institution.
But "examined their work" is not equivalent to "checking to make sure that the raw data weren't completely made up."
Why not?
I mean, come on. You're giving your seal of approval to some study results, and you don't think it necessary to confirm that the study results are genuine, accurate?
Is the idea just that tenured faculty are too busy to actually confirm things?
67: The guy generated fake data, which he gave to Green to analyze. It didn't occur to Green that the data was faked. Why would it?
72: because the data was maybe too good to be true? Hindsight 20/20 and all that, but still...
Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown research.
Is the idea just that tenured faculty are too busy to actually confirm things?
Leaving aside how unlikely anybody is to check for faked data without some specific cause to do so, my entire career is based upon tenured faculty being too busy/not having the skills to do what I do.
It's not just that the data was faked - there was a convincing story about how it was acquired etc, down to which suppliers were used and so-on. To catch that kind of stuff, you'd have to be pretty much doing forensic audits on your co-authors.
74: well, I believe Green's response to the data looking very good was to have LaCour replicate the study. This turned out not to be foolproof, but it wasn't totally irresponsible negligence either.
I finally started clicking on the links. He makes very nice graphs.
I just figured out that Green is Donald Green. I remember at least one of his pieces from back when I was in that world.
It's worth noting that the follow-up study was single-authored by LaCour, which reinforces my impression here that Green actually behaved reasonably well. This is exactly how you want senior people to collaborate with graduate students: going out of their way to meet graduate students at other schools (Green runs a summer school), helping them launch a great project, giving good large-scale advice on the project (e.g. what sort of followup paper you should do), getting out of the way to make it clear that the student is the lead on the project (making LaCour first author on the first paper and then not coauthoring any subsequent papers), and then writing a strong outside recommendation letter.
Where is Smearcase? I would really like to know of good, in-print recordings of Lucia di Lammermoor.
I just got done calling you an idiot in another thread but sure. I don't know what "in print" means at this point because there are no more record stores. I'm looking on Amazon. I guess if you want to hear it sung beautifully get Sutherland in 1961 under Pritchard and if you want to hear it sung meaningfully, get Callas under Karajan. If modern sound is important, there appears to be a studio recording with Damrau and Calleja, both very good singers, from a year ago.
81: I forgot about that. I've taken classes from two of those instructors and with one of them.
82: Thanks! I'm going to be playing it for my birthday party, which is coming up soon, so I wanted to find something that was fairly easy to track down.
81 offers a reasonably persuasive defence of Green's (innocent and well-intentioned) role in this case of academic fraud. But it seems oddly abstracted from the question of judgment, and from the issue of "quality control" (or peer review), which go to the heart of this case.
As a graduate student, LaCour could not go very far (certainly not to a job at Princeton!) without the support and endorsement of senior mentors and colleagues. What was the responsibility of these senior people in terms of double-checking LaCour's claims (maybe not a detailed audit of his alleged data, but perhaps a query, or even a raised eyebrow, at his supposed hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money?).
L'affaire LaCour is already all over the right-wing nuthouse side of the Internets, as a signal example of how "liberals lie" and "the academy is a just one big liberal fraud." This stuff can have real-world, nagative consequences.
I guess I'm not comfortable with the idea that senior scholars are just doing their job when they haplessly fall prey to junior grifters and con artists, as though these august elders had no responsibility, and no effective tools, to impose some disciplinary standards and to insist on meaningful peer review.
The grant money is weird and should definitely have raised some suspicions somewhere, though my inclination is that's a bigger problem for Vavreck than for Green. Since grant money always goes through a particular school, it's not all that easy for someone at Columbia to inquire about the status of grants going through the UCLA grant office. One possibility is that this is a failure of communication between Green and Vavreck, and that Green should have been in contact with Vavreck directly about who was going to be helping LaCour through applying for grants for this project. It seems likely to me that Green and Vavreck each thought the other knew what was going on with the money.
I agree with 85. Somewhere in all of the articles on this, I saw a comment to the effect of "Academics don't ask other academics where their money came from." This is so far from my (non)academic experience as to be astounding to me.
I am just wrapping up a project on which I collaborated with three research partners, including an academic, and I literally cannot imagine we could have gotten past THE FIRST CONVERSATION without being clear on who was paying for it.
Maybe my corner of the nonprofit world is unusually paranoid, but you would never, never commit to a project without knowing the funder. First to make sure there actually WAS funding, second to make sure it wasn't something you didn't want to be associated with (a friend of mine had a thing years ago about whether to accept money from the Playboy Foundation), third to forewarn yourself in case the funder was inclined to be the meddlesome type (either with your project or your findings), and fourth because keeping stuff that is generally public knowledge* secret is a really, really bad warning flag in a co-collaborator.
*Some smaller grants are made using the program officer's discretionary funds and may not show up in the foundation's public records in quite the same way.
(In all fairness, I should say that I was super-judgmental of Green when I first heard the story, but after seeing more details am semi-satisfied that he was reasonably diligent. At least he seems to have taken pro-active steps when the data seemed too good to be true. I'm still hung up on the grants, thing, though, because it is so far outside my own experience that I'm just thoroughly befuddled by it.)
For one thing, graduate students can't be PIs at UCLA (http://www.adminpolicies.ucla.edu/app/Default.aspx?&id=900). That's pretty standard and Green should have known that, so there's definitely something a bit weird. I think it's fair to fault Green a bit for not thinking through how the grants would work and emailing Vavreck about whether she would serve as official PI for the grants. Though I haven't seen any detail about what Green thought was going on. If LaCour lied to Green in a plausible way (saying he and Vavreck would apply for the grants), it's not surprising that Green didn't bother to check up on that behind LaCour's back.
I haven't seen any reporting on interview that really gets into any detail on the grant issue at all. So I just don't know how much to fault Green on that front. Depending on the facts I can see it as going anywhere from Green being really negligent in an embarrassing way, to Green not being at fault at all. I just don't feel confident at all.
I was just reading the interview in CHE with the graduate students who uncovered the fraud, and one of them says:
"Also, I knew the paper had appeared with only Michael's name on it before Don's name appeared on it. Mike had done this as his project, and had only later decided to invite Don to help him with the data analysis."
In that situation, I'm not at all surprised the Green didn't inquire about the grant situation: the data was already gathered and there was no need to raise money.
Lucia as a birthday party soundtrack, huh. For effect, maybe enter the party in a blood-stained wedding gown. It could even double as a parable about the Foreskin Holocaust. Activism can happen anywhere.
Professor Green? Of course: http://www.youtube.com/professorgreentv
no wonder he got stabbed.
(seriously, we got to 93 without anyone picking up the free £20 note there?)
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Pigeon masks for everyone! (Google street view catch--staged i would assume.)
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97: you don't figure those people were all just independently going about their business?
I would distinguish between independently going about their business, doing *something* as a group, and the specific something being trying to get on Google street view in pigeon masks. I believe the last is the most likely.
A new post over at LG&M inclines me to think that LaCour's collaborators are more culpable than I initially thought. Apparently LaCour, a graduate student, was claiming close to a million dollars in total grant funding from various sources on his CV.
That should have set off someone's BS detector.
He's just so wonderfully beside the point, as long as he stays away from here.
Another thing that is strange about the grants is that universities demand their [obscenely excessive] cut for administrative overhead. In my experience this is handled thru your dept so wtf poly sci department head?
I think he did the paper with people from another department, not his own.
93 best best best! You typed my thought!
Can't face Sutherland myself I just find her sort of mindlessly relentlessly on and on and on ish. Then I start thinking unkind jolly hockey sticks, princess horse face thoughts and just - no.
93 best best best! You typed my thought!
Can't face Sutherland myself I just find her sort of mindlessly relentlessly on and on and on ish. Then I start thinking unkind jolly hockey sticks, princess horse face thoughts and just - no.
Well, the trouble with Sutherland is really Bonynge, the hack. She's more interesting on any recording with someone else conducting, but after he became a package deal with her, there's no real avoiding him.
Was this million dollars in grant money being claimed anywhere other than the CV? If I'm already working with someone, going and digging out their CV is about the last thing I'm going to bother to do.