It's been part of a recent pattern...though I wanted to point out this particular example because of its despicable racial angle.
Students and colleagues have been checking into the credentials of their professors lately....and finding out that these professors are sadly not credible. A couple of other striking examples....
That's a behavioral psychologist faking research on...."honesty" of all things.
That's the president of Stanford....resigning after 12 of his published works into neuroscience were found to contain false or manipulated data.
Now, admittedly the last one exonerated the president as "not responsible" for the fake data (though you can find deeper dives into the investigation that show how unlikely this is and how it's probably an attempt to protect the university's reputation)....his name was on the research, he got the credit for the research, and ultimately his resignation was an acknowledgment of his responsibility for the research.
There's also the famous "sokol squared" hoax where three individuals got together and published award winning fake research papers in several journals focused on the humanities and liberal arts. One paper was literally a feminist screed with large portions plagiarized from Mein Kampf and the subject of "jews" was replaced with "men" or "the patriarchy".
The whole thing is created by these huge incentives to fake results for prestige and a career....while peer reviewing research is a undesirable and unprofitable endeavor.
One only needs to consider how university's make money. They largely make money off of students who have no reason to be there. If one were to look up the number of students pursuing a degree in sociology for example...one will find a staggeringly high number of students despite the demand for sociologists in real life being extremely low. The one place they are desirable....or at least the place they are mostly desirable....is in academia. In academia, their proposed research is funded through a government grant system that...above all else....wants results. Most research, done correctly, yields no interesting results....no confirmed hypothesis....and typically fails to prove the premise it is founded upon. It would be wrong to say this is a waste though...because as long as it was well done and the results are valid....any future researcher with the same idea can find this research, see that their idea was already tried and is incorrect....and they can avoid wasting their time and the taxpayers' money.
However, failed research doesn't typically improve the career of the researcher....and it doesn't improve the reputation of the university....and doesn't inspire confidence in funding further research. Sometimes research leads to an interesting findings....but if they are politically sensitive or undesirable....that research gets buried.
The peer review/replication-crisis in the soft sciences and humanities was itself the subject of research a while back with the intention if finding similarities in what was considered bad or completely fraudulent research. If I remember correctly, the number 1 indicator of bad or fake research was...
1. Political convenience. If the research was done with the goal of verifying a particular political narrative that was either new or very popular.....and the results show that narrative is true or justified....the chances of that research being of high quality were very low. I'll give a couple of quick examples...
1. I saw a poster on here once reference research claiming that white supremacy in the classroom was the cause of black students on average having worse grades than white students. Amongst the factors it claimed were a result of white supremacy....AAVE use by black students was one of these factors. I had to read it a couple of times to make sure I was not reading it wrong...and then pointed out the flaw to the person posting it. It was a ridiculous premise to claim white supremacy was to blame for the way some black students spoke.
2. Back in college, one of the term papers I wrote was a comparison of research into the effectiveness of gun control laws on gun violence in crimes. While I concluded that both sides of the argument were not without their share of bad research....the "less gun control laws= less gun crimes" was so bad it was hard to find any good research in favor of this position
at all. For example, I noticed the main researcher who tried to show less gun control laws were better for society was a guy named Lott (its been a long time so I hope I remember his name correctly) and not only did he make up the overwhelming majority of research opposed to gun control....his methodologies were so bad they produced results that were statistically so unlikely they were basically fantasy. One paper concluded that millions of examples of guns used as self defense occurred every single year....despite not being reported to the police. This was data acquired over anonymous phone surveys....and included examples like "showing your gun to a would be assailant" who then retreated or otherwise committed no crime as valid examples of "self defense" with a firearm. In reality, flashing your gun to someone who hasn't actually assaulted you or even verbally threatened to harm you isn't self defense....it's a crime. Lott however, never bothered to verify these accounts nor did he consider the full range of circumstances in which they occurred....he simply took the gun owners' words for it. Ultimately, without really any good research on the side of less gun control, I had concluded the side in favor of gun control laws to be the more valid since it had at least some good research. This is likely the reason why the Republican party passed legislation preventing the government from funding research into gun control laws and their effectiveness.
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