And these problems are rife throughout the academy. A Smith College commencement speaker this year even had to surrender her honorary degree when it turned out her speech had been stolen.
It’s not just about copying. There’s also a widely acknowledged “replication crisis”: Scientists publish papers reporting results, but it’s increasingly impossible for others to reproduce those results, leading to what some have called an existential crisis for research.
We’re told cuts to federal spending on higher education will imperil research, but such claims would be more troubling if the “research” were of more reliably high quality.
It’s an open secret that the pressure to produce a constant flood of papers that are publishable and, better yet, interesting enough to spark headlines leads to corner-cutting, “data torture” and overclaiming — or, sometimes, outright fraud.
The result is an expensive self-licking ice cream cone of grant applications and publications, but the actual contribution to human knowledge is often lacking.
Of course, research isn’t the only justification for higher education; we had colleges and universities long before professors saw academic publication as the major goal of their jobs.
