Dishonesty in the Academy

From celebrity professors to undergraduate students, the academy confronts a growing ethical deficit. The picture isn't pretty, but we can take action now to preserve our professional credibility.

By Robert Hauptman

Academics are committed to the discovery, propagation, and dissemination of truth. They seek it out, confirm it, publish the results of their quest, and teach it to their undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students and protégés. Truth may vary depending on perspective, gender, culture, agenda, zeitgeist, and a host of other factors, but the unequivocal goal of the college or university professor is to ascertain the truth and share it with students and peers. If the truth leads to profitable discoveries, applications, patents, and useful pharmaceuticals as well as honor, awards, and fame, so much the better. But all of these tangential accoutrements bought at truth's expense would be meaningless for most of those who have dedicated themselves to the life of the mind. Had wealth or glory been their goal, they would have chosen other vocations. This does not mean that many people strive only for explanations and meaning and ignore glory, merit raises, and the Nobel Prize. It does mean that truth is not expendable in these ancillary pursuits.

Despite this balanced assessment, academics are sometimes charlatans and frauds: they masquerade as something they are not; they dissimulate; they distort their credentials; they accept bribes; they steal; they plagiarize; they fabricate; and they fudge, cook, trim, republish, and destroy their data. Judith P. Swazey, head of the Acadia Institute, and her fellow researchers surveyed 4,000 doctoral students and professors at 99 universities. According to the December 4, 1993, issue of Science News, the researchers found that "44 percent of students and 50 percent of faculty" were aware of at least two types of unethical activity. Although humanists and social scientists are sometimes culpable, many of the cases of academic dishonesty that surface are found in the hard sciences, especially in biomedicine. Perhaps the pressures and strain for success and grants are just too great in this area; perhaps the overly ambitious are drawn to medical research; perhaps the potential rewards are so alluring that young scientists cannot help themselves. Whatever the reason, medical research provides us with an extraordinarily disproportionate number of infractions.

Ever since 1982, the year William Broad and Nicholas Wade published Betrayers of the Truth, the first substantive overview of scientific misconduct, many important cases have been publicized, discussed, adjudicated, and settled. Even the knowledgeable layperson has heard of Stephen J. Breuning, who pled guilty in federal court to charges that he had falsified data in a research project that influenced the ways in which the mentally retarded are medicated and of Joseph Ellis, who fabricated a personal history of Vietnam War exploits.

But these high-profile academics, some of whom were innocent of the charges, are merely the tip of an expansive iceberg. During the 1990s, monographic analyses documenting the scale of scientific cheating appeared, including Robert Bell's Impure Science: Fraud, Compromise, and Political Influence in Scientific Research and Marcel Lafollette's incisive Stealing into Print: Fraud, Plagiarism, and Misconduct in Scientific Publishing, both released in 1992. In "Federal Actions Against Plagiarism in Research," published in the spring 1996 issue of the Journal of Information Ethics, A. R. Price points out that between 1989 and 1995, the Office of Scientific Integrity, the Office of Research Integrity, and the National Science Foundation found a total of twenty-three grant recipients guilty of plagiarism. Many were top-of-the-line researchers (some holders of both M.D.'s and Ph.D.'s) at prestigious American institutions. It is disheartening that those who hold our health in their metaphorical hands are willing to betray a trust and cause harm; there can be little doubt that many perpetrators go undiscovered.

Cheating

Students cheat. They copy their friends' work; they purchase papers from term-paper mills and Internet sites; they crib test data, formulas, and answers; they misuse calculators, software, and computer systems. They dream up schemes to avoid learning while concomitantly getting excellent grades. They purchase answers to SAT and GRE exams from entrepreneurs who hire other test takers in distant time zones to memorize questions. They also hack and crack and destroy their peers' chemical and biological experiments—-especially in medical school, where such training inculcates the values that arm our future medical practitioners.

When academics are accused of unethical activity, colleagues often come to their defense. If they are found guilty, punishment is frequently minimal—confinement to one's office, for example—so that someone who has harassed students gets paid for not teaching! But when we catch a student in flagrante delicto, we punish with a vengeance. In 1982 Gabrielle Napolitano, who was then a senior at Princeton University, was found guilty of plagiarism. Princeton authorities withheld her diploma and informed the law schools to which she had applied. She was denied admittance, according to the May 31, 1982 issue of Time Magazine.

According to an article in the October 24, 1990, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, one-third of the 232 anthropology students surveyed by professor Michael Moffatt that year admitted to extensive cheating. Around the same time, a survey indicated that 83 percent of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students participated in unacceptable academic behaviors, according to an editorial in the December 17, 1993, issue of the Washington Post. In the April 30, 1999, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harold J. Noah of Teachers College at Columbia University insisted that "cheating is now ubiquitous in the United States and overseas." What is far worse is that it has become an acceptable practice. Some sociological surveys report that more than half of American students are "prepared to acknowledge that they have cheated in one form or another," according to Noah.

There are many reasons for student cheating, all of which may be rationalized by the perpetrators: lack of time, poverty, uncaring instructors, institutional bureaucracy, laziness, peer pressure, inability, poor role models, and fear of failure, among other possibilities. Additionally, technology has helped to make theft, plagiarism, and prevarica tions of various kinds so much easier.

Students are dishonest because their role models (parents, instructors, doctors, lawyers, clerics, police, and society in general) offer little to stimulate principled action. Consequentialist ethical theories that care more about results than principles take precedence over traditional moral thinking. As a result, unethical activity becomes acceptable when it is convenient or whenever one can get away with it. Additionally, when primary and secondary school instructors or university professors act unethically, the consequences may appear negligible to the potentially wayward student. And peer pressure may sway even those students who come equipped with an excellent value system. Since liberal arts institutions no longer attempt to inculcate correct action or character, a student's value system derives almost exclusively from his or her home environment and the actions of peers.

Fabrication

When instructors are not acting as proctors or detectives hoping to stifle cheating or ferret out dishonest students, some are dreaming up schemes of their own. One way to further one's career is to make a series of startling discoveries, publish the results, and thus impress one's peers. That is what Albert Einstein, James Watson, and Linus Pauling did. Their discoveries were legitimate and beneficial. It is also precisely how Stephen J. Breuning operated, but his data apparently were fabricated and so the conclusions derived were without empirical foundation. Based on his work, alterations occurred in the treatment of the mentally deficient that were devastatingly harmful. More recently, Fridhelm Herrmann and Marion Brach, two German molecular biologists, were accused of fabricating data in forty-seven papers published in prestigious periodicals, including Blood and the Journal of Experimental Medicine. According to the February 20, 1998, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Brach admitted her culpability, but Herrmann did not acknowledge his guilt, and he refused to cooperate with the commissions set up to investigate. He was suspended from his position at the University of Ulm, but continued to draw his paycheck.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is endemic. It is easy to paraphrase another author's ideas or incorporate his or her locutions without crediting the source. This may occur inadvertently, accidentally, or purposely. Occasionally, some authors, even sophisticated scholars, may not realize that what they are doing is ethically unacceptable. On the other hand, since all academics are aware that some students plagiarize their papers, and since instructors attempt to eliminate plagiarism, it stretches credibility to think that these same people are oblivious to the need to acknowledge, attribute, credit, and correctly document when they present the ideas or articulations of their peers.

Data manipulation occurs in the sciences; the appropriation of other scholars' work is a problem in all disciplines, and high-profile cases have manifested themselves in biomedicine, geology, history, and literature. In his 1997 book, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist, Neil Bowers describes in exquisite detail how an unknown plagiarist republished Bowers's poems on an ongoing basis.

Bowers spent an inordinate amount of time, money, and emotional energy tracking this person down. Recent high-profile cases include those of Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, both of whom should know better.

Peer Review

Peer review, the system universally used for evaluating manuscripts for publication in journals and monographs as well as for assessing grant applications, is, theoretically, an excellent means of validating certain aspects of the publication process. But because human beings are controlled by diverse necessities, the results of the peer-review process are sometimes ethically flawed. Peer review frequently succeeds in culling out the dross, and thus helps editors and granting agencies make fair and judicious decisions. It usually does not catch errors or deceptions, but since this is not its real function, it cannot legitimately be criticized on this ground. But it can be faulted for the many ethical abuses that referees purposely perpetrate. Since reviewers are not rewarded in any meaningful way, they have little incentive to do a good job. Some referees take their responsibilities seriously and spend as much time analyzing a manuscript as they would in assessing their own work; others may dismiss a paper out of hand without even reading it—on specious grounds, because they are in a bad mood, or because they dislike the topic, the author, or the stylistic ineptitudes of those whose linguistic abilities preclude clear articulation. They sometimes hold the paper for months or lose it. The truly dishonest may deny value and reject a manuscript in order to publish their own similar findings first; they may steal ideas; or they may abrogate confidentiality and pass data and information along to a colleague who is working in the same area.

The ethical crisis in peer review is so pressing that during the past decade, the American Medical Association has held three international conferences on the topic, the results of which have been presented in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a publication that normally allocates its pages to papers on medical procedures, treatments, and pharmaceuticals.

Documentation

When a student or scholar prepares a research report or paper, one of the most important aspects, in addition to methodology, results, and originality, is the documentation: the references, correctly noted, that show that the author has carefully searched the literature, read the germane materials, incorporated what he or she held to be necessary, and is grateful to be able to credit those upon whose shoulders he or she now stands. Obviously, some people disagree: the dishonest steal ideas, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and even entire texts, pass them off as their own, defend themselves when caught, and cannot comprehend that they have done anything wrong (despite twelve to twenty years of indoctrination into scholarly conventions). Others document, but haphazardly, incorrectly, or overwhelmingly. They also make mistakes-lots of them: they miscopy, leave critical items out, and conflate materials, even their own previous publications. As Janell Rudolph and Deborah Brackstone insisted in the April 11, 1990, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, this sloppiness "threatens bibliographic control in scholarship."

The etiology of this disastrous situation is twofold. On the one hand, students and the scholars they become care little about the niceties of acknowledg-ment and attribution; thus documenting sources is of minor concern. But even more important are the horrific systems that have evolved. As disciplines have become ever more sophisticated, their practitioners have demanded their own means of documentation. Thus there are hundreds of these sometimes bizarre systems to confuse the student. Anthropology follows one set of standards, while sociology opts for another. Some twenty years ago, the discipline of language and literature refused to remain with its perfectly acceptable method and so it created a modified version based on the convoluted, complex, and illogical means of documenting developed by the American Psychological Association (APA). All of these possibilities are bewildering and annoying to students who never master them, even after their acceptable dissertations are filed away on the libraries' shelves. Then when they become academics, they manage to distort the very systems that they expect their students to apply.

Correct documentation is now even more abstruse in all fields, since the many diverse sources of electronic information make it difficult for an unsophisticated student to decide which form is the correct one in a given instance. This has become such a pressing problem that the Wall Street Journal offered a front-page analysis and commentary in an article by June Kronholz in May 2002. Any editor or referee who reads hundreds of scholarly manuscripts can attest to the inability of even well-known scholars to document carefully and correctly. The bottom line here is that impeccable documentation standards are as important as the substantive material under discussion.

Human Subjects

The literature on the treatment of human subjects indicates, at least theoretically, an evolving ethos of care. As one moves back in time, one discovers that professionals in fields such as medicine or psychology cared little about the well-being of their subjects. In Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans, published in 1999, J. D. Moreno mentions cases such as the experiments on African Americans suffering from venereal disease, Stanley Milgrim's extraordinary but harmful work on obedience, and the 1946 MIT experiment in which retarded students were fed milk containing radioactive material, showing that researchers cared more about their hypotheses and potential breakthroughs than about their subjects. And although informed consent has long been a necessary concomitant of human experimentation, it is, even today, something of a myth—and an impediment to those who wish only to confirm that a specific treatment really does work. As the report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments observes, "It is naïve to think that informed consent can be relied upon as the major mechanism to protect the rights and interests of patient subjects."

Because we are ostensibly more sensitive to human needs today, it is improbable that contemporary researchers would sanction these harmful experiments as frequently as their forerunners did in the past. Human subjects probably receive more respect and are treated better than they were in the past because of medical maltreatment during the Holocaust and the ensuing Nuremberg trials, the revised Declaration of Helsinki, rules promulgated by government agencies and codified in the Code of Federal Regulations, institutional review boards that must scrupulously scrutinize all work done with human subjects, and the facts that deception is now an unacceptable practice and those harmed sue and win. In the December 2001 issue of Ophthalmology, Simmons Lessell insists that "we now have a system in place that protects patients, which is, after all, our primary obligation."

Nevertheless, as recent cases in Colorado and at Johns Hopkins University indicate, there is still room for improvement. It is, naturally, mandatory in an academic setting to protect volunteers who act as experimentees. Coercing consent from students, scaring it out of confused or uncomprehending patients, or demanding it from relatives of the comatose is unacceptable—regardless of intention. Kant's dictum that humans must never be treated as a means is especially helpful.

Administrative Dishonesty

Misdeeds on the part of administrators may seem out of place here, but although they do not concern the pursuit of truth as such, they do influence the ways in which both faculty and students act and interact. As S. Stecklow pointed in the October 12, 1995, issue of the Wall Street Journal, when chairs, deans, vice presidents, presidents, provosts, and chancellors abrogate rules, laws, academic freedom, and constitutional rights such as due process and freedom of speech; when they act in arbitrary, capricious, and selfish ways; and when they manipulate statistical data so that institutions appear more selective than they are, they create an environment in which research possibilities and interaction are chilled, where fear instead of inquiry reigns, where discrimination is substituted for opportunity, where integrity is less important than impression—and all of this sets precisely the kind of example higher education should avoid at all costs. The harm that might result from fabricated data in a clinical trial could be horrific, but the fraud would soon be discovered and thus the damage would be limited. The harm caused by an academic administrator could have a geometric life, affecting not only current professors and students but those who come along years or decades later. The reputation of the institution may suffer as well.

Solutions

Practicing scientists may continue to deny that research misconduct is a serious problem and insist that self-regulation is more than adequate to control the occasionally aberrant, but cases of fabrication, fraud, and plagiarism turn up with such astonishing frequency that most other people recognize, acknowledge, and admit that academic dishonesty and misconduct are more than occasional anomalies. It is thus now possible to mount an attack. There are many possible solutions, ranging from the reasonable and logical to the radically punitive. Here are some of them.

Educate students at all grade levels concerning academic dishonesty.
Provide all upper-division undergraduates and graduate students with mentors who can guide them through the labyrinthine conventions and rules that govern academic research.
Mentors, advisers, and dissertation and laboratory directors should exemplify and harp upon correct and acceptable actions.
Adequate class time must be allotted to discussion of attribution and documentation including precise uses of systems such as those developed by the APA, the Modern Language Association (MLA), and the University of Chicago Press.
The ethos and rules that govern the academic environment must make clear to all involved that academic dishonesty will not be tolerated.
We should strive to eliminate detrimental situations (for example, pharmaceutical company support of laboratories that test their products) in which conflicts of interest compromise ethically acceptable behavior.
College and university review boards and committees must follow the rules, due process, and the law; they must be fair.
In student cases, the onus should not be placed exclusively on the shoulders of the accusing instructor. Administrators should affirm their faculty members rather than making their lives miserable because the institution's lawyers fear lawsuits from disgruntled parents.
Whether for students or academics, punishments should be harsh enough to deter the tempted.
The names of guilty professionals should be widely disseminated in government publications as well as in popular and professional media.
Large and powerful professional organizations such as the MLA and the APA should be willing to condemn those who perpetrate academic crimes.
Critics or whistleblowers should be motivated by a sense of moral outrage, and when they do come forward they should be heard and honored rather than castigated.
Most important, an atmosphere in which integrity is rewarded and unethical activity is punished must be fostered.

Honesty and integrity are integral to the academic environment and the research, publication, and teaching that are its raisons d'être. There would be little practical point to an academy that purposely advanced falsity and distorted perspectives. Although its instructors and graduates might briefly prosper, they eventually would fail in whatever they did. There is little demand for astrologers, because their auguries have no practical value. What we do know about the future is that its inhabitants will look back upon the past and judge it in terms of veracity and integrity. There is no place for dishonesty in the academy. We should seek it out and extirpate it whenever it rears its abhorrent visage.

Robert Hauptman is professor of learning resources and technology services at St. Cloud State University.

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