Harvard University is under cultural pressure, even from its own political tent, because its leader couldn't bring herself to condemn anti-Semitism, hate speech, and attacks on Jewish people by Harvard faculty and students. This would have been okay a few years ago, American progressives have long been opposed to Israel, but since Harvard targets microaggressions of all kinds, and 'stands with Ukraine' after the invasion by Russia, it was not just queasy but hypocritical.
Academics are fine with quietly defending Hamas, 94 percent of Harvard faculty are on the left so good luck finding anyone to give apologists a dirty look in the hallways, but such overt posturing - there is not a lot of nuance to rape and beheaded babies - angered many who in the past would have rationalized it.
Using the wrong pronoun was hate speech but claiming that Jews went in and killed their own people to have an excuse to wipe out Iranian-funded terrorists was academic freedom?
Harvard Corp, which controls an endowment that is the GDP of a small country thanks to lobbying to get unlimited student loans allowed since the 1980s, circled the wagons around fellow Board member Claudine Gay, but then someone outside her tribe actually read her papers for the first time. And using tools to detect cheating they found 25 instances of plagiarism. The Board washed that away but then an independent panel said 9 of the 25 were serious and she resigned.
No one believes that if Harvard has created an ideological cancer in one set of buildings it hasn't infected them all, so it was only a matter of time before critics looked at their science. It turns out that has been done for a while but a few weeks ago Sholta David of For Better Science blew their doors off. Implicated in fraud - that's right - not "duplicative language - is no less than Laurie Glimcher, the President and CEO of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The papers weren't in bottom-feeding pay-to-publish journals, peer review at Cell, Nature, and Science failed to notice any issue.
Like PNAS when they published screenshots of a weedkiiler 'turning frogs gay' as Berkeley professor Tyrone Hayes termed it, no evidence was needed. It was a high-profile claim that needed no data. When I revealed that in the Wall Street Journal, PNAS quietly changed their 'gentleman's agreement' policy and stopped allowing friends to hand-walk papers past peer review, but it wouldn't have mattered in this case.
Dozens of papers by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute weren't exploiting a legacy mechanism the way Hayes' friend David Wake did at PNAS, they passed peer review. Pretty pictures were good enough, no data needed. The scholars had to have known they were doing art and not science. It cannot have been accident. Harvard is circling the wagons again, saying their investigation has not found misconduct, they just retracted 6 papers(!), found cause for concern in 31 others(!), and 16 others are under investigation.
That would end the careers of people who were not responsible for bringing in so much wealth.
Harvard is sure they can wait this out, Claudine Gay was a humanities scholar so she didn't bring in revenue while Dana-Farber brings a lot of 'cancer cash' in the door, so they won't want to fire their literal top rainmakers, and instead said they'll carefully examine everything for a year (and hope bigger news comes along.)
David is suddenly the Ronan Farrow of science academia. Everyone with something to hide is looking over their shoulders hoping they won't be caught by him next. Well done, sir.
