It's not easy to get a tenured professor to leave his job - unless he is caught dog-fighting or saying girls might be different than boys, there isn't a lot off-limits, especially at a progressive bastion like Harvard.
But bad press is not always good press and Harvard evolutionary psychology Professor Marc D. Hauser has announced his resignation. A three-year investigation said he fudged data in his research on monkey cognition and he was on the wrong side a Psychology Department vote in February to disallow him from teaching in the upcoming academic year.
Science loves the oppressed underdog so when an internal Harvard investigation found Hauser “solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct”, apologists in academia immediately began rationalizing that slap in a way we haven't seen since the IAC slapped the IPCC for publishing old magazine interviews and calling them data.
With Satoshi Kanazawa and Marc Hauser no longer writing the sort of popular tripe that makes media headlines for science looking silly, the evil zombie of evolutionary psychology may finally undergo a final death.
Hauser says he has a lot of opportunities in the private sector and that may be a good thing - the only thing academia loves more than getting someone fired is campaigning to bring them back, so Hauser may not be out of the university scene for long. And Larry Summers had to resign from Harvard for believing he could have an intellectual discourse about gender differences but a short while later he was on Pres. Obama's transition team. You never know where life will take you.
