So we have the Jason Arday case. Is academia now rotten to the bone, as I’ve read in some places, or is it an exception? Well, I think both statements are incorrect.

First of all, Arday, although a spectacular case, is not an exception. Academia has seen a steady stream of high-profile scandals over the past decades. Those cases have involved researchers from very different disciplines and ideological backgrounds.

What about this sad list of once famous, now rather infamous researchers from fields I know best:

• Diederik Stapel: “In 2011 Tilburg University suspended Stapel for fabricating and manipulating data for his research publications. This scientific misconduct took place over a number of years and affected dozens of his publications.” (source)
• Brian Wansink: “Starting in 2017, problems with Wansink’s papers and presentations were brought to wider public scrutiny. These problems included conclusions not supported by the data presented, data and figures duplicated across papers, questionable data (including impossible values), incorrect and inappropriate statistical analyses, and “p-hacking“” (source)
• Oliver Sacks (this one still hurts), “Sacks’s private journals and letters were made available to journalist Rachel Aviv by the Oliver Sacks Foundation. She found that Sacks described aspects of his books as “pure fabrications” and “falsifications”, and that he considered his case studies as self-expression or “a sort of autobiography”. In a private letter to his brother he described The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat as a book of “fairy tales” and wrote: “Guilt has been much greater since ‘Hat’ because of (among other things) My lies, falsification”. Pria Anand compared Sacks’s “confabulations” to the temptation of medical professionals to construct life stories, explaining that his moral failures were no less upsetting for being familiar.^[77] H. Steven Moffic described Sacks as an author of “historical fiction”. (source)

Recently, Dan Ariely also came under scrutiny.  Even John Hattie is facing an investigation. Although I need to add, I regard both still as minor cases compared to the ones mentioned above.

But does this mean that Academia is rotten? Well, there are issues for sure. Do check the great book by Stuart Ritchie and you’ll discover that all these examples are, in the grand scheme of things, footnotes, also showing that academia can self-correct, be it sometimes a bit (too) slow. 

The truth is that there are still a lot of hard-working, honest people in Academia. They, too, become victims when celebrated scholars turn out to have cut corners or worse. A crisis can be a moment of growth, as Erikson once said, and I do hope science will grow because of these scandals. And yes, I’m still gutted myself, but nuance is needed as always.