"Education is not just another business; it is a calling"

Howard Gardner

Lying, Deception, and Fraud

Although our knowledge-making enterprise encourages creative mistakes--even outlandish notions--as a productive way of generating new and invigorating ideas that will furnish the truths of tomorrow, it does not encourage--nor should it tolerate--intentionally fraudulent claims and consciously falsified data. Not only would such behavior testify to the claimant's contempt for the very ends of liberal science--truth--but, since not all error can be detected, some bogus data will inevitably slip through, not only injuring the integrity of the system but perhaps harming people as well. Do we want Boeing engineers falsifying flight-test data?

Unfortunately, in today's ethically challenged universities, the fabrication of data is troublingly common, more common, perhaps, than plagiarism. A survey of 469 researchers and administrators of the American Association for the Advancement of Science revealed the surprising fact that 27 percent--124 people--believed that they had come across or witnessed plagiarized, fabricated, or falsified research over a ten-year period (Strauss).

Since the early 1980s a fair number of cases of scientific fraud have made headlines. Barry Garfinkel, a psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota, was convicted of falsifying data in a study of anti-depressants; Stephen Breuning, a psychologist specializing in drug treatment for the mentally retarded, invented many of his findings (Dolnick 59; Bell 105-109). Robert A. Slutsky fabricated data in 13 of his papers. John Darsee fabricated nearly every paper that he wrote (Bell, 112). Roger Poisson falsified data for an international breast cancer study (Taylor; Gorman). Another scientist committed suicide (with her husband) after being accused of fraudulent research practices (Ratelle). Bernard Fisher falsified data in a federally financed study of breast cancer treatments (Pappas "All" 25). An audit of 120 institutions in a national breast cancer research project found falsified reports in eleven of them (AP, 16 June 1994).

Solving the Problem By Denying It

As anyone who has been tracking this problem knows, I have listed only a smattering of cases; there are literally thousands more. Each issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports yet another accusation of malfeasance leveled against an academic researcher, almost always in the sciences. Faced with this problem, higher education has tried to deal with it characteristically by denying it.

"The editor of Science went so far as to claim, on the basis of no visible study whatsoever, that the incidence of scientific fraud was extremely small. University administrators have echoed the sentiment, while paying lip service to the need to correct whatever problems occasionally occur" (Dong A54).

"Leading science journals have characteristically closed their pages to papers exposing fraudulent research. Science refused to publish the work of Judith P. Swazey and her colleagues [who are quoted in this essay], whose survey results offer a serious challenge to its editor's Panglossian position" that 99.9999 percent of scientific reports are fraud free (Lewis 132).

In Betrayers of the Truth (1982), written before the problem mushroomed, two journalists, William Broad and Nicholas Wade, were forced to come to some sobering and disturbing conclusions:

1. that fraud in science (primarily physics, biology and medicine) is common;
2. that the belief that fraud in science is uncommon is the result of self-deception, not evidence; and
3. that the much-vaunted guarantees of scientific accuracy and honesty are myths (especially Chapter 12; Davis 49).

"Read a stack of such stories and there seems no escaping the conclusion that science is just another corrupt enterprise, as rife with scandal as Congress or the used-car business or the savings and loan industry" (Dolnick 60).

Springing from the academy's overweening righteousness, the denial of wrongdoing can only increase the incidence of academic malpractice and intensify the corruption of academic purpose (Lewis 131). When scholars willing to violate rules realize they have nothing to fear from their colleagues or employers, they will proceed without fear. If scientists and academics do not do more to discourage fabrications, falsehoods, and other kinds of academic fraud, the advancement of knowledge will be seriously undermined, as Philip Campbell, editor of Nature, fears: should this moral decay continue, he believes, science will be brought "into grave disrepute with politicians and the media, waste large amounts of research funds, and divert significant energy into judicial investigation" (CHE).

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