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The article talks about the resignation of the president and antisemitism, but that's actually not the only recent trouble at Harvard: there were multiple indep

• aprilthird2021 2y ago
  I feel like we have to at least have a list of some of the accomplishments at Harvard to see if it was truly not a great year or just business as usual. Plagiarism is bad, but academia as a whole suffers from it. Stanford's last president stepped down when his old lab was found to have fraudulently submitted some research. At the same time, advancements in human understanding take place in the messy real world alongside such problems. If those are continuing or even growing, then I don't really care whether powerful donors like or don't like what Harvard's talking heads do or don't do politically
  • wakawaka28 2y ago
    Plagiarism and fraud may happen in many schools but one would certainly expect more honest work out of a school costing 5-10x more than the competition. What are people paying for, if not a great reputation?
    • aprilthird2021 2y ago
      Right, I'm saying perhaps there is a great deal of surprisingly innovative honest work coming out of such schools also. We only have a list of the negatives from OP. In every large organization there are both good and bad actors. If the good ones are 5x-10x better than other institutions' good ones, that changes our discussion here.
      • t_mann 2y ago
        The thing is, results need to be genuine to constitute progress (fake results are arguably worse than none). That's why this undermining of trust in results is fatal. You shouldn't 'offset' fraudulent research with "they won a Nobel" (which Harvard actually did last year, if you count economics), because even the work of Nobel winners can be called into question later [0, also has a Harvard degree btw]. Every instance of academic fraud is problematic, and multiple independent cases in a year, across a wide spectrum of disciplines and departments at the same institution, is definitely not common, and we shouldn't start normalizing it I think. [0] https://forbetterscience.com/2020/10/07/gregg-semenza-real-nobel-prize-and-unreal-research-data/ https://forbetterscience.com/2020/10/07/gregg-semenza-real-n...
        • aprilthird2021 2y ago
          > That's why this undermining of trust in results is fatal. It's not though. Every one of the top schools in the US has some amount of cheating done by its students. The students still tend to have an outsized degree of success and innovation in the world. The US is a world leader in innovation, business, technology, etc. and it's also a country plagued by gang violence, homelessness, loneliness, isolation. All human systems are not like scientific theories that once you falsify one aspect of them, the whole entire thing is spoiled.
          • t_mann 2y ago
            > All human systems are not like scientific theories that once you falsify one aspect of them, the whole entire thing is spoiled. Virtually everything that counts as a research accomplishment is predicated on studies that are vetted through peer review. Imperfect as this process is, it is not capable of flagging research misconduct reliably. So most things we could list under accomplishments will likely require some amount of trust in the researchers. If you don't see how multiple independent examples of this trust being abused constitute a problem in this regard, then I suggest we leave it there. To be clear: the examples that I listed don't just relate to plagiarism, which would be misappropriation of results that are (hopefully) still true. Read the articles, there are many cases of suspected outright faking of results (often unlikely to be honest mistakes). I hope you never have a relative who has to rely on a cancer treatment based on fake research. I'm also not saying that Harvard is necessarily an outlier in this regard (unfortunately). But when it happens, I think we should call it what it is: bad, without buts.