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The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research
I fully agree with the comments below by Edward Archer. In my own research career, I constantly came across published research that was essentially worthless. Doing survey research with your own students as survey respondents was ubiquitous, for instance. That the population at large might think differently from young students never seems to have been considered on most occasions.
I made sure that in my own research I used rerpresentative general population samples -- and I routinely got results very much at variance with the accepted wisdom
That did however have a benefit. I found it easy to get my articles published. The editors had seen so few articles based on proper sampling that they almost had to publish my findings.
As well as technical problems in research that I read, I often found severe intellectual problems. Most articles I read were at best arid intellectual exercises -- exercises that routinely failed to consider explanations for findings that were outside the norm. I was able to point out such deficits so clearly that I got a lot of pure critique articles published. The editors could see my point.
Editors actually hate to publish critiques as it shows their review processes to be inadequate. But around 50% of my critiques were strong enough to overcome that resistance and appeared in print. See list here
From what I saw, I would have to say that most published scientific research is worthless.
For most of the past century, the United States was the pre-eminent nation in science and technology. The evidence for that is beyond dispute: Since 1901, American researchers have won more Nobel prizes in medicine, chemistry, and physics than any other nation. Given our history of discovery, innovation, and success, it is not surprising that across the political landscape Americans consider the funding of scientific research to be both a source of pride and a worthy investment.
Nevertheless, in his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the pursuit of government grants would have a corrupting influence on the scientific community. He feared that while American universities were “historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,” the pursuit of taxpayer monies would become “a substitute for intellectual curiosity” and lead to “domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment…and the power of money.”
Eisenhower’s fears were well-founded and prescient.
My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields.
Yet, more importantly, training in “science” is now tantamount to grant-writing and learning how to obtain funding. Organized skepticism, critical thinking, and methodological rigor, if present at all, are afterthoughts. Thus, our nation’s institutions no longer perform their role as Eisenhower’s fountainhead of free ideas and discovery. Instead, American universities often produce corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research that endangers the public, confounds public policy, and diminishes our nation’s preparedness to meet future challenges.
Nowhere is the intellectual and moral decline more evident than in public health research. From 1970 to 2010, as taxpayer funding for public health research increased 700 percent, the number of retractions of biomedical research articles increased more than 900 percent, with most due to misconduct. Fraud and retractions increased so precipitously from 2010 to 2015 that private foundations created the Center for Scientific Integrity and “Retraction Watch” to alert the public.
One reason non-government organizations lead the battle to improve science is that universities and federal funding agencies lack accountability and often ignore fraud and misconduct. There are numerous examples in which universities refused to hold their faculty accountable until elected officials intervened, and even when found guilty, faculty researchers continued to receive tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars. Those facts are an open secret: When anonymously surveyed, over 14 percent of researchers report that their colleagues commit fraud and 72 percent report other questionable practices. The problem goes well beyond the known frauds.
The list of elite institutions at which high-profile faculty commit misconduct is growing rapidly.
In 2018, Duke University was the eighth-largest recipient of NIH funding with $475 million, and in 2019, Duke acquired over $570 million. Yet, in 2014, a whistleblower at Duke alleged that $200 million in grants were obtained using falsified data. Despite the retraction of nearly 50 papers, Duke refused to take responsibility and mounted a legal battle. The result was a $112.5 million penalty in which Duke did not have to admit culpability. That was Duke’s second major misconduct debacle in a decade. In each instance, Duke fought to keep the details confidential while continuing to receive hundreds of millions in public funds.
Harvard is the wealthiest university in the world and, despite being a private institution, received almost $600 million in public funds from the NIH and other agencies in 2018. In fact, some faculty received more NIH funding than many states, and these funds are sufficient to pay for tuition, room, board, and books of every undergrad at Harvard. Nevertheless, Harvard’s faculty has an ever-increasing number of retractions due to misconduct or incompetence. In one case, Harvard’s teaching hospital was forced to pay $10 million because its faculty had fraudulently obtained NIH funding. The penalty was only a fraction of the NIH funds acquired by the guilty faculty.
More recently, Cornell opened its third investigation of a researcher who received more than $4.6 million from the United States Department of Agriculture and $3.3 million from the NIH. As is typical, Cornell exonerated its faculty member in the initial investigation and only reinvestigated after intense media scrutiny.
Ubiquitous sexual harassment is also emblematic of the moral decline in academic science. The number of academics found responsible for sexual harassment has skyrocketed. Yet most universities simply “pass the harasser” so that faculty can transfer their grants to another institution. A 2019 headline in The Chronicle of Higher Education read: “‘Pass the Harasser’ Is Higher Ed’s Worst-Kept Secret.” The NIH has been slow to respond and “apologizes for lack of action on sexual harassers.”
Retractions, misconduct, and harassment are only part of the decline. Incompetence is another. An article in The Economist suggested, “[f]raud is very likely second to incompetence in generating erroneous results.”
The widespread inability of publicly funded researchers to generate valid, reproducible findings is a testament to the failure of universities to properly train scientists and instill intellectual and methodologic rigor. That failure means taxpayers are being misled by results that are non-reproducible or demonstrably false.
The widespread inability of publicly funded researchers to generate valid, reproducible findings is a testament to the failure of universities to properly train scientists.
A number of critics, including John Ioannidis of Stanford University, contend that academic research is often “conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure.” In other words, taxpayers fund studies that are conducted for non-scientific reasons such as career advancement and “policy-based evidence-making.”
Incompetence in concert with a lack of accountability and political or personal agendas has grave consequences: The Economist stated that from 2000 to 2010, nearly 80,000 patients were involved in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted.
Beginning in 2013, my colleagues and I published a series of empirical refutations in top medical and scientific journals showing that no human could survive on the diets used by the U.S. government to create the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. To be precise, we demonstrated that the methods used by government and academic researchers produced data that were physiologically implausible and inadmissible as scientific evidence.
Yet, rather than address the consequences of our refutations, academic researchers simply ignored the evidence. That lack of scientific integrity leads to evermore faculty and students using demonstrably implausible dietary data every year. Given that taxpayers fund thousands of meaningless studies that generate erroneous and often ridiculous conclusions (e.g., eggs cause heart disease or coffee causes cancer), it is unsurprising that policy architects and the public are confused about “healthy eating.”
As Eisenhower feared, the pursuit of government grants corrupted our nation’s scholars and money has now become a substitute for intellectual integrity and curiosity. Nevertheless, reform is possible.
Currently, universities take 52 percent of each NIH grant as “indirect costs” to cover administrative expenses. That revenue incentivizes both a lack of accountability and misconduct while allowing the wealthiest 10 percent of universities to receive 90 percent of NIH funding. Ending the “indirect cost” legerdemain and instituting mandatory penalties against universities for faculty misconduct would effectively double research funding while disincentivizing fraud and harassment.
Second, the NIH should limit the number of projects an investigator can simultaneously control and institute a mandatory age limit for grant recipients. Currently, the NIH gives more money to investigators aged 56-75 than aged 24-40. Since innovation and discovery occur early in a scientist’s career, that policy would stop elderly but well-connected researchers from impeding progress.
Finally, disallow the use of taxpayer monies for publicity. Currently, investigators have free rein to “hype” their research with taxpayer funds. Misleading or exaggerated claims in press releases has contributed significantly to the public’s confusion on nutrition and many other health issues.
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Northeastern expected to launch graduate program in Maine
At a time when many of Maine’s colleges and universities are struggling to attract students, a technology entrepreneur is making a $100 million bet that the state needs a new graduate school, one focused on preparing students for a digital economy and jump-starting a start-up culture in Northern New England.
Northeastern University will announce on Monday that it is launching a satellite graduate campus in Portland with a $100 million investment from Dave Roux, a Silicon Valley investor and Maine native. The graduate school and research center, is scheduled to accept its first batch of students this fall, and will be named after Roux and his wife. It will be called the Roux Institute at Northeastern University.
More rural parts of the country are losing out to innovation epicenters, such as Boston, San Francisco and Seattle, because they don’t always have the talent and resources to compete, Roux said. He wanted to create a program to train more data scientists and computer programmers in Maine to focus on the applications of artificial intelligence on health sciences. The hope is the research done at the institute will help spinoff companies into the region and draw other business to the Portland area, Roux said.
“Does the world need another university?” said Roux, who is currently chairman of BayPine, a Boston-based investment firm. “The world doesn’t need an average university doing average stuff. This is so rare, so valuable. I think it as an opportunity machine, disguised as an academic institution.”
Roux said he spoke with 14 universities across the country over the past two years in search of an institutional partner and found Northeastern’s entrepreneurial attitude, its employment-focused programs and its experience operating satellite campuses, appealing.
Northeastern has in the past decade expanded beyond its Huntington Avenue campus in Boston and opened graduate-level programs in Charlotte, Seattle, San Francisco, Toronto and is in the process of launching in Vancouver. Those campuses enroll 2,500 graduate students.
Northeastern expects the Portland campus to start with about 100 students and expand to 1,000 students in five years and 2,600 students in a decade. Ten organizations, including L.L. Bean, MaineHealth, and the Jackson Laboratory, have agreed to become founding corporate partners and agreed to send their workers to the institute and offer students employment training as part of their education, according to Northeastern officials.
“The impact of the Roux Institute will reverberate across the region for generations to come,” said Joseph E. Aoun, the Northeastern president in a statement. “It will serve as a national model for expanding growth and innovation, and reducing inequality.”
But entering the Maine higher education market could present numerous challenges.
Maine’s aging and slow-growing population means that many of the state’s colleges and universities are struggling to enroll students. Throughout New England small, private colleges are facing increased financial pressures in part due to demographic shifts, and several have been forced to shut down or find larger partners.
For the past several years, the University of Maine has advertised on billboards throughout New England for students, promising them financial aid to help lower out-of-state tuition costs and lure them to Maine.
Roux said he and Northeastern officials have spoken to other Maine colleges and universities about creating a pathway for undergraduate students to complete their graduate education at the institute in less time and for less money.
Northeastern plans to offer Maine students scholarships to attend. Despite the demographic challenges in the state, Roux said he expects the campus will have no trouble attracting students. “I am super confident that we are going to have a ton of learners,” he said.
A new university will likely bring some competition, but Roux and his team have met with higher education officials throughout Maine in recent years and expressed a desire to find ways of collaborating, said James Page, who was the chancellor of the University of Maine system until last summer.
Roux did not approach the Maine public university system about leading this graduate program, because he was looking for a partner with a marquee name and a national reputation with experience operating such a graduate research campus, Page said.
Maine’s public university system is trying to expand its research capabilities, and this Northeastern campus could offer opportunities for students and for faculties to work together, he said.
“Any program that can bring new young people, who are talented, who are educated . . . will be a very good thing for the state,” Page said. “This is seen as a real opportunity for higher education in Maine.”
James Herbert, president of the University of New England, said he has been assured that Northeastern has no plans to expand into undergraduate programs on its Portland campus, so there is likely to be more opportunity for collaboration instead of competition. “We’re excited about it,” Herbert said.
The Northeastern Portland campus will still need regulatory approval, said Barbara Brittingham, the president of the New England Commission of Higher Education. Northeastern has already started initial conversations with the commission, she said.
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Joe Biden doesn’t want lower-income families to have the same school choice he and Hunter had
The pandering political class will eagerly tell you that lower-income children shouldn’t be allowed to go to the schools of their choice — even while sending their own children to private schools.
Why? To woo the deep-pocketed national teachers unions. In doing so, they betray lower-income families and their children, who are largely assigned to poor schools based on a five-digit ZIP code.
This week, Joe Biden announced his full-throated opposition to the notion that all families should get the opportunity to choose the best school for their children.
Meanwhile, the Bidens are big believers in private schools for themselves. Like his brother and father, Hunter Biden attended Archmere Academy in Delaware. This is likely why, at least in 1997, then-Sen. Joe Biden spoke movingly about the plight of lower-income families and opened the door to the notion of school vouchers.
On the Senate floor, Joe Biden said:
"When you have an area of the country, and most often here we are talking about inner cities, where the public schools are abysmal or dysfunctional or not working and where most of the children have no way out, it is legitimate to ask what would happen to the public schools with increased competition from private schools. Is it not possible that giving poor kids a way out will force the public schools to improve and result in more people coming back?"
A poll recently released by Beck Research, a Democratic polling firm, shows that the vast majority of voters, particularly black, Latino, and millennial voters, deeply support school choice policies.
The poll, commissioned by the American Federation for Children, shows massive popularity for the federal Education Freedom Scholarship legislation sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Bradley Byrne and championed by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. In total, 78% support the legislation, including 83% of black respondents, 83% of Latinos, 78% of millennials, 67% of Democratic primary voters, and 77% of Republican primary voters.
Does pizza even poll that well?
According to federal data, 82% of school-age children attend district public schools. In our poll, 41% of parents said they would prefer to send their child or grandchild to a private school.
Despite our reputation as a nation of freedom and opportunity for all, America is very much an outlier in how we school our children. The government simply assigns you to schools by ZIP code unless you are lucky enough to have school choice programs in your state — or have the financial means to move to a different school district, pay for private school tuition, or home-school. Meanwhile, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Belgium, Denmark, Israel, and France have far more open and pluralistic systems of education, allowing families the freedom to choose the best elementary and secondary education for their child. In the Netherlands alone, families can choose 36 different types of schools!
Given America’s poor academic standing worldwide and anemic performance on national assessments, where 66% of eighth graders perform below level in reading and math, we desperately need to expand educational opportunities for families. A poor child living in a ZIP code plagued by schools that have failed to educate children for decades deserves the same opportunities exercised by the Biden family.
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