Last month I wrote a story about Brian Lucey getting 13 papers retracted:

Chris Brunet

Elsevier Shuts Down Its Finance Journal Citation Cartel

On Christmas Eve, 9 “peer-reviewed” economics papers were quietly retracted by Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher…

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2 months ago · 82 likes · 6 comments · Christopher Brunet

My article hit #1 on Hacker News:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119530

Today’s update involves professor Samuel Vigne, Lucey’s protégé, and former PhD student, who has now had yet another paper retracted:

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1059056023001764

The stated reason for this new retraction is fraudulent citations:

The journal, with guidance from an impartial field expert acting in the role of an independent Publishing Ethics Advisor, found that 22 citations were added to this paper at the article revision stage without justification to the handling editor. Additional 8 citations were added to this paper at author proof stage without the approval of the Editor. The new citations were inserted generically without being thoughtfully integrated into the paper’s narrative, thus lacking direct relevance to the specific points being made. The new citations mainly benefit the authors Muhammad A. Naeem and Sitara Karim.

#2: MIT Fraud Update

Another popular article I wrote was about a PhD student at MIT named Aidan Toner-Rodgers, who was kicked out of school for fabulously fabricating data.

Chris Brunet

MIT Econ PhD Student Kicked Out for Massive Fraud

This is undoubtedly the most blatant and brazen econ fraud of 2025…

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8 months ago · 156 likes · 4 comments · Christopher Brunet

Another paper by Aidan Toner-Rogers (MIT) was just retracted a few days ago, this time in the top journal in the world for Development Economics:

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387826000714

  

The stated reason for this new retraction is because his co-author requested it:

This article has been retracted at the request of the corresponding author (FLF).

The corresponding author has indicated that key results in the paper cannot be independently verified and that the reliability of the underlying analyses cannot be confirmed. In light of these concerns, the Editors have concluded that the findings cannot be relied upon and have therefore retracted the article. This retraction is issued to maintain the integrity of the scientific record.

#3: Florian Ederer Update

Long-time readers will remember that I gave a seminar at Stanford University in 2023 about a hacked economics forum:

Here we are 3 years later, and the resulting paper from the hacked data is still not published, stuck in R&R limbo. Last week, I asked the authors for an update:

I am guessing it is held up due to legal issues.

#4: Faculty Leaks

This week I came across , an “anonymous dispatch from inside higher education”. It’s a brand-new account—just launched this week—and they’ve already published their first 2 pieces. I’m always glad to support new writers, and this one looks promising. If you’re interested in academia, this Substack is worth checking out and subscribing to.

Faculty Leaks

The Last Dinosaurs: Why Academia Keeps Protecting Its Worst Senior Faculty

Faculty Leak is an anonymous dispatch from inside higher education. Some details have been changed. The dysfunction has not…

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19 days ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Faculty Leaks

Faculty Leaks

The Academic Conference Grift: How Professors Turn a Two-Sentence Abstract Into a Paid Vacation in Greece

Faculty Leaks is an anonymous dispatch from inside higher education. Some details have been changed. The dysfunction has not…

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14 days ago · 1 like · Faculty Leaks

#5: Plagiarized Poison Ivy

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#1: 10,000 graduate jobs for 900,000 graduates in the UK

Bloomberg put out a report last week concluding that there are only 10,000 new graduate jobs each year in the UK, and, well, the math isn’t great.

#2: 38% of Stanford students are disabled

The Atlantic recently published an article with some amazing statistics:

• At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled

• At Amherst: more than 30 percent

• At Stanford: nearly 40 percent

• At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.

Much of this rise in “disabilities” stems from students strategically seeking accommodations—particularly extra time on exams—because of how universities currently define and incentivize disability status.

At Berkeley, psychological/emotional distress is now the top reason for an accommodation. Second is ADD/ADHD.

Professor Eric Kaufman has measured which kinds of university student have high anxiety… the answer may not surprise you:

#3: UC San Diego Students Can’t Do basic Math

This was a big story a couple of months ago when it broke:

Steve Sailer

UCSD Admissions Fiasco Like Subprime Mortgage Crash

Jelani Nelson is the chairman of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at UC Berkeley. He is half Ethiopian, half African-American, and grew up in the Virgin Islands…

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5 months ago · 37 likes · 38 comments · Steve Sailer

UCSD’s “Math 2” course teaches grade-school math (grades 1–8) to freshmen.

From page 49 of the university’s new report:

• 25% of students got 7 + 2 = ___ + 6 wrong
• 61% of students, a large majority, couldn’t round 374,518 to the nearest hundred
• 37% of students couldn't subtract fractions

Hilariously, there are 5 mathematics students at USCD who have to take this remedial math class, 15 electrical & aerospace university students, and 14 Computer Science Students:

UCSD is ranked as the nation’s 5th best public university.

#4: Mega-journal Heliyon retracts hundreds of papers after internal audit

• https://retractionwatch.com/2026/02/03/mega-journal-heliyon-retracts-hundreds-of-papers-after-internal-audit/

Heliyon has published fewer papers and ramped up its retractions since a major indexing service put the journal on hold and the publisher launched an audit of all papers published in the journal since its launch in 2016.

…

Heliyon published over 11,000 papers in 2023 and more than 17,000 in 2024, issuing around two dozen retractions in each year. Last year, the journal published 3,168 articles and retracted 392 others.

So far this year, 37 papers have been retracted, and 144 have been published. The retraction notices cite reference issues, citation stacking, suspicious affiliations and areas of research, authorship changes, ethical approval, among others.

#5: Indiana University just posted a notice of intent to hire two H1B employees

No Americans were qualified for these jobs.

This follows an announcement 2 days ago from Ron DeSantis that all Florida public Universities will pause hiring new H-1B workers.

#6: Oklahoma Professor alleges his work was plagiarized

#7: Harvard is allegedly hiring 2 conservative professors

After I wrote this article about Harvard:

Chris Brunet

Harvard's PhD Bloodbath

Just after midnight last night, the Harvard Crimson quietly published a bombshell. Citing “financial pressure,” the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) announced drastic cuts to dozens of Harvard’s doctoral programs — a restructuring so deep that many graduate programs will effectively cease to exist…

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6 months ago · 183 likes · 3 comments · Christopher Brunet

I was contacted by a Harvard-connected source who told me that Harvard is now trying to hire at least two Conservative/Republicans/Trumpists, meaning two tenured professors who will make the Trump Administration more likely to be lenient in the final deal. The problem, I am told, is that the faculty are making it difficult to do so.

My evidence starts with Harvard’s job openings for faculty positions:

• academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/search

Harvard, as reported, has a hiring freeze because of all the financial pressure. So, how does it have 150 openings? The vast majority are post-doc positions which are already funded and so don’t “count” against the freeze. Let’s restrict the search to job postings mentioning “tenure”:

• academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=tenure

Now, there are just 6 jobs, which is much more reasonable, given the hiring freeze. One of these is actually for a non-tenured role in housing, and so doesn’t count. Three others are in SEAS (school of engineering and applied sciences) which might have special funding. But, in all of FAS (faculty of arts and sciences), there are exactly two job postings:

• https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15390

• https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15389

Why are these two FAS positions hiring, given the FAS hiring freeze?

Both of these postings look dramatically different from any other Harvard faculty job posting I have ever seen. A normal posting looks like this one, for Applied Math:

• https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15608

In particular, it requires the following:

Totally standard stuff: teaching statements, research statements, service statements: The two FAS positions, in contrast, only require a CV, despte being tenured posts:

I have never seen this sparse requirement—only a CV—to apply for a tenured Harvard job posting, or indeed, the job posting for any senior academic position. Of course, if you are President Garber, you want to make this search as quick and easy as possible.

Another weirdness is that, in the typical Harvard posting, you see what we see in the Math posting, that is, the contact information is just some secretary. They do not release the head (or any members) of the search committee, nor does that person want to be bothered by direct enquiries.

However, for the two FAS positions, the contact info is for two senior faculty members, almost surely the ones in charge of the search. Note that, while neither is “conservative,” both are old and white and male, and exactly who you would pick, if you were Garber, if you needed to hire a couple of conservatives.

However, I have heard --- this is very much second hand --- that the problem is that the faculty committees on these searches are not playing ball. They are refusing to hire someone right wing enough, at least by Garber’s lights, so he keeps telling them to keep searching.

#8: Plagiarizing Harvard professor of the practice

Last year, I wrote an article about Harvard professor of the practice Ricardo Hausmann and his serial plagiarism.

Chris Brunet

Professor at Toulouse School of Economics Writes Open Letter Accusing Harvard Professor of Plagiarism

Today's Substack is not by me. Instead, I reprinted this open letter from X with permission from the author, César Hidalgo of the Toulouse School of Economics…

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2 years ago · 56 likes · 12 comments · Christopher Brunet

Someone who read that article sent me this:

There’s another case of a Harvard professor of the practice whose intro stats textbook (co-authored with an undergrad) is a rip-off of several previously written textbooks. He and his student co-author copy dozens of derivations, proofs, problems, solutions, illustrations etc. with some lazy paraphrasing and trivial notation changes. They never explicitly credit the original textbooks or include them in the bibliography. This professor published nothing else over the past ten years, so plagiarism aside, he didn’t meet the criteria for re-appointment.

A professor at another university sent a document showing side-by-side comparisons to Harvard officials months ago. As has been par for the course, Harvard continues to sit on complaints and evidence for months or years on end, and the plagiarists keep stealing with impunity. Unlike Claudine Gay, who submitted a bunch of corrections In January this year, he wasn’t even asked to request corrections crediting the original textbooks.

I’m attaching the document in case you want to publish it on your substack.

Here is that document:

Hfas Complaint

18.5MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

I sent this PDF to the authors, the plagiarizee, Harvard, and the textbook publishing company with polite questions about whether they ever looked into it, but nobody responded.

It seems fairly damning: 74 examples of blatantly copy-pasting questions.

That said, I’m not entirely sure how unusual it is for instructors to recycle introductory statistics problems. There are only so many ways to rephrase a word problem about rolling dice, coin flips, or sports betting odds.

The author of the allegedly plagiarized textbook, Joe Blitzstein, has this as his pinned tweet:

And he seems to have made quiet a bit of profit from it, since it has 137 reviews on Amazon:

#9: Indiana Econ Professor Arrested for Child Solicitation; UGA Math professor exposed

#10: Econ Profession Death Spiral Confirmed by MSM

5 months ago, I wrote this article:

Chris Brunet

The Collapse of the Econ PhD Job Market

For decades, a doctorate in economics was a golden ticket. It promised a path to tenure, or at worst, a lucrative role at a central bank, think tank, or tech firm…

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7 months ago · 104 likes · 23 comments · Christopher Brunet

Initially, it was paywalled (sorry!), but it gained so much momentum that I unpaywalled it, and it became one of my more popular articles with 45k reads:

The Tiktok I turned it into went viral too, wasting 283 hours of society’s valuable time:

The article was generally well-received, but Chris Blattman, an econ professor at UChicago, took issue with my Microsoft Paint projections:

Well, Chris, now that 2025 is over, and we have the final data, we can see my early projections were perfect.

This was the worst job market ever for economists:

Last month, the Wall Street Journal wrote almost the exact same article as mine, except much worse:

Two weeks ago, had a nice write-up on the economics profession discrediting itself.

Lorenzo from Oz

Why we should stop listening to economists on immigration

If economists were intellectually serious about immigration, they would analyse it like they do monetary policy. Monetary policy can be done well; it can be done badly; it can be done disastrously…

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2 months ago · 75 likes · 26 comments · Lorenzo Warby

#11: MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS

7 Months ago I reported on an MIT PhD student kicked out of school for falsifying an AI paper:

Chris Brunet

MIT Econ PhD Student Kicked Out for Massive Fraud

This is undoubtedly the most blatant and brazen econ fraud of 2025…

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8 months ago · 156 likes · 4 comments · Christopher Brunet

Now, MIT has a second AI paper retraction.

• https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/03/mit_sloan_updates_ai_ransomware_paper/

Do 80 percent of ransomware attacks really come from AI? MIT Sloan has now withdrawn a working paper that made that eyebrow-raising claim after criticism from security researcher Kevin Beaumont.

The withdrawn paper [PDF], co-authored by researchers from MIT Sloan and Safe Security, claimed, “Our recent analysis of over 2800 ransomware incidents has revealed an alarming trend: AI plays an increasingly significant role in these attacks. In 2024, 80.83 percent of recorded ransomware events were attributed to threat actors utilizing AI.”

Completed in April, the paper was cited in an MIT Sloan blog post last month titled “80 percent of ransomware attacks now use artificial intelligence.” It has since been echoed elsewhere.

“The paper is absolutely ridiculous,” Beaumont wrote in a Mastodon thread last week. “It describes almost every major ransomware group as using AI – without any evidence (it’s also not true, I monitor many of them). It even talks about Emotet (which hasn’t existed for many years) as being AI driven.”

#12: Brett Matsumoto to head Bureau of Labor Statistics

Following EJ Antoni’s failure last year to secure the support required for confirmation as head of the BLS:

Robert Reich

Trump’s political hack nominee for the Bureau of Labor Statistics is already monkeying with the data.

Friends…

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8 months ago · 2042 likes · 320 comments · Robert Reich

Last month, Trump nominated Brett Matsumoto to that role, a much more boring, less partisan, more technocratic pick. Whereas Antoni had no research record to speak of (his PhD was from “Norhtern Illionis University, an objectively terrible school, and his thesis on Austrian economics looked like an undergrad thesis riddled with errors), Brett’s PhD in economics is from UNC Chapel Hill and his research is on serious economic measurement.

Brett is a beloved folk hero in the economics profession (more specifically, in the EJMR community) because he is best known for bravely standing up to fight against research misconduct in the “Family Ruptures” scandal.

Brett is a much better choice in every dimension than EJ Antoni.

#13: College for Sale

Since Green Mountain College in rural Vermont went bankrupt in 2019, its 155-acre campus has been sitting empty.

If anyone here has a spare few million dollars in your pocket, they are now fielding proposals to revive it in some capacity.

#14: Canada Establishes Inuit-led University

#15: Climate Change Economics Paper Retracted

Last year, the Review of Financial Studies (the #2 academic finance journal in the world) issued an “expression of concern” for a 2022 paper about the impact of climate change on the mortgage industry.

Now, the paper has been retracted:

This retraction followed a response by M. LaCour-Little, A. Pavlov and S. Wachter, published in the Review of Financial Studies, which identified two main issues with the original article: the use of incorrect Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) conforming loan limits and the misclassification of loans due to rounding of loan amounts around this limit.

The committee subsequently concluded that correcting the issues would invalidate the main results reported in Table 2 of the original article; rectifying the coding error of the publicly available conforming loan limits alone would invalidate the results reported. Moreover, in the process of examining the results, the committee determined that the methodology described in the original paper does not generate the results reported. The editorial team are retracting this article because the original findings cannot be replicated given these issues.

#16: University of Alberta becomes first Canadian University to Abandon Affirmative Action

• https://nationalpost.com/opinion/university-of-alberta-to-become-first-to-abandon-race-centric-hiring https://nationalpost.com/opinion/university-of-alberta-to-become-first-to-abandon-race-centric-hiring

#17: Shanghai University of Finance and Economics: A Playground for Academic Corruption

I was blown away by the investigation because I didn’t really think that investigative journalism / blogging / whistleblowing could exist in China:

• https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/hVosUoiIoWFJvqUByzOh9w

Shortly after it was posted, it was deleted from Chinese social media:

But I have archived it here on the Western internet:

• https://archive.is/DaoAi

Professor Yao Yang is currently trending:

“In over 40 years, I have never fallen in love with Beijing.”

So, we are very curious—what could Professor Yao Yang possibly fall in love with?

The answer is revealed: Professor Yao Yang voted with his feet, leaving Beijing for Shanghai.

It turns out that the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics’ Dishui Lake Advanced Institute of Finance (DIIJF) is actually a playground for a group of academic corruption and collusion!

Despite this, Professor Yao Yang still tries to maintain appearances and shout slogans:

“DIIJF, standing tall and upright!”

Unfortunately, beneath this facade, there is already a stain.

Yao Yang: Dishui Lake DIIJF aims to be “standing tall and upright,” cultivating scholars who can solve real-world problems.

DIIJF has never been a place to cultivate scholars who can solve China’s real-world problems. On the contrary, it is only good at dealing with “people” rather than “problems”—any scholar who dares to speak the truth and refuses to conform will be treated as a “problem” to be solved.

Despite this, we urge Dean Yao Yang to investigate how many charlatans he has under his command.

We are providing a list for Dean Yao Yang to verify; these professors are all involved in multiple publications of the same paper.

Bao Xiaohua: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/86/c12600a208774/page.htm

Cao Dongbo: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/a8/c12600a208808/page.htm

Ding Xiaoqin: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/9a/c12600a208794/page.htm

Jin Qinglu: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/ 2f/84/c12600a208772/page.htm

Jin Yuying: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/84/c12600a208772/page.htm

Liu Zhiyang: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/75/c12600a208757/page.htm

Luo Yuding: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/90/be/c12600a233662/page.htm

Wang Fang: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/a2/c12600a208802/page.htm

Yan Hongzhong: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/7d/c12600a208765/page.htm

Zhu Xiaoneng: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/7f/c12600a208767/page.htm

#18: Canadian Mathematician Goes Missing

, one of the best journalists in Canada, has published a detailed write-up on a mathematician and outspoken critic of the Iranian regime who warned that the regime had infiltrated a Canadian university engineering program at Simon Fraser University.

He went missing earlier this month under suspicious circumstances.

The Bureau

Mathematician Who Warned of Regime Infiltration of Canadian University Engineering Program Missing in Suspicious Disappearance

VANCOUVER – An outspoken Iranian dissident who publicly warned Canadian authorities in 2021 about alleged Iranian regime infiltration of engineering programs at Simon Fraser University has disappeared under suspicious circumstances, prompting an investigation by the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team…

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2 months ago · 106 likes · 7 comments

The RCMP’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) is still investigating.

#19: Rachael Meager is now officially Rafe Meager

If you are active on EconTwitter, you will know that one of the most popular accounts is Rachel Meager, she is one of the cool kids. Previously she was an assistant professor at LSE Department of Economics, but has recently returned home to be a professor in Australia.

She is also on Substack:

The Universal and the Vacuous Events

Either rotten or good, or both rotten and good

By Rafe Meager

Breaking news: Rachael is now going by “Rafe,” and says she is a man.

This is very very sad. You can see the pain and confusion in her tortured eyes.

#20: Marco Di Maggio update

Do Kwon has now pled guilty in a New York court to two U.S. fraud charges, conspiracy to defraud and wire fraud, under a plea deal that requires him to forfeit over $19 million but carries a maximum prison sentence of 25 years.

• https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/do-kwon-pleads-guilty-us-fraud-charges-40-billion-crypto-collapse-2025-08-12/

Kwon was a software engineer who built Terra, which wiped out investors worldwide when it imploded in 2022.

Kwon has nothing to do with economics or academia directly—but his chief economic consultant at the time was Marco Di Maggio, then a finance professor at Harvard Business School.

I wrote about Marco Di Maggio three years ago, in one of my first articles:

Chris Brunet

Marco Di Maggio: Putting the BS in HBS

If you even tangentially follow the crypto markets, you have heard of Terra/Luna…

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4 years ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Christopher Brunet

How central was Di Maggio to Terra’s $40 billion Ponzi? Just look at the foundational whitepapers—the core documents outlining the system. His name is on all of them. Marco promised this Ponzi scheme was safe, and he put the Harvard name brand on it, but it was a fatally flawed scam.

When I initially covered this, I noted that Di Maggio had walked away from the wreckage untouched, despite questions about how many millions he might have personally pocketed while retail investors were left holding the bag.

Now for the update: Di Maggio has since quietly left Harvard, and has now resurfaced in the UK at Imperial College Business School.

• https://www.marcodimaggio.net/

Imperial is a good school, but British academia is much worse than American academia, and even in the pecking order of British academia, it is 2nd rate, sitting a tier below the big four: Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, and UCL.

Harvard to Imperial is a pretty major downgrade, but still a comfy landing spot for a man who did so much damage to the global economy.

#21: Adrien Matray Update

Since we’re catching up with old friends, let’s check in on Adrien.

When I first reported on his scandal, it was huge news — one of the very few papers ever retracted by the best econ journal in the world due to two egregious coding “errors” followed by the classic excuse: the dog ate my laptop.

Chris Brunet

BREAKING: American Economic Review retracts Princeton economics professor's paper due to "coding error"

Following this Harvard bombshell from 2 days ago…

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3 years ago · 27 likes · 2 comments · Christopher Brunet

“The data and the code for the analysis are stored on remote, external servers that were inaccessible to the authors for prolonged periods of time during the publication process, so it is unfortunately not possible to recover past versions to isolate the error’s origin.”

— Adrien Matray

After getting caught in this fraud, he was bounced off the tenure track at Princeton and shuffled into temporary VAP roles at Stanford and Harvard. Hardly the academic wilderness, but still a sharp demotion — from a tenure-track golden boy to one-year contracts.

He has not updated his Linkedin since that, for a good reason: he has now left academia and joined the Atlanta Fed. A promising elite academic career derailed by research misconduct, but still a safe cushion too land on.

#22: Times of India Covers Affirmative Action in Canadian Universities

If you follow me on X you know that I am in the habit of tweeting out discriminatory job postings from Canadian schools, e.g.:

My last one about University of Toronto was tweeted by Elon Musk, and The Times of India (13.9 millions followers on X) has written an article about it:

#23: University of Adelaide builds “squat toilets”

Presented without comment:

#24: Last month Supreme Court signals it will defy Trump to keep Lisa Cook on Federal Reserve

This happened over a month ago, but given that I’ve written a dozen articles on Lisa Cook, it is worth covering the newest update:

• https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/21/politics/takeaways-supreme-court-federal-reserve-lisa-cook-trump-power

The Supreme Court signaled deep skepticism Wednesday that President Donald Trump had the authority to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, with several conservative justices joining their liberal colleagues in posing pointed questions of the lawyer defending the president.

By the end of the two-hour argument, many of the justices appeared to be more interested in how the court would side with Cook — not whether it would do so — and how quickly it would resolve her underlying litigation.

…

Given the tenor of the arguments, and the fact that the case was at the Supreme Court on an emergency basis, it’s possible that the justices will hand down a decision far more quickly than it normally might in an argued case. Usually, the court will resolve its most important cases before the end of June.

#25: TAMU Abolishes Women’s Studies Program

#26: University of Nebraska Abolishes Statistics Department

Much more worrying than getting rid of gender studies:

Meanwhile Nebraska is happily funding gender studies, dance, and theater departments. In what world do you eliminate the statistics department before their Bachelor of Arts in Dance?

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This was her third attempt at taking the SAT.

The first time she got 1100, the second time, 1050, the third time 1070.

A 1070 SAT score is genuinely bad. It sits around the 59th percentile, which is bad enough that if you score at this level you probably aren’t smart enough to go to college, and especially embarrassing given that Alice had every possible advantage: a private tutor, elite schooling, and access to unlimited billions of dollars.

For reference, these are the best schools you could realistically expect to get into with a 1070 SAT score:

1. Montclair State University (NJ) — 930–1200

2. University of Nevada, Reno (NV) — 1070–1230

3. University of South Alabama (AL) — 990–1180

4. University of New Mexico (NM) — 900–1160

5. University of Toledo (OH) — 1040–1260

This is exactly why people are angry. If Alice de Rothschild had been born in a trailer park, her academic profile would have made her a fit for a school like University of Toledo, which has a roughly 95 percent acceptance rate.

Instead, because of her blue blood, she was admitted to New York University, which admits only about 7 percent of applicants. Jeffrey Epstein even tried to get her into Columbia University, but failed. NYU was the fallback.

The New York Times reports:

[Epstein] asked Richard Axel — a Nobel laureate and a powerful scientific figure on Columbia’s campus with whom he had a long relationship — to lobby the admissions office on Alice de Rothschild’s behalf.

“I have spoken with Columbia admissions and she is good but not strongest candidate. I am pushing,” Dr. Axel wrote to Mr. Epstein on Nov. 16, 2016.

“Alice de Rothschild’s university admissions in the United States, as well as her rejections, are entirely due to her grades,” the Rothschild family said in a statement. “Alice cannot be held responsible for Jeffrey Epstein’s unilateral actions.”

She was not admitted. Dr. Axel wrote to Mr. Epstein in February 2017, breaking the news. She ultimately enrolled at N.Y.U., where she studied biology.

This struck a chord because thousands of people who scored far higher than Alice but were shut out of elite schools recognized it immediately for what it was: a rigged system. The “elites” who rule over us are frauds. They deserve scorn and ridicule not because they are exceptional, but because they achieve nothing. They are simply born into power and placed there. They fail upwards.

One of the funnier replies to my tweet sarcastically suggested that the Rothschilds would have to write an admissions essay about how someone was racist to them once and it makes them sad….

… which is ironic, because in the emails, I found that Ariane Rothschild frequently complained to Epstein about all the “anti-rothschild” racism she had to endure and how that makes her sad.

Another common talking point in the replies was that this mediocrity is the result of generations of inbreeding. Which is surprisingly true. For centuries, the Rothschilds almost exclusively married their cousins, which is something they openly admit.

In response to this inbreeding talking point, hundreds of people argued the opposite: that Rothschild blood has been so diluted by recent intermixing with shiksahs, that no wonder Alice Rothschild is dumb.

The most unhinged of all responses came from , who began bizarrely white-knighting for Epstein and the Rothschilds, claiming that me violating the Rothschild’s privacy is “more of a violation of a teenager” than “anything that’s come out in the entire Epstein files” which he referred to as a “moral panic.”

This is what the Epstein files actually show. Everyone looks for the sex tapes and the blackmail, but the day-to-day reality is much more pathetic. Epstein was a fixer for the Zionist mafia. If a billionaire’s kid is too “slow” or “dim” to get into a real school, Epstein was the guy who called in a favor to a Nobel Laureate to fix it.

This story blew up because it’s a middle finger to every smart, poor kid who actually studied. While ordinary people grind for a percentile that might determine the trajectory of their entire lives, the ruling class treats the Ivy League like a private club with a side entrance for their inbred failspawn.

More soon on the Epstein–Rothschild correspondence.

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This includes 7 papers in the International Review of Financial Analysis (a good journal—it has an 18% acceptance rate):

• RETRACTED: The role of feature importance in predicting corporate financial distress in pre and post COVID periods: Evidence from China

• RETRACTED: The impacts of climate policy uncertainty on stock markets: Comparison between China and the US

• RETRACTED: Financing Irish high-tech SMEs: The analysis of capital structure

• RETRACTED: Extreme spillovers across Asian-Pacific currencies: A quantile-based analysis

• RETRACTED: Identifying the multiscale financial contagion in precious metal markets

• RETRACTED: Is Bitcoin a better safe-haven investment than gold and commodities?

• RETRACTED: Cryptocurrencies as a financial asset: A systematic analysis

Plus two more retractions in Finance Research Letters (29% acceptance rate):

• RETRACTED: Datestamping the Bitcoin and Ethereum bubbles

• RETRACTED: Trading volume and the predictability of return and volatility in the cryptocurrency market

Two days later, three more papers were retracted at the International Review of Economics & Finance (30% acceptance rate):

• RETRACTED: Oil price shocks and yield curve dynamics in emerging markets

• RETRACTED: Volatility forecasting on China’s oil futures: New evidence from interpretable ensemble boosting trees

• RETRACTED: ESG disclosure and internal pay gap: Empirical evidence from China

Combined, these 12 papers have 5,104 citations.

All 12 papers had one thing in common: Brian M Lucey, Professor of International Finance and Commodities, Trinity College Dublin — the #1 ranked economics and business school in Ireland — as a co-author.

Lucey published 56 papers in 2025, one paper every 6.5 days. Lmao.

Lucey has published 44 papers in Finance Research Letters alone, an Elsevier journal he edited.

I emailed Lucey for comment, but he did not respond.

Brian Lucey… where have I heard that name before?

Oh yeah, he bullied me on Twitter in 2023.

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The stated reason for the retractions was that: “review of this submission was overseen, and the final decision was made, by the Editor Brian Lucey, despite his role as a co-author of the manuscript. This compromised the editorial process and breached the journal’s policies.”

In plain terms, Lucey was serving as editor while approving his own papers. The result was a complete bypass of peer review—an abuse of editorial authority that functioned as a citation-cartel scheme.

Apparently this was an open secret in the profession for many years, with EJMR comments going back 5+ years explicitly calling him out as a cheater:

Along with the 12 retractions, Lucey was removed as an editor at 5 journals: International Review of Financial Analysis, the International Review of Economics & Finance, Finance Research Letters, Financial Management, & Energy Finance.

Lucey remains as editor-in-chief at Wiley’s Journal of Economic Surveys.

I emailed Wiley, and they provided me with this statement:

We are aware of these concerns and have investigated Prof. Lucey’s activity on Journal of Economic Surveys. Our research integrity team did not find any concerns regarding conflict of interest or mishandling of papers, nor has Prof. Lucey published any papers in the journal since he joined the editorial team as a co-editor in 2024. We expect full commitment and adherence to our editorial practices and standards, and we will be monitoring the situation to ensure that there is no improper handling of papers at the journal.

In response to Wiley’s statement, one EMJR user wrote: “I am baffled how they could possibly still have confidence in him, given his serious and systematic ethical lapses in editorial positions. Sounds somewhat naive to expect ‘full adherence to our editorial practices and standards’!”

Until being purged from the leadership of these 5 journals, Lucey played a central role in coordinating Elsevier’s Finance Journals Ecosystem, which allows “participating journals to suggest transferring a rejected manuscript to another journal in the system without the need for resubmission and the associated cost."

That system, and the editors involved, “came under fire last year when a preprint suggested it might facilitate citation stacking as a way to boost journal impact factors. The analysis in the preprint also suggested a citation ring involving Elsevier editors could be at work.”

I emailed the anonymous “Theophilos Nomos” who wrote this paper, but they did not respond to my email.

That pre-print names Samuel Vigne, a finance professor at Luiss Business School, former PhD student of Lucey, and prolific Lucey co-author (they have published at least 33 papers together) as a core node of Lucey’s citation cartel.

Multiple publications by Vigne and Lucey are flagged on PubPeer.

• https://pubpeer.com/search?q=samuel+vigne (21 results)

• https://pubpeer.com/search?q=brian+lucey (55 results)

This example neatly illustrates how their co-authorship trading scheme operated:

• https://pubpeer.com/publications/59EAFFA126CD44D742AAF1386F45FC

It describes a draft uploaded to SSRN with three authors:

After submitting that draft to the Elsevier finance ecosystem, that draft was scrubbed from SSRN, and in the final published version, an additional author (Samuel Vigne) was added as a new author, with an “equal contribution” statement. The two versions are otherwise identical, containing the same figures, sections, and text.

Co-authorship trading is only one part of the operation. The other is citation stacking. In this model, a small, tightly linked group funnels an enormous volume of papers into the same handful of journals, then systematically stuffs those papers with citations to one another. The result is a rapid, artificial explosion in citation counts that makes them look like influential geniuses.

Take John Gooddell, a professor at the University of Akron and a Lucey co-author. Gooddell has published 68 papers in Finance Research Letters alone, a journal edited by Lucey. If each paper contains even a modest 50 references, that amounts to roughly 3,400 citations recycled through a single outlet. In 2024 alone, Gooddell published 61 papers. He’s not doing research. He’s farming citations.

Following Lucey’s retractions, Samuel Vigne was removed as the editor-in-chief of International Review of Financial Analysis and Finance Research Letters.

In addition to that anonymous pre-print, there is also a 2025 paper written by actual professors with sophisticated econometric analysis & graph theory which describes the citation cartel in much more detail. The conclusion of that paper is: ”Elsevier ecosystem journals benefited from the creation of the ecosystem … Elsevier journals in the ecosystem have overlapping editors and Elsevier appoints these editors in coordination with a single academic [Brian Lucey] that manages the fleet of ecosystem journals.”

Brian Lucey posted a reply to this paper, which was extremely weak and does not contain any tables or figures. It mostly ignores the data and structural model of the citation ring and instead leans on Lucey’s “lived experience” as an editor (“we have experience shepherding…”), while also nitpicking semantics and phrasing, such as Lucey complaining that they called him a “professor of finance” instead of his full honorific, “professor of international finance and commodities.”

The Elsevier ecosystem web page went live on 4 November 2020 , according to Lucey’s rebuttal. Below is a visualization of the network before and after this transition date, which shows a clear distortion of the citation network. During 2021-2025, the Ecosystem citations per article is 103 % higher.

2016-2020: (Before)

2021-2025: (After)

2020 is also the year where Brian Lucey’s citation profile exhibits an exponential “J-curve”, a Hallmark of citation rings. Did he suddenly become a well-respected genius in 2020? Or did he figure out how to cheat the system?

In a comment to Retraction Watch, Lucey further argued that citation cartels are not a crime, because everyone does it.

”Because here’s the thing: Elsevier are aware of [editors publishing in their own journals] as a pretty common practice in finance and economics. We’ve given them evidence of hundreds of instances of this. And nothing has happened, which does raise the question, you know, maybe they’re going to go back and go look at all these. Presumably, they will treat everything the same.” Lucey shared his list of such instances. It includes 240 articles, 133 of which are in Science of the Total Environment, which was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in November.

(N.B.: As several commenters have noted, the list linked above includes citations to editorials and special issue introductions, which are typically penned by editors-in-chief. The disclaimer at the top of the document Lucey provided reads, “In no way is this meant to suggest any ethical or other breaches. It is a list of persons who occupied a EiC or similar role in the Journal mentioned at the same time as a paper in which they were an author or coautho[r].”)

Dr. Thorsten Beck, in a blog post, confirmed that no, not everyone does it, and yes, it is a crime.

This incident raises an important question: is this common practice across academic journals? And are there rules for editors publishing in ‘their’ journals? As I was editor across three journals for a total of 11 years, I can certainly speak to this (and clearly say NO).

…

I don’t have formal confirmation but I have been told by several independent sources that ultimately even Elsevier realised that this editor was seriously damaging the reputation of the journal, appointing a second editor and then easing out the ‘doubtful’ editor from his responsibilities.

The fallout from the Lucey–Vigne era extends far beyond a handful of retracted PDFs. What it exposes is a structural weakness in how academic “excellence” is manufactured, measured, and monetized. By presiding over a coordinated cluster of journals, a small group of editors effectively gained the ability to print their own academic currency.

However, blaming Lucey and Vigne alone ignores the hand that fed them. Elsevier did not just “allow” this to happen; they engineered the environment for it to flourish, because of incentives: Elsevier’s internal metrics (Impact Factors) directly benefitted from this behavior. It was a symbiotic corruption: the editors received a fast-track to academic stardom, and Elsevier received a high-margin, high-volume production line of citable content.

This is the “paper mill” reimagined for the elite: not a basement operation in a third-world nation, but a polished, corporate-mandated factory within the halls o the world’s most powerful publisher. This is the natural result of a corporate mandate to maximize profits by bundling journals into monopoly-priced packages, forcing universities to pay for the very “prestige” that Elsevier’s own staff helped to dilute. As one EJMR commenter noted, “The tragedy isn’t that they cheated; it’s that the system was designed to let them thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data.”

The question now is whether Trinity College Dublin will fire Lucey.

They did not respond to my inquiry.

What Investigators Should Look For

An editor of a psychology journal was offered $1,500 per accepted paper.

, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex, wrote that he was offered $5,000 per paper.

Muhammad Ali Nasir, a professor of Macroeconomics at Leeds University, wrote about how common selling papers is in European finance journals: “I had been made such offers from anonymous emails but I choose not to engage and in one case forwarded the email to EiC. I will be surprised if any editor is not approached by these people.”

This raises a multi-million-euro question: given their documented corruption, are the various “educational consultancies” and special-purpose vehicles operated by Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne used to circulate ecosystem funds, conference fees, or “consultancy” payouts from authors seeking a shortcut to publication?

One anonymous economist says:

Here is a hypothetical outline of how such a cash-flow scheme could function.

“Hello [unknown, distant institutions], we offer consulting services: €€€ for excellent advice on how to publish in top-tier finance journals. Our advice yields results.”

Money flows into companies.

Papers flow into journals.

Another anonymous economist says:

I’m not going to provide details on how to corruptly have a paper published. I’m just going to speculate on what could be going on in a situation like this. It could be based on “consultancy fees” for advice on publishing that you or your institution pay to one of those companies. They give some advice, including what papers to cite, etc, and if you follow their advice you are likely to be published in one of their journals. This could be attractive for researchers and institutions in, e.g., China and the Middle East.

Another anonymous economics professor I spoke to told me:

Universities in East and West Asia pay cash bonuses for publications. Some authors hire a broker (many advertise openly on Facebook), other authors contact the editor directly. The cash bonus is shared between the author, broker, and editor.

Besides selling papers, they also sell special issues, which allow the guest editors to do what they want.

And they sell positions on the editorial board, which are important for promotion to the next academic rank.

Some payments are in cash, others in kind.

Finally, they organize conferences. Registration fees more than cover the costs of putting on a conference. The conference name suggests it is organized by a society, but it really is Lucey who pockets the profits.

Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne operate four private companies in Ireland and the UK classified under “other education,” likely functioning as consultancies or special-purpose vehicles for academic or policy work.

• PIQUE ASSOCIATES LIMITED

• INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE FINANCE VENTURES COMPANY LIMITED BY GUARANTEE

• HIPPOPOTAMUS LIMITED

• FUTURE FINANCE AND ECONOMICS ASSOCIATION LIMITED

The existence of these consultancies warrants investigation into potential conflicts of interest and financial misconduct.

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At the time, a lone commenter on EJMR accused him of being “corrupt to the bone” and ‘‘publishing his buddies.’’

What once sounded like an internet cheap shot now sounds like prophecy.

The Karolyi name has since become shorthand for everything rotten in academic finance: nepotism, backroom deals, and a profession that quietly rehabilitates insiders rather than holding them accountable, or even asks them to say sorry.

Before writing this article, I contacted both Andrew Karolyi, and his son, Stephen Karolyi (He/Him/His), but neither responded.

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Stephen Karolyi earned his PhD in Financial Economics from Yale in 2014, landed his first tenure track job at Carnegie Mellon, then immediately began flooding the Review of Financial Studies with submissions, knowing full well that racking up multiple publications in his daddy’s journal would guarantee him a lifetime of tenured sinecures.

But publishing in daddy’s journal was only the tip of this corruption iceberg…

Will the real specification please stand up?

Our saga begins in October 2015, when our hero, an assistant professor of accounting named Alex Young—then at North Dakota State, now at Hofstra—attended a conference where Stephen Karolyi presented a paper, “Governance and Taxes: Evidence from Regression Discontinuity,” coauthored with Andrew Bird, another assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon.

The lowly North Dakota scholar spotted a fatal flaw with their methodology and alerted them, but the mighty Carnegie Mellon scholars brushed him off.

When that paper finally appeared in The Accounting Review in January 2017 — another one of the best accounting journals in the world — Young again spotted something odd: the methodology section had been rewritten since the 2015 draft… but every number in all 11 tables remained identical, down to the third decimal place.

Their methodology completely changed, but their results didn’t…

That is how they were caught.

In the 2015 draft, the authors began their data description as follows:

In the 2017 draft, the authors stated that they made the opposite choice:

The 2015 methodology further appears the following:

While in 2017:

In sum:

Young concluded it was fraud:

Thus, if we compare the tables from the two versions, at the very least, we should see slightly different numbers for the estimated coefficients, standard errors, etc. But row for row, column for column, the numbers for the estimated coefficients, standard errors, and R-squareds are all exactly the same between BK 2015 and BK 2017 to three decimal places.

Young then launched a campaign to get to the bottom of it.

• On 18 April 2017, Alex Young emailed Professor Bird to follow up on their October 2015 conversation, and requested that he share their data and code.

• Two days later, on 20 April, Professor Karolyi replied with a short message that ignored the request.

• On 5 May 2017, Alex Young then wrote to The Accounting Review, to explain his concerns in detail.

• Six months then passed with no update.

• In November 2017, Econ Journal Watch (www.econjorunalwatch), the profession’s most respected independent watchdog, intervened formally to request the files. The authors answered—but not with the files. The journal asked again. The answer was still no.

On December 1, 2017, The Accounting Review (TAR) formally opened a misconduct inquiry thus launching a series of elaborate excuses from Bird & Karolyi.

Excuse #1: The Copy-Editor Did It

One month later, in January 2018, Young published a devastating takedown in EconJournalWatch.

Bird & Karolyi responded immediately with a note blaming the ‘‘potentially confusing description of our methodology’’ on a rogue ‘‘copy editor’’ who made the changes ‘‘during the final iteration of copy editing’’ without their knowledge.

This claim is absurd.

Copy editors don’t rewrite methodology—they deal with commas, capitalization, and house style. They would never, under any circumstances, alter how you describe your data or your methods. And even if they did, every journal shows you exactly what edits the copy editor made, giving you the option to accept or reject them. Authors are wholly responsible for ensuring the text accurately reports their data and findings.

Excuse 2: STATA Sort

Nobody bought the ‘‘copy-editor’’ excuse, so, a month later, in February 2018, Bird and Karolyi published a (now deleted) 4-page note to SSRN titled, “Governance and Taxes: A Note on Methodology.” That note claimed that Alex Young did not correctly replicate their article:

Young (2018) replicates the main findings using the Russell rankings, but was unable to replicate the same finding using May market capitalization rankings.

Curiously, rather than open-sourcing their own data and code to prove Young wrong, they only used the data and code provided by Young:

To provide the strongest possible evidence of replicability, we replicate the main findings of Bird and Karolyi (2017) using only data and code provided by Young (2018). We do this by making one correction to the measurement of May market capitalization ranking

The correction they made to Alex Young’s data involved the STATA ‘‘Sort’’ command — and tweaking that ‘‘Sort’’ command magically fixed everything:

The following regression commands (exactly as in lines 51 and 52 of the Young (2018) code) produce analogous results using reconstructed May market capitalization rankings:

This is what their miraculous ‘‘Sort’’ fix looked like:

This would turn out to be fraudulent as well, because it sorted the data the opposite direction as they claimed. They got the coding backwards.

When I emailed Alex Young to ask about the ‘‘Sort’’ tweak, he uploaded an extensive explanation:

To be clear, if Andrew Bird and Stephen Karolyi had simply made a Stata sort coding error and had provided their original data and code which

• contained this error and

• reproduced all their reported tables in “Governance and Taxes: Evidence from Regression Discontinuity,”

I would’ve been convinced that they committed no data falsification. In addition, I would’ve apologized to them and contacted Dr. Daniel Klein to request that my Econ Journal Watch article be appended with a note clarifying that there was no research misconduct, just an honest mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, and of course I am no exception to that.

So the problem is not a mistake.

Within days of posting their flawed ‘‘Sort’’ fix, Bird and Karolyi deleted the 4-page SSRN note and replaced it with a shortened 1-page note that now contains:

• no mention of their STATA sort tweak ever existing,

• no mention of any data or any code,

• no tables, and

• no citation of any article besides their own.

Excuse #3: The Dog Ate My Laptop

When The Accounting Review requested the data and code during their investigation, Karolyi & Bird claimed that a laptop crash had wiped out everything—no backups, no cloud storage.

The excuse was hard to believe given that Karolyi was known for managing numerous projects simultaneously; at that point, they had nearly 30 (!) working papers in progress, making it implausible that all their research, code, and data would have been stored on a single, unprotected laptop.

In 2019, The Accounting Review concluded their investigation and retracted the article, explicitly stating that “the methodology described in the paper does not generate the results reported,” and that ‘‘the authors were unable to provide the original data and code.’’

The Accounting Review‘s retraction notice does not mention Alex Young or comment on whether Bird and Karolyi committed any form of research misconduct.

Bird & Karolyi admitted no wrongdoing: they put out a statement saying that they ‘‘are disappointed by the American Accounting Association’s (AAA) decision.’’

They maintain they committed no fraud and thus no crime.

The dog just ate their laptop, that’s all.

Stephen Karolyi’s CV now has a cheeky section referring to this retracted paper as a ‘‘Permanent Working Paper’’:

Excuse #4: The Replication Kit

Following The Accounting Review’s retraction, Carnegie Mellon’s Office of Research Integrity and Compliance (ORIC) launched an investigation at the Provost’s request. ORIC found “no evidence of research misconduct,” reasoning that although the authors had “lost” their original data and code, they were able to privately “create a replication kit” that reproduced the results. They refused to release the alleged replication kit, preventing anyone from verifying this claim.

After being officially ‘‘cleared’’ by CMU, Andrew Bird was exiled from the school without tenure — yet soon resurfaced at Chapman University, with tenure.

I spoke to Alex Young about Dr. Bird’s transition to Chapman University, he told me:

From November 2020 to September 2023, I received multiple emails from [name retraced], formerly Associate Dean for Research at Chapman University’s business school, “seeking input.” [name retraced] brought up the “replication kit” claim, and I asked him three times (in November 2020, March 2023, and September 2023) for a copy of the “kit.” [name retraced] ignored my first request and then responded to my last two requests by saying that he did not have “access” to the “kit,” or any interest in obtaining “access.”

I reached out to [name retracted], who denied this version of events but was unable to substantiate his recollection after changing jobs and losing access to his old emails. His explanation nonetheless seemed credible, so I withdrew his name from this article.

Excuse #5: Daddy’s Corrigendum

After being caught red-handed fabricating results in The Accounting Review, Bird and Karolyi were exposed a second time when a special committee appointed by the Review of Financial Studies — managed by Karolyi’s father, remember — investigated their paper, “Do Institutional Investors Demand Public Disclosure”, after ‘‘discovering inconsistencies between the published version and the earlier working paper.’’

Using the data and code provided by the authors, Review of Financial Studies determined that two versions of this paper used different market capitalization rankings (Russell vs. CRSP), yet somehow produced identical results.

In other words, the Review of Financial Studies paper suffered from the exact same fatal flaw as their The Accounting Review paper: the description of the specifications had changed, but the numbers in every table magically stayed the same.

After Review of Financial Studies concluded that the same ‘‘error’’ happened a second time, they published a “Statement” concluding that:

• “the Committee discovered that equations (1) and (2) on page 3254, which describe the two-stage model, do not describe the actual regressions that were used to generate the results presented in the paper.”

• “the committee found that the paper’s main inferences are not robust if the models are estimated as described on page 3254 of the paper.”

• “the Committee concluded that the methodology described in the paper does not generate the results reported in that paper.”

In response, the authors quietly published a paywalled corrigendum admitting the fatal flaw, noting only that “the authors regret this error” and that their methods were were wrong.

The paper remains on the books, unretracted, still padding their CVs and tenure files. Daddy refused to retract it, and instead let them publish a bogus corrigendum.

It’s hard to explain why the same “mistake” happened twice. That’s blatant fraud.

In any honest system, that ends a career.

In academic finance, it’s just another Tuesday.

Consequences

Andrew Bird downgraded from Carnegie Mellon to Chapman University.

His co-author, Stephen Karolyi, meanwhile, was effectively exiled from academia and got a job in government as a “senior advisor” in the Division of Supervision, Risk, and Analysis at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The man deemed too corrupt to remain in academia was entrusted with regulating the banking industry.

This brings me to why I wrote this article today.

On one level, this scandal is old news — relegated to obscure 2018 lore within the economics profession, never picked up by the media. I wanted to be the first to document it to show how the sausage is made.

But the timeliness is what makes it relevant: as of last month, Stephen Karolyi has now returning to academia, moving from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to tenure at George Mason University’s business school.

The obvious question is: can someone who committed blatant academic fraud, and had his nepo daddy sweep it up, ever be redeemed? Or is there a line beyond which “second chances” become a joke — especially when every single one of his colleagues is aware of his fraud?

What message does hiring him send to students?

Is he going to tell them with a straight face that he ‘‘lost his laptop’’ when they ask him about this fraud?

Or will he go back to blaming it on STATA?

Or will he go back to blaming it on the copy-editor?

The simple truth is that Dr. Stephen Karolyi would not be a tenured professor today if his powerful daddy didn’t protect him, and if his colleagues cared about unrepentant fraud. For students, early-career researchers, and anyone who believes in meritocracy and scholarship, this is a bitter pill to swallow. While unrepentant frausters like Stephen Karolyi are given infinite “redos,” countless honest economists grind away for years, hoping hard work will be enough to secure a stable academic career.

The lesson is clear: the system is corrupt.

No wonder the profession is dying.

Chris Brunet

The Collapse of the Econ PhD Job Market

For decades, a doctorate in economics was a golden ticket. It promised a path to tenure, or at worst, a lucrative role at a central bank, think tank, or tech firm…

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7 months ago · 94 likes · 22 comments · Christopher Brunet

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As for the elder Karolyi, who enabled his son’s fraud, his CV shows that he was renewed in 2017 for a second three-year term as an executive editor of the Review of Financial Studies. He “voluntarily” resigned from this position only one year into that term, in 2018, right as his son was put under investigation.

• https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/10/21/fas-phd-admissions-cuts/

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According to the Crimson report, which quotes five anonymous faculty sources, the reductions are as follows:

• Science PhD admissions slashed by more than 75%

• Arts & Humanities cut by about 60%

• Social Sciences reduced 50–70%

• History down 60%

• Biology down 75%

• The German department will lose all PhD seats

• Sociology will go from six students to zero

In addition to slashing PhD admissions, FAS has also instituted a hiring freeze for full-time staff, announced it would keep its budget flat for fiscal year 2026, and ceased work on all “non-essential capital projects and spending.”

These austerity measures follow a wave of layoffs across other Harvard schools, including the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Kennedy School of Government, the School of Dental Medicine, and the Graduate School of Design.

On the surface, Harvard’s austerity might appear justified. Four days ago, the university released its fiscal year 2025 financial report, revealing an operating loss of $113 million for the year ending June 30. That marks a massive reversal from the $45 million surplus it reported the year before. According to Chief Financial Officer Ritu Kalra, the deficit stems largely from the “abrupt termination of nearly the entire portfolio of our direct federally sponsored research grants” driven primarily by $116 million in reimbursements for money Harvard had ‘‘already spent’’ that “disappeared almost overnight.”

Even so, it strains belief that the richest university on Earth cannot find the resources to keep a few PhD cohorts afloat. The newly reported $113 million loss amounts to just 1.7 percent of Harvard’s $6.7 billion in annual revenue — a rounding error in Cambridge terms. Did the Faculty of Arts and Sciences really need to cut 6 sociology PhD students in order to survive? Would the school really risk insolvency if they admitted 13 History PhD students instead of 7?

Harvard’s claim of hardship collapses under even cursory scrutiny. The endowment returned $4 billion last year, climbing to $56.9 billion in total value after an 11.9 percent gain. Private equity alone now accounts for 41 percent of its holdings.

Furthermore, 2025 was a record year for donors, current-use gifts totaled around $629 million — the most in Harvard’s history, up from $528 million the prior year — yet we are told the school can no longer afford to train its own graduate students? What is the point of record ‘‘current use gifts’’ if they can’t even keep their basic PhD programs afloat? You’re really telling me in a year where their private fundraising hit an all-time high, that six history PhD stipends are what break the budget?

The entire purpose of an endowment is to help a university weather lean years without gutting its core academic programs. Yet Harvard has chosen to protect its gold pile over its scholarship, famously behaving like a hedge fund with a school attached as an afterthought. As CFO Ritu Kalra put it, the endowment is “not a source of short-term relief but a covenant across generations.” Translated from administrative jargon, that means the priority is not education but to have as big a stream of income as possible that is shielded from the influence of donors, students, and government.

And right on cue, the university’s collapse into financialized pseudo-education is now being met with a political response that’s just as absurd. Two weeks ago, President Trump announced that Harvard had reached a tentative deal with his administration to restore $2.4 billion in frozen federal grants — on the condition that it spend $500 million to create a network of trade schools for mechanics to work on ‘‘automotive plant, motors, engines,’’ which doesn’t really make any sense to me, but okay. I mean, I think funding trade schools in general is a good idea, but I am not sure that forcing Harvard to run one at gunpoint makes sense.

‘‘This would be a giant trade school, series of trade schools. It would be run by Harvard,’’ Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

Yesterday, he again reiterated that: “They’re going to open up trade schools. And I love the idea of trade and trade schools by Harvard. So, you know, they get into like a vocational type school.”

So there it is: the richest university on Earth is claiming poverty and cutting history, philosophy, chemistry, biology, and sociology — only to reinvent itself as a glorified trade school to appease the government that froze its funding.

This is where higher education is heading. The intellectual core is being hollowed out from both directions, administrators treating universities as hedge funds, politicians treating them as job-training centers. What’s dying in the middle is the idea of the university itself: a place devoted to knowledge for its own sake.

It’s fitting that Gen Z is named after the last letter of the alphabet. They may also be the last generation to experience anything resembling a classical liberal education rather than debt-funded vocational training under corporate or state control.

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#1: Yet Another Harvard Economics Professor Implicated in Jeffrey Epstein Pedophile Network

Since earlier this month I exposed misconduct by Harvard’s former Dean of the Faculty of Arts, it seems worth pointing to a Crimson story from last week about another former Dean of the very same faculty.

The Crimson just reported that Epstein not only arranged “massages” for Henry Rosovsky, former Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but also facilitated a $2 million gift to build Harvard Hillel’s Rosovsky Hall.

• https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/9/3/rosovsky-epstein-massage-allegations/

Convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell alleged that former Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Henry A. Rosovsky received a “massage” through disgraced billionaire and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s network, according to a transcript of a United States Department of Justice interview released on Aug. 22.

…

In 1991, Epstein helped facilitate a $2 million donation from billionaire Leslie H. Wexner to fund the construction of Harvard Hillel’s Rosovsky Hall, named in the former dean’s honor, though Epstein did not contribute his own money. Rosovsky also frequented Epstein’s Cambridge office during his tenure at the helm of the FAS.

#2: Nicholas Decker update

4 months ago, I profiled a GMU econ PhD student who defended pedophilia, obsessed over ‘transgender children,’ and argued for abolition of age of consent.

Decker urged leftists to rise up and begin indiscriminately killing Republicans, a call to violence that now takes on new relevance in light of Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Following his full-throated defense of pedophilia and successful incitement to violence, Decker tweeted that puberty is an “irreversible harm” and that children should not go through it.

He then spent several days defending bestiality, claiming that animals can consent to sex if they show “indicators of enjoyment” or “seem to like it.”

He declared that ‘‘queerness is a spectrum,’’ therefore bestiality is protected under the LGBT+ umbrella.

A week after defending bestiality, he became a vegan.

Decker then announced he’s spending this semester as a visiting student at MIT.

#3: Congress, DOE, & DOJ go to war with GMU

Speaking of GMU, this summer, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce sent a formal letter to GMU President demanding he appear for questioning to answer questions about GMU’s DEI programs. That hearing is expected to take place in early fall. If Washington refuses to testify voluntarily, the committee has floated the possibility of issuing a subpoena.

• https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairmen-jordan-and-roy-demand-testimony-george-mason-university-president

The impetus for this new congressional hearing appears to be an investigation by investigative journalist John Sailer, who exposed via FOIA requests how GMU ‘‘required every faculty hiring committee to carefully document how it prioritized diversity.’’

One hiring committee openly stated that it discussed ‘‘demographic diversity” as a part of candidates’ strengths/weaknesses, while another committee put in writing that out of 8 candidates there were “seven women of color, five of whom identify as African American, one as Palestinian American, and one as Iranian American; and a Korean American man...”

The U.S. Department of Justice’s then opened a formal investigation into GMU to determine whether it discriminates against employees on the basis of sex and race, including in promotion and tenure decisions. The probe will also review discrimination against students on the basis of race or national origin in admissions, scholarships, and other benefits, as well as the university’s handling of antisemitism on campus.

In late August, the Department of Education announced that GMU violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by using race in hiring and promotion. They demanded that GMU issue a public apology. The president of GMU rejected DOE’s proposed resolution and refused to apologize, and is currently attempting to negotiate with them.

#4: Video update on Massive Fraud at MIT

Last month, I published a story about ‘‘undoubtedly the most blatant and brazen econ fraud of 2025.’’

Chris Brunet

MIT Econ PhD Student Kicked Out for Massive Fraud

This is undoubtedly the most blatant and brazen econ fraud of 2025…

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8 months ago · 119 likes · 3 comments · Christopher Brunet

For a long time, I’ve wanted to experiment with video as a funnel to bring more attention to my writing. This month I finally did it: I turned that MIT article into a TikTok, and to my surprise, it went mega-viral with 500k views, 50k likes, 3k comments, and a collective 13,000 hours of watch time.

It was quick, low production value, and improvised, yet it’s easily the most successful piece of media I’ve ever created. Watch:

@realchrisbrunet#economics #academia #ai #artificialintelligence #fraud

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Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

That video pushed me to 10.5k TikTok followers, next I’m aiming for 100k.

Follow me on that platform:

• https://www.tiktok.com/@realchrisbrunet

I also launched a YouTube channel to host longer videos and eventually turn some of my articles into full-length documentaries.

• https://www.youtube.com/@chrisbrunet

I have 84 YouTube subscribers so far, please be my 85th:

Does this expansion into video mean I’m pivoting away from writing? Not at all. If anything, I’m doubling down on Substack. The videos are a way to grow this community, and they’re already working... From just that one viral TikTok, I picked up a few hundred new substack subscribers. If you’re one of them: welcome! Drop a comment and say hi.

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#5: MIT PhD Student Vanishes from Econometrica Paper

In economics, a revise-and-resubmit at Econometrica is the holy grail. For a graduate student, it all but guarantees a top placement. Which makes the latest authorship drama surrounding Extreme Value Theory with Heterogeneous Agents baffling: an MIT PhD student has been erased from the project that should have launched his career.

The paper, originally submitted in 2023 co-authored by Dr. Sephorah Mangin of Australian National University with MIT student Louis Becker, was accepted at Econometrica in 2025 without him.

A footnote explains blandly: “At the 2025 resubmission, Louis Becker requested to have his name removed as an author.”

That single footnote has lit the economics profession on fire.

Why would a graduate student abandon the most prestigious journal in the field?

And what changed between the 2023 draft and the 2025 version?

I’ve gone through both drafts, reached out to the journal, the authors, and their universities.

Here’s what I uncovered—

🔒 The rest of this article is subscribers only.

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Fas Report

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This report is not a final Harvard finding. It is an interim report prepared by volunteers to assist the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in ensuring compliance with federal research regulations. It has been formally submitted to Harvard officials, and Stacey Springs, Director of Research Integrity at Harvard University, confirmed receipt one week ago.

In March 2022, a leaked complaint from Harvard was spiked by The Daily Caller News Foundation over legal risk. The following day, it was published independently on my Substack.

Chris Brunet

EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Complaint Shows Harvard Professor Fabricated Data

Karlstack has obtained a leaked document that shows a professor of political science at Harvard allegedly fabricated data in order to prove that white people feel threatened by minorities…

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4 years ago · 53 likes · 25 comments · Christopher Brunet

That complaint alleged that Ryan Enos, the director of Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies, had falsified data to “prove” his pet theory: Racial Threat Theory, a branch of Critical Race Theory claiming that white people fear black people.

Harvard never investigated Enos. Instead, its administrators circled the wagons. The American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) sent a cease-and-desist to suppress coverage. The report also faults AJPS editors for willful disregard of COPE/Wiley ethics guidelines in handling the complaint.

Meanwhile, questions also emerged about the role of then–Dean Claudine Gay. A 2022 leak I obtained showed that the decision to dismiss the misconduct inquiry carried the signature of Peter Marsden, a retired sociologist serving as chair of Harvard’s Standing Committee on Professional Conduct. Marsden’s dismissal letter rested on procedurally invalid grounds that ran directly contrary to Harvard’s own stated research integrity policies. According to those policies, only the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has the authority to take final action in such cases. That means Marsden could not have closed the matter without Dean Gay’s knowledge and approval.

This created a clear conflict of interest: Enos’s research leaned heavily on Gay’s own scholarship; a fraud finding would undermine hers.

Chris Brunet

EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Document Proves Dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences Swept Fabricated Data Under the Rug

For full context, here is a previous story I published showing a fabricated data investigation that Gay swept under the rug…

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3 years ago · 28 likes · 9 comments · Christopher Brunet

A Harvard spokesperson acknowledged to me that Gay saw the misconduct inquiry and decided it should be "readily dismissed."

This leaked internal document shows Harvard’s official justification for dismissing the complaint was that it “does not fall within the purview of the Standing Committee on Professional Conduct.”

Compare that statement to Harvard’s own policies on research integrity:

• Harvard Policies: “The Standing Committee on Professional Conduct (CPC) handles allegations of research misconduct involving FAS investigators.”

• Harvard CPC (in Enos’s case): “Allegations of research misconduct by FAS faculty members do not fall within the purview of the CPC.”

It is difficult to reconcile these two statements. On paper, the CPC exists precisely to handle allegations of misconduct by FAS faculty. Yet when the allegation landed on their desk, they declared it outside their jurisdiction, without referring it to any other administrative body. This was a direct violation of federal regulations, which require referral if one entity cannot proceed.

This was not a procedural oversight. It was a procedurally indefensible justification, tantamount to a false exculpatory statement. In legal practice, such statements are often treated as evidence of consciousness of guilt.

And the instinct to suppress scrutiny was not confined to Enos’s case; it was mirrored in Gay’s own record, when, in 2001, Gay solo-authored an American Political Science Review article but refused to share the underlying data when pressed — an incident I first covered in Dossier (below), later echoed by the New York Post and Daily Mail.

The Dossier

These scholars asked Claudine Gay for her data. She said no.

This is a The Dossier contributor post from Christopher Brunet, a contributing editor at The American Conservative who also writes an online newsletter at karlstack.substack.com…

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2 years ago · 257 likes · 130 comments · Christopher Brunet

Harvard insiders believe that when this resurfaced in late 2023, it became the final straw for the Corporation. Initially, the Corporation signaled a slap-on-the-wrist plagiarism correction in the mid-December Crimson announcement. But the prospect of a Tessier-Lavigne–style public inquiry into her withheld data was intolerable. On December 27, 2023, senior fellow Penny Pritzker pressed Gay to announce her resignation, effective January 2, 2024.

That ended her short presidency, but not Harvard’s troubles.

In April 2025, three federal agencies—the GSA, HHS, and Department of Education—formally warned Harvard that it had “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” The government gave Harvard until August 2025 to implement reforms and submit quarterly compliance reports certified for accuracy.

Harvard’s reply was the usual boilerplate: promises of “lasting and robust structural, policy, and programmatic changes.” Yet here we are, seven years after the Enos case began, and Harvard still hasn’t complied with its own research integrity policies, let alone federal regulations.

The Enos coverup now looms as the test case for whether Washington will finally enforce the rules—or let Harvard skate once again.

Report Highlights

I emailed this report directly to Ryan Enos for comment, but he did not reply.

I reached out to AJPS to ask what steps, if any, it planned to take in light of this new report. The editors replied: “Thanks for your note. We have no comment at this time.” They copied the executive director of the Midwest Political Science Association.

Fas Report

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1. Phantom Voters

• Allegation (2022): Enos’s 2004 dataset reported turnout at 59.08%, while the official Chicago Board of Elections rate was 74.63%. This implied a surplus of more than 100,000 “non-voters,” a mathematical impossibility unless the dataset was fabricated.

  

• Defense (2022): Enos did not directly deny the discrepancy. He suggested that voter files can contain normal inaccuracies, implying the difference could be explained by quirks in the commercial data.

• Report Analysis (2025): Investigators concluded the discrepancy could not be explained away. The replication concludes: “without [these phantom voters], the author’s empirical results would have been null effects at best (and possibly significant effects in the opposite direction).”

2. Misrepresentation of Data Sources

• Allegation (2022): Enos wrote that he “obtained the 2004 Illinois voter file,” but in fact he used a commercial VCS/L2 file that relies on imputation and “educated guesses.” He also failed to disclose the official Illinois State Board of Elections dataset, which was readily available.

• Defense (2022): Enos admitted using a commercial file but characterized it as standard practice, claiming this did not affect his conclusions.

• Report Analysis (2025): He did not disclose the existence of the official Illinois State Board of Elections dataset, a deception that gave false reassurance of accuracy. Investigators said this omission and misstatement violated disclosure standards, and this misstatement alone violates Harvard and federal disclosure standards. Representing an error-prone commercial file as an official state voter file gave false reassurance and raised “serious concerns about intent.”

3. Inflated Effect Sizes

• Allegation (2022): Between drafts of his work, Enos altered reported effect sizes — each time in the direction of his preferred hypothesis.

• Defense (2022): Enos did not specifically address these changes in his memos, suggesting that revisions were part of the normal process of refining estimates.

• Report Analysis (2025): Investigators found the pattern systematic, not incidental. The selective inflation without disclosure was classified as data manipulation inconsistent with good-faith error.

4. Voter File Irregularities

• Allegation (2022): Replication efforts (code available here) showed discrepancies between Enos’s 2012 working paper and his later AJPS article/book. Adjusting only the voter registration cutoff (2000-10-10 vs. 2000-01-01) failed to reproduce his 2012 estimates, implying undisclosed alterations.

  

• Defense (2022): In memos, Enos insisted his datasets were consistent and attributed differences to benign coding quirks.

• Report Analysis (2025): The replication file reproduced his published figure exactly but showed that results collapsed under even minimal changes, pointing to hidden alterations. These manual alterations resulted in ‘‘a minimum of 240 falsified observations (through additions, deletions, and/or modified variable values), and at least 4 observations were fabricated (entirely made up by the author, as they did not exist in the initial dataset). Although the author vehemently denied the existence of this irregularity, no plausible deniability exists.’’

  

5. Precinct File Irregularities

• Allegation (2022): Complaints noted unexplained inconsistencies in precinct-level datasets.

• Defense (2022): Enos later admitted to deleting precincts and altering vote totals but framed these as clumsy SQL errors: “I would not claim to be an elegant or efficient SQL programmer.”

• Report Analysis (2025): Investigators found that Enos “failed to meet the burden of proof on all counts,” and dismissed his excuses — labeling discrepancies as “guesswork” or “not unusual” — as invalid. The report concludes that undocumented deletions and alterations amount to falsification under both Harvard’s policies and federal law, and specifically documents:

  • 12 duplicate observations,

  • 390 unjustified deletions,

  • 110 inexplicable non-deletions,

    

    

    

  • Incomplete records: Missing 1996 election results and relying on “formatted” reassignment files he created himself, with no verifiable link to official sources.

  • Incomplete code: His SQL file only flagged precincts for deletion or change but did not include code showing how he applied these to construct the datasets. By definition, that omission itself constitutes falsification.

  • Severe coding errors: Catastrophic syntax and logic flaws — invalid file paths, copy/paste mistakes, structural errors — produced undue deletions, miscalculations of vote totals, and cascading distortions across up to 11 variables.

  • Non-uniform application: His datasets show precinct changes inconsistent with his own SQL code, proving they were not generated programmatically.

  • Other irregularities: Duplicates with contradictory values and out-of-sequence observations indicating manual cut-and-paste tampering.

Summary

Across all categories, investigators found that Enos’s affirmative defenses — whether blaming coding errors, normal voter file quirks, or inadvertent omissions — failed to meet the burden of proof on all counts. Under federal rules, once irregularities are identified, the accused must provide credible documentation to substantiate their defenses. Enos did not.

What Is an Affirmative Defense in Research Misconduct Cases?

In research misconduct proceedings, an affirmative defense is not just a denial. It is a specific kind of response in which the accused acknowledges irregularities in the data but offers a legally or ethically defensible justification such as an honest error, inadvertent omission, lack of intent, or the delegation of work to another party.

Federal rules make clear that the burden of proof rests with the respondent. Once irregularities are identified, it is the accused who must produce credible evidence, lab notes, datasets, or documentation to substantiate their defense. If they cannot, the defense fails. And under federal standards, a failed affirmative defense is typically treated as proof of misconduct, whether classified as reckless or deliberate.

Federal Rules Ignored

Institutions that receive federal research funding are legally bound to investigate allegations of research misconduct by following a defined process:

• Review affirmative defenses raised by the accused and issue a final determination;

• Make findings on whether misconduct was reckless or deliberate and state who is responsible;

• Retain records and report to the appropriate federal agencies that oversee compliance and can sanction institutions that obstruct the process.

Harvard did none of these things in the Enos case. Instead of reviewing defenses and issuing findings as the law requires, it dismissed the complaint on invalid grounds. This was a violation of federal regulations that condition Harvard’s accreditation and its access to hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding.

Regardless of whether Enos’s research was federally funded, Harvard is bound by its own policies to investigate allegations of misconduct and preserve records for at least seven years. That clock can be reset when new evidence emerges — including the 2022 AJPS investigation, Enos’s affirmative defenses in the 2022 memoranda, Harvard’s December 2024 statement acknowledging irregularities, and now this report documenting his failed affirmative defense.

If Harvard were to destroy records when the retention period lapses in October 2025, it would expose itself to potential liability for spoliation of evidence and obstruction of justice.

Precedents of Failed Affirmative Defenses at Harvard

Harvard has confronted this scenario before. In multiple high-profile cases, faculty members attempted affirmative defenses — and failed:

• John Darsee (1980s): A cardiology researcher whose fabricated data collapsed when his defenses were scrutinized, leading to one of the most infamous misconduct scandals in NIH history.

• Marc Hauser (2010): A psychology professor whose affirmative defenses were examined line by line under Harvard’s own policies and applicable federal law. Investigators classified his actions as deliberate falsification after he failed to substantiate his claims.

• Francesca Gino (2023): A Harvard Business School professor who blamed data issues on honest errors and alleged coauthor tampering — a claim dismissed as implausible. Her defenses failed, and she later sued, arguing male faculty (likely Enos) were treated more leniently.

These precedents show how Harvard has historically handled failed affirmative defenses: investigate them, reject them if unsupported, and issue formal findings of misconduct.

Enos’s case is the outlier.

With his track record, he fits squarely into the category of problematic faculty highlighted in the April 11, 2025 federal letter that warned Harvard had “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” He is also tied to the Kennedy School, one of the very departments cited for Title VI violations.

And Enos has not stayed on the sidelines. He has repeatedly thrust himself into Harvard’s political battles:

• In 2019, he served on Claudine Gay’s ethnic studies search committee, whose stated goal was a cluster hire of "new faculty members [...] who specialize in Asian American, Latinx, and Muslim American studies" — a mechanism for recruiting scholars of specific ethnicities.

• In 2021, he wrote to President Larry Bacow asking him to condition Harvard affiliation on an ideological litmus test, "barring or removing people from [the Harvard] university community" depending on their views on the January 6 Capitol events, even going so far as to offer his “services” to help enforce ideological tests.

• In 2023, he co-authored a Crimson op-ed demanding protection for pro-Palestine student activists, and in 2024 he defended the disruptive encampment in Harvard Yard as “The Case for Leaving Protesters Be.” Later that year, he was disciplined for joining a pro-Palestine “study-in” inside Widener Library.

• In a March 2025 article, The College Fix reported that "Enos [...] supported the removal of Republican U.S. Rep. (and Harvard graduate) Elise Stefanik from the school’s Institute of Politics Senior Advisory Committee due to her objections over certifying Joe Biden the winner in 2020."

His activism made him politically useful to Harvard administrators, and rather than investigate, they chose to shield him.

The new report removes any ambiguity. It finds Enos failed to meet the burden of proof in defending against data falsification, documenting a pattern of reckless errors and anomalies that can only be explained as deliberate manipulation. Under federal standards, even recklessness alone would still require a retraction.

This is not arcane academic hair-splitting. Enos’ data:

• Anchored his Harvard tenure case.

• Became the backbone of a Cambridge University Press book.

• Fed into Critical Race Theory claims about “white fear” — a narrative that shaped DEI policy across academia.

Expert Counterpoint

Not all experts agree with the report’s conclusion. To stress-test the report and include a contrary view, I asked Dr. Michael P. McDonald, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida to review the material:

“I read the allegations and Enos’ response. I’ve worked with voter files for over thirty years and published about their properties. My initial reaction is that Enos’ response is reasonable and that he did not engage in research misconduct. Enos correctly states potential voter file issues which may explain the discrepancies among the total number of voters and nonvoters (I can think of even more than those in the provided excerpts). Further, as Enos notes, for his conclusions to be misleading using difference-in-difference models, it would have to be that the discrepancies among racial groups and their geographic location correlate with his findings. That is not alleged here. The best way to challenge Enos’ findings is to replicate his research with new data.”

But two core findings in the report cut against this defense:

1. Systematic bias. The “phantom voters” and precinct changes consistently push results toward Enos’s preferred hypothesis—not random noise.

2. Replication failure. Key estimates don’t reproduce across Enos’s own files (2012 → 2016), despite his claims of continuity.

Under federal standards, once irregularities surface, the burden shifts to the researcher to provide verifiable explanations. The report concludes Enos did not, rendering his defenses inadequate under Harvard policy and federal law.

A History of Convenient “Errors”

Enos has previously claimed such errors were minor and unintentional. But his career shows a pattern of sloppiness — or worse:

• 2009 (QJPS corrigendum): The Quarterly Journal of Political Science published a correction to Enos’s replication code and survey design after a ‘‘coding error.’’

• 2018 (PNAS correction): One of Enos’s PNAS papers contained a mis-typed survey question in its tables and figures. PNAS initially refused to correct it, but reversed course and issued a formal correction after outside scholars raised concerns.

Public Criticism and Repeated Corrections

Enos’s irregularities have not gone unnoticed in the wider scholarly community. Over the past decade, his work has repeatedly drawn scrutiny and public criticism:

• 2014 – PNAS critique: In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, van Hoorn (2014) identified flaws in Enos’s work, questioning its robustness and highlighting methodological gaps.

• 2018 – Gelman’s blog: A devastating public comment on Andrew Gelman’s Statistical Modeling blog dissected Enos’s PNAS article, accusing him of pseudoscience: “Both Enos and his advisees make conclusions unwarranted by the data.” The commenter further warned that his students were being pushed in the wrong direction, harming their career prospects.

  

• 2022 – Harvard statement: In March 2022, Enos was forced to issue a statement acknowledging the removal of an “inadvertently” retained IP variable from a dataset — an error so serious it had triggered accusations of fraud when flagged to Harvard’s public relations office.

Harvard Distances Itself from Enos

Ten months ago, when I teased today’s bombshell, I reached out to Harvard for comment. Here’s the statement Harvard provided:

Barely twelve minutes later, another email arrived from Harvard, instructing me to delete the sentence portraying Enos as “publicly transparent about his research methods.”

Communications departments don’t act lightly. Entire teams usually sign off before a single email is sent. Harvard’s sudden walk-back was a deliberate signal: Alan Garber’s administration is distancing itself from Enos. For years, Harvard shielded Enos. Now, even they won’t defend his work.

The Bottom Line

If Racial Threat Theory collapses, then the Critical Race Theory arguments built on top of it collapse too. A central CRT claim — that “white fear” can be quantified, measured, and used to explain political behavior — rests on sand. And the impact isn’t confined to Harvard. Once bad data enters academia, it seeps into media, bureaucracy, and law. That’s exactly what happened here: Enos’s fraudulent claims migrated into policymaking itself. Federal Reserve Governor Lisa D. Cook, for example, relied on his work in her article Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching. Here are Cook’s own words:

“Recent research also shows that proximity to racial minorities caused higher voter turnout and more conservative voting by whites in US cities (Enos 2016).”

“Sustained interracial interaction could ‘breed fear’ of black political gains if such interactions revealed that African American political power would come at the expense of white political power. (Enos 2016)”

The question is no longer whether Enos falsified his data, but how much of Harvard’s intellectual edifice will collapse with him, and whether Washington is prepared to cut off the federal funding that sustains it.

By October 2025, Harvard’s seven-year record-retention clock runs out. If it destroys the Enos files, that would constitute spoliation of evidence under federal law. Washington must decide: enforce the rules — or prove Harvard is untouchable.

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It’s about a now-former PhD student at MIT named Aidan Toner-Rodgers.

Amazingly, he has still not deleted his LinkedIn:

Aidan was a rising superstar.

As a 1st-year PhD student at the 1st-ranked econ program in the world, he made national headlines last year with a paper arguing that AI accelerates scientific discovery. For that paper, he was featured in a glowing full-paged photoshoot in the Wall Street Journal flanked by literally the two most influential economists in the world, David Autor (right) and Daron Acemoglu (left), who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics last year.

New research from Aidan Toner-Rodgers, an MIT doctoral student, challenges both Acemoglu’s pessimism and Autor’s optimism. Both professors are raving about it.

“It’s fantastic,” said Acemoglu.

“I was floored,” said Autor.

Aidan’s paper cited six articles by Acemoglu and another six by Autor, which likely contributed to why they were so impressed.

Despite only being a preprint, it has already been cited over 60 times. The paper was also featured in Nature, NPR, Freakonomics, Marginal Revolution, cited by the European Central Bank, and even in the U.S. Congress.

Here’s Toner-Rodgers presenting the paper at a research seminar:

• https://cassyni.com/events/MiPYGu3qzKP5MQFWNUn9Tb

Aidan then did a podcast circuit to promote the paper, including a full hour with The Atlantic:

• https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/01/ai-scientific-productivity/681298/

Just a few months after his media tour, Aidan’s paper was revealed as a fraud: not just fraudulent, but *spectacularly* fraudulent. The entire study was fabricated from thin air, and yet somehow, this psycho gave eloquent seminars and spoke about it for an entire hour to the Atlantic.

The bombshell exposing him as a fraud was dropped 2 months ago when the WSJ — the very same newspaper that honored him with a glowing photoshoot just 4 months prior — published a story: ‘‘MIT Says It No Longer Stands Behind Student’s AI Research Paper’’

In a press release, MIT said it “has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.”

The university said the author of the paper is no longer at MIT.

Toner-Rodgers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

…

“More than just embarrassing, it’s heartbreaking,” Autor said.

MIT has now deleted Toner-Rodgers from their PhD student listing:

• https://economics.mit.edu/people/phd-students/aidan-toner-rodgers

The WSJ explained how Aidan was caught, by a skeptical computer scientist:

Read my full investigation below for the explosive details →

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What this entire saga boils down to — the key issue, if, and when, this case goes to court — is one straightforward question: whether brute-forcing a rainbow hash (a precomputed table of password hashes) to deanonymize usernames on a public website qualifies as ‘‘unauthorized access’’ i.e. illegal hacking.

The analogy I use is a bike lock.

Imagine you were walking down the street and saw a bike lock protecting a bike, and you stood outside in the rain for 10 days attempting several quadrillion combinations on that bike lock (‘‘guessing usernames’’) using hundreds of hours of compute time (cracking EJMR took approximately 240 hours of compute time using Nvidia A100 GPUs) costing many thousands of dollars in University resources, until you eventually cracked it and rode away with the bike.

The thief in this analogy, Yale, might argue that it was an imperfect, outdated lock— the owner of EJMR forgot to ‘‘salt the hashes’’, a cybersecurity practice, on his database — but the prosecutor could more convincingly argue that it is still criminally unreasonable for someone to spend 10 days of compute time trying to brute force their way through the imperfect lock.

I argue that Yale stealing this metaphorical bike violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) (18 U.S.C. § 1030) on a federal level, and the Connecticut Computer Crime State (Connecticut General Statutes § 53a-251) on a state level, both of which make a crime to "obtain information" "without authorization" or "exceeding authorized access." Past cases, like United States v. Auernheimer (2012), show that even scraping public data can lead to CFAA charges if it’s deemed unauthorized.

My theory all along has been that these Yale authors (Florian Ederer, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Kyle Jensen) were never prosecuted by law enforcement because they are elite Democrats with PhDs from MIT, MIT, and Harvard, and they were doing the hacking in the name of social justice/wokeness, in 2023, under the protection a sympathetic Biden/Kamala regime.

There’s a new president in town, though, and he’s on a rampage — targeting universities, especially Yale — and both civil and criminal liability in this case remain wide open. This hack is a juicy target for Trump to exploit.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene

My Yale Professor Just Fled America to Escape Trump

"I could feel the reign of terror spiraling," Yale historian Marci Shore told the Kyiv Independent last month. With those words, a brilliant mind who taught me to understand totalitarianism announced she was doing something she never imagined: becoming an academic refugee from the United States of America…

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a year ago · 1669 likes · 75 comments · Kahlil Greene

Far from being ashamed of their crime, one of these hackers, Florian Ederer, spent the past 2 years (during which time he was denied tenure at Yale, which he appealed, and lost the appeal) parading this hacked data around in Vox, Bloomberg, NPR, Washington Post, Financial Times, CBS, NY Post, Fortune, etc.

If you click the first article at the top of that list, in Vox, Florian brags about the hack (‘‘we deanonymise a substantial portion of users even on a platform designed to preserve anonymity’’), and says it was justified because ‘‘sexism, and racism are deeply ingrained in the culture of the economics profession.’’ Sorry — but brute force hacking doesn’t suddenly become legal because you think you are doing it in the name of ‘‘sexism and racism.’’ It’s still a crime.

I read the other 16 articles on the list, and they all say the same thing: the economics profession is racist and sexist and therefore, the thinking goes, anti-woke economists should be stripped of anonymity.

Each article glosses over or ignores the legality and morality of the hack. NPR, for example, said the authors ‘‘discovered a flaw in the way the site gives anonymity to users’’ and never questioned if it is moral to exploit that flaw upon ‘‘discovering it.’’ If NPR had bothered to interview a penetration tester or computer science professor, they would have told them that the first principle of ‘‘ethical hacking’’ or ‘‘penetration testing’’ is that if you discover a flaw or exploit in a website, you don’t exploit it unless you explicitly have permission.

Several of the articles ominously boast/warn about how this hacked data can be weaponized via lawsuits to ruin the lives anti-woke econ professors.

“If we can subpoena the IP address and figure out who it is, we can hold them accountable,” says Anya Samek, an associate professor of economics at UC San Diego told Bloomberg.

“I thought maybe we should be trying to hold people accountable,’’ says Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, “I don’t think this is the end of the story.’’

Crime Pays: Yale Hackers Rewarded with 2 Top Pubs

The first major update today is that the Yale team has finally turned their hacked data into two academic papers, beginning with one titled Anonymous Attention and Abuse published in AEA Papers and Proceedings.

• https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20251048

It actually makes sense to publish this in AER P&P—it's a non-peer-reviewed outlet, and this is a political fluff piece dressed up as research, it’s just a fun little word-cloud. Their wordcloud concludes that discussion on EJMR has moved increasingly towards Twitter threads…

…and ‘‘given the rise of importance of Twitter on EJMR it is natural to ask which Twitter accounts receive the most attention on EJMR.’’

Hilariously you can see that realChrisBrunet has the most threads about him, although I don’t have any statistical significance when it comes to valence. Their main result (those two bright red boxes in the image above) shows the profession is misogynistic towards Jennifer Doleac and Claudia Sahm, two insufferable woke activists.

Stay-At-Home Macro (SAHM)

My goal is to make economic policy and macroeconomics better.

By Claudia Sahm

The second publication derived from the hacked data is far more serious: a paper titled Anonymity and Identity Online has received a “Revise & Resubmit” at the Review of Economic Studies (RESTUD), one of the top five peer-reviewed journals in economics, published by Oxford University Press. A single publication in RESTUD is often enough to secure tenure at most universities.

This p-hacked R&R concludes that EJMR is more ‘‘toxic’’ than Reddit.

Groundbreaking stuff.

Literally just a cherry picked word cloud that they ran python text packages on.

Here is how EJMR reacted to this paper getting placed into a top 5 journal:

Department of Health and Human Services Opens Probe

While reporting this update, I heard unconfirmed rumors that Yale Police had opened an investigation into the hack. I reached out to Yale PD for comment — they declined. I then contacted Yale’s media relations office by phone and email — they ignored me. I believed I had a major update, but couldn’t verify it.

Then, unexpectedly, I was contacted by an EJMR user who had filed a formal complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Inspector General. The complaint alleged that his personal data was used without consent in the Yale study. To my surprise, HHS took the matter seriously, and on May 15th, assigned a Special Agent to investigate.

Now that federal authorities have a foothold, it’s time to escalate. Civil and criminal liability for Yale remains wide open. The Trump administration has shown it is willing to take action against elite institutions abusing power under the guise of social justice. This case is a perfect opportunity to do exactly that.

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If you care about academic integrity, digital privacy, or free speech, share this article — and make sure the people in power see it. I’m sure Robert F. Kennedy and Linda McMahon will really love to hear about how elitist Democrats at Yale are threatening to doxx thousands of vulnerable people for using “racist speech” and “sexist speech” coming from a conservative source.

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The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

— Thomas Jefferson, 1787

America was born from revolution, not polite disagreement. Its Constitution enshrines the right to free speech so that citizens can speak against power, even speak of overthrowing it, without fear of government reprisal. That’s not extremism. That’s the American tradition.

But when revolutionary language is weaponized to serve personal grievance, ideological conquest, or fantasies of a transhumanist utopia, it ceases to be patriotic. It becomes pathological.

That’s the story of Nicholas Decker, an econ PhD student at George Mason University who published a manifesto last month titled “When Must We Kill Them?” on his personal Substack, .

In the early hours of April 17, long before the article had gained any traction, I was the first to find Decker’s essay. It had virtually no views, no replies, and no public reaction. I recognized it instantly for what it was: a sanitized justification for ideological violence disguised as civic duty — so I flagged it, sent it to a few large accounts, posted it myself, then went to bed. When I woke up, his screed had 14,000+ replies and 11 million+ views:

Decker’s essay mimics the tone of a modern-day Declaration of Independence: listing grievances like arbitrary imprisonment, censorship, and state overreach. But beneath the patriotic veneer lies a very different motive: transgender ideology and personal retaliation.

‘‘Evil has come to America,’’ the first paragraph begins:

Next, he refers to MAGA supporters as “beasts” rather than men — a classic rhetorical move to dehumanize political opponents while posturing as their victim.

Then comes the invocation of violence, masked in dramatic language:

He escalates further, rejecting the idea of targeting specific officials and instead naming an entire demographic as his enemy:

Only after the article went viral did Decker revise his screed to clarify that indiscriminate violence wasn’t what he meant:

But the original message was clear. The closing paragraph declared:

Decker’s call to arms generated 1,332 comments — this was the top-voted:

I read each of the 1,332 comments, most are MAGA people calling him an idiot or traitor, or threatening to shoot him before he can shoot them, e.g.:

• ‘‘Describe precisely your skill and experience with weapons … I'd be interested in his actual access to weapons. I'm an ex infantryman. I'm old now, but still armed and dangerous’’

• ‘‘80% of the civilian guns are in republican hands. Your war is going to be very short.’’

• ‘‘[This article is] delusional, traitorous and obscene. I call you out as dangerous, an instigator and fomenter of propaganda, lawlessness, murder and treason.’’

• ‘‘Your post is an unhinged, pseudo-intellectual tantrum that exposes everything wrong with progressivism and you modern progs … You think your post is revolutionary, but it isn't—it’s cringe.’’

• ‘‘As a Veteran of combat (six tours), I have actually seen the horror of war, and that was limited war on the enemy’s soil. You, sir, have no clue what you are encouraging here.’’

• ‘‘I'll fucking stomp your skull in motherfucker. Genuinely I hope you get shot’’

Conversely, many comments are from Democrats agreeing that violence and/or domestic terrorism is justified because they hate Trump:

• “It's amazing how the same retarded MAGA losers working to normalize political violence act all shocked and appalled when the same thinking is turned on them.”

• ‘‘Mr. Decker, your question, of when do we kill, is appropriate for the situation. However, perhaps more importantly, the question is WHOM do we kill?’’

• ‘‘There might be justifiable wars.’’

• ‘‘‘2nd Amendment to defend our rights’ people sure get upset when someone discusses defending our rights.’’

• ‘‘Brave words, i hope more people will be willing to take a stand on the idea that violence should be used’’

• ‘‘The Republican party is a criminal domestic terrorist organization and the leader of Project 2025 has said that they are planning on breaking the laws to force their agenda on the American people. They have made it clear that they will not stop violating the constitution and breaking the laws until they are violently stopped.’’

• ‘‘One of the greatest moments of cowardice in the American Civil War was that we should've summarily shot hundreds of hundreds of thousands of more white Southerners at the end of the Civil War, and didn't. Some evil can only be dealt with one way.’’

Many comments call for Decker’s screed to be censored and taken down by Substack staff; while free speech absolutists like argue that it should be left online as a monument to free speech.

According to Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), for free speech to cross into incitement, it must (1) intend to provoke imminent lawless action, (2) be likely to produce such action, and (3) be directed at inciting or producing that action. Legally, Decker didn’t cross the Brandenburg v. Ohio threshold for incitement, since it lacks a clear directive for immediate action. So yes — his speech is protected. That’s the whole point of the First Amendment.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) issued a statement defending his right to publish the article, not the content itself:

GMU’s overreaction has sent a dangerous message: write something controversial, and the feds might show up at your door. That’s chilling and, frankly, un-American. When administrators start acting like King George III, they’ve lost their way. Ironically, GMU’s behavior resembles that of UK speech police, where citizens are arrested for criticizing public officials online.

Thankfully, in America, the First Amendment answers the question of whether robust political debate is “criminal behavior.” Students expressing themselves on public issues is very much “the Mason way.” FIRE calls on GMU to ensure this mistake does not become an accepted practice.

The day after the pseudo-patriotic death threats, GMU put out a statement saying that they had referred the matter to law enforcement:

The Secret Service then paid Decker a visit — not with charges or threats, but with polite questions to confirm whether his essay was performative or literal. According to Decker’s own account, they asked if he had any weapons, confirmed he wasn’t an imminent threat, and left.

Even Decker admits he's not stable.

In previous tweets, he described himself as suffering from crippling depression…

crippling anxiety…

crippling autism…

At one point, he wrote:

“I can’t figure out if I’m autistic or just a psychopath.”

“I legitimately might be a sociopath.”

When I asked him about these claims, he downplayed them as outdated musings.
‘‘Anxiety and depression were transient phenomenon I have not felt for some time … I don’t agree with my self-description of myself as a sociopath. Consider it a musing.’’

In another essay from 6 months ago, he outlined a plan to buy children (with his polyamorous partner) via surrogacy and raise them to explore transgender identities.

“I wish to have kids, but I do not want them to be mine. Instead, I will find someone better than me in relevant ways and have them provide the genetic material… We will select embryos to maximize the quality of life for my child to come.”

That wasn’t a fluke. Decker is fixated on the age of consent, transing children, pedophilia, child porn, and so-called “pedophile rights.” His timeline is littered with dozens of tweets defending these indefensible positions:

I sent these tweets to Decker, who acknowledged that a few were taken out of context but stated, "The rest are accurate, and I stand by them." Given his focus on child consent, I asked him, "Can children consent to getting tattoos?" He replied, "Yes." When I pressed further, asking, "At what age can a child consent to a full arm sleeve?" he responded, "Whenever. It’s not a big deal."

Decker’s fixation on transgender children is relevant as it reveals a hidden motive behind his call for Trump's assassination. My investigation uncovered his CV, where one bullet point states: “April 2025, I raised $101,000 for a longitudinal study on trans youth, which had its funding cut by Trump.”

In April, Trump canceled Decker’s $101,000 grant for a transgender youth study. That same month, Decker called for violence against the Trump administration. The timing is damning. Decker’s rage stems from losing funding for his ideological cause, not a fight for liberty.

Elite Human Capital-Approved Extremism

After standing down the Secret Service, Decker took a victory lap and celebrated his "win" on Richard Hanania’s podcast. Hanania called Decker “the bravest man on the internet,” praised his intellect, and admitted to encouraging him to write provocatively. Decker said he wanted "my fellow liberals to understand" that, in his view, force may become necessary if certain political conditions persist. Again, this proves that his revolution isn’t against tyranny — it’s against the perceived failure of liberalism to move fast enough.

Decker delusionally told Hanania he believes his death threats will actually boost his chances of landing a tenured economics professorship. That may or may not be true. In the current regime, unhinged radicalism is not always punished — if it flatters the right ideology.

This is the same Richard Hanania who wrote an entire essay smearing me publicly as “low human capital” for denouncing a foreign military campaign and encouraging dissidents to speak freely. He accused me of “conspiracism” for defending speech and dissent. Meanwhile, he gave airtime and praise to a man who publicly supports targeted and indiscriminate violence in the name of transing children.

Hanania wrote: “Even if you don’t care about the issue, you should want the elite faction to win.” That’s the game. If you align with power — even if you’re mentally unstable, calling for bloodshed, and attempting to castrate children — you’re protected. But if you criticize that same regime, you’re branded insane, blacklisted, and buried.

In the end, Decker isn’t dangerous because he hates Trump. He’s dangerous because he’s trying to wrap his fetish in the robes of patriotic revolution — and call it virtue. And those who enable him — like Hanania — are not neutral observers. They are partisan actors dressing tribal loyalty up as free speech valor.

The real threat to free speech isn’t anonymous trolls or unhinged students: it’s the elitist Zionist gatekeepers like Hanania who decide which speech gets punished and which gets praised. When violent ideologues are given platforms and critics are labeled liabilities, it becomes clear: extremism is tolerated, even rewarded, as long as it serves ‘‘elite human capital’’ and their goals.

Evicted by Reality

After the Secret Service visited him, Nick Decker tweeted out his home address, directing his enemies to his basement and daring anyone online to come kill him.

Though those tweets were deleted, he repeated them on Substack:

His landlord immediately evicted him for "endangering the peace and quiet enjoyment of the property." He attributed his eviction to "internet lunatics," implying that everyone else was the problem.

His followers then called for the landlord to be murdered:

This eviction is particularly ironic because, as a libertarian obsessed with property rights, he has argued that tenants shouldn’t be granted lawyers during evictions because it ‘‘drags out the process.’’

Following this saga, Decker started a GoFundMe page for himself where he raised $4,192, which he told everyone he would use for rent…

… but then donated it all to effective altruism.

Because nothing says “moral clarity” like fantasizing about revolution, getting evicted for inciting violence, and donating your rent money to a tech-funded cult.

This isn’t the story of a brave dissident. It’s the story of a disturbed ideologue who dressed up his personal vendetta as political virtue and the gatekeeper that rewarded him for it.

If you scream for blood on behalf of the regime, you get a podcast, a GoFundMe, and applause. If you criticize it, you get smeared, deplatformed, or disappeared.

That’s not liberty. That’s not bravery. That’s not America.

And no amount of blood, iron, or grant money will make it so.

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On March 12, 2022, I quit The Daily Caller News Foundation.

On March 13, 2022, I published this scoop:

This was a leaked internal Harvard document—that The Daily Caller refused to publish due to the potential legal risks of Harvard suing them. So, I quit, and published it on my own.

4848a0a7 59e9 488f A64a 1d122412a963 (1)

1.5MB ∙ PDF file

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This leaked report revealed that Ryan Enos, a tenured professor in Harvard's Department of Government, falsified data to ‘‘prove’’ his pet theory: Racial Threat Theory (RTT). RTT, which cites Claudine Gay extensively, is a branch of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and asserts that white people harbor a fear of black people. It was Enos's work on CRT and RTT that secured him tenure at Harvard.

I broke that Enos scoop on a Sunday night. On Monday morning, Singal sent me an annoyed email. “I was actually looking into the same story.” After emailing me, Singal sent a bitchy tweet:

Singal then published the first of many hit pieces against me, claiming I had botched the story. By now, after countless attacks, such criticism barely phases me. But back then, this particular hit piece cut deep.

For his hit, Singal interviewed Andrew Gelman, a statistician from Columbia University, one of the most famous statistical bloggers in the world. Gelman actually agreed with me about Enos’ data:

It would have been mathematically impossible for the maximum number of non-voters in a subsample, however peculiar, to exceed the official number of non-voters for the entire sample.

This seems like a big deal.

— Andrew Gelman

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However, Singal didn't care what Gelman said.

Singal still said I botched it.

Singal was simply salty I scooped him, and Singal was incompetent.

So I hit back:

Karlstack

Why Is Jesse Singal Whitewashing Harvard's Corruption?

Read more

4 years ago · 14 likes · 6 comments · Christopher Brunet

Why didn’t you mention the 800+ missing precincts in Chicago, Jesse? This is the single most important fact in this case. Did you omit this because you have an agenda, or are you simply incompetent and unable to parse what is important in a dataset? The latter could be true, as you admit you never really looked into it this deeply:

"I should also note that I don’t love writing this type of halfway article where I criticize another journalist’s efforts but don’t fully investigate the claims myself,"

— Jesse Singal, yesterday

After more back-and-forth fighting with Harvard and the journal (AJPS) that published Enos’ fraudulent data, it led to AJPS sending me a cease and desist letter, which I fought, and won.

Karlstack

Cease and Desist Deez Nuts

On the afternoon of March 13th, I quit my job as an investigative reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation. On the evening of March 13th, I broke this story on my personal Substack…

Read more

4 years ago · 18 likes · 8 comments · Christopher Brunet

Months of escalating conflict eventually then led me to turn my attention to Claudine Gay. It became clear that she was complicit in shielding Enos, blocking Harvard’s internal investigation into his misconduct due to a clear conflict of interest. Given Enos’s extensive citation to Gay’s work, any fraud in his research would inevitably implicate her as well. So I launched a comprehensive investigation into Gay—and it became my most popular article, getting shoutouts from Joe Rogan and Elon Musk.

Karlstack

The Curious Case of Claudine Gay

UPDATE…

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4 years ago · 173 likes · 27 comments · Christopher Brunet

I kept autistically feuding with Enos and Gay for several more months in 2022, writing a dozen articles.

Karlstack

An Open Plea For One Single Honest Academic

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4 years ago · 31 likes · 21 comments · Christopher Brunet

This Enos fraud case is already proven dead to rights — Enos should be fired and have his tenure stripped in shame, but the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) is refusing to investigate on the grounds that I do not have a PhD?! Therefore, I do not have grounds to submit a complaint?! They are adamant about this. They won’t accept my pleb complaint.

Does this make sense to you? Do journals normally refuse to accept ethical complaints unless the complainant has a PhD? Of course not — that would be insane! Normally, journals are even required to accept credible anonymous complaints. So this “we only accept complaints from PhD holders” line is a totally made up rule because they know if they investigate Enos, they will have no choice but to find him guilty. So they are obfuscating.

Karlstack

Update on AJPS / Harvard Corruption

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4 years ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Christopher Brunet

“We can’t and won’t accept anonymous charges, as it undermines our procedures,” they say. Show me the rule that says as much. Show me your policies and procedures that codify that you can’t accept anonymous charges (even though these charges aren’t even anonymous — a reputable PoliSci PhD holder attached their name to it). Such a rule doesn’t exist. They are pulling it out of their ass.

“We are sorry that you have spent time on this and we take seriously your credentials to evaluate the anonymous memo. But unless we have access to the data and analysis in a way that allows us to verify or refute their quality, we aren’t able to take this up. “

They have the code.

They have the analysis.

They have the data.

They can easily verify the fabricated data in 15 minutes by looking at the data tables.

Therefore their excuse about “unless we have access to the data in a way that allows us to verify or refute their quality, we aren’t about to take this up,” is a bold faced lie.

Again — they know that if they investigate Ryan Enos’ data fabrication they will have no choice but to find him guilty and retract the paper — so they are desperately grasping at any fake excuse they can think of to avoid triggering an investigation.

“Brunet appears to believe that he can bully us into acquiescing by continuing to spread his accusations around in every fora he can find. “

Karlstack

Ryan, I’ve known you for over a decade.

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4 years ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Christopher Brunet

Ryan, I’ve known you for over a decade.

Here’s a candid appraisal of the situation. You are unfit to be an academic.

You lack the most basic math and technical skills (you tried to study Congress and this was a barrier so you moved into REP). You need to hire an army of RAs to run your analyses, and editorial services to improve your writing. You routinely source ideas from low-tier journals and student papers, without attribution. When you do come up with your own ideas, the theories are so far-fetched that they would never receive support without extensive data manipulation. Think about it. People vote solely on the basis of who their neighbors are, and they have such short memory that if said neighbors move out, they forget all about it and no longer bother turning out to vote. A brief train ride during which they hear people speak Spanish radically changes Anglos’ views on immigration. How did you imagine this was going to fly?

None of the people who coauthored with you like you (except Lynn, who has very poor judgment). Most of your students did badly on the market (unless they had a powerful senior backer) because you couldn’t bring yourself to give them due credit on coauthored work. I will not even get into your personality issues. It is a good thing that a brave political scientist recently taught you a lesson on humility and the importance of treating all academic colleagues with respect.

You know what you did, and there’s no plausible deniability. Some actors with vested interests are trying hard to delay the inevitable, but it’s only a matter of time. Retract the articles/book, and resign with dignity while you still can.

Find something you are passionate about and can become competent at, and get a job where you can earn a paycheck in an honest manner. You will live a much happier life.

— Anonymous colleague of Ryan Enos

I thought I had such a powerful story on my hands, I followed my instincts, and yet, it didn’t gain any traction. Instead of being disgraced, Claudine was named POTUS of Harvard, ensuring nobody would ever prosecute Ryan Enos under her tenure. The CRT & RTT data fraud bodies will stay buried forever.

I know Claudine Gay was the one who covered up for Enos… because on December 4th, 2023, I literally published the leaked document to prove it.

Karlstack

LEAKED DOCUMENTS: The President of Harvard swept fabricated data under the rug

Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard University, is testifying in front of Congress this week…

Read more

2 years ago · 113 likes · 12 comments · Christopher Brunet

Here is a partially redacted document leaked to me by an anonymous source:

The first thing you will notice about this document is that Claudine Gay’s name does not appear anywhere on it… but she saw it, and she was the one who signed off on it. As per Harvard’s Procedures for Responding to Allegations of Misconduct in Research, “The Dean shall be fully informed of the steps to be taken, and the information on which the steps are based.”

That, plus, a Harvard spokesperson acknowledged to Karlstack that Gay had seen the report. Now I finally have proof of what their official justification for dismissing it was: it “does not fall within the purview of the Standing Committee for Professional Conduct.”

A few months later, I forced her to resign for ‘‘plagiarism’’.

• https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-man-behind-claudine-gays-ouster/

Some have claimed that Brunet was actually fired from the Daily Caller in an attempt to persuade his readers that he is not a trustworthy source of information. Yet Geoffrey Ingersoll, the editor-in-chief of the outlet, corroborated Brunet’s story in an email with TAC.

“It made me happy to see his work vindicated, and to see a fraud who was bad for the university and bad for America go down in the process,” Ingersoll said.

It’s been 33 months since March 2022—roughly the time it typically takes Harvard to investigate. In the Hauser case, the story surfaced in 2007, yet he wasn’t placed on administrative leave until 2011—four years later.

Today, I’m proud to share part of the new Ryan Enos investigation. How can you be sure it’s authentic? Well, for starters, every single one of my leaked Harvard documents so far has been verified as real. Let’s just say, I have my sources. And before publishing, I reached out to Harvard for comment.

I received a response and had a conversation with a Media Relations & Communications representative for Harvard FAS. There’s a juicy tidbit:

Harvard: I’m James Chisholm with the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences. As you are operating in good faith, could you provide me with the full report of this apparent internal investigation? Otherwise, as I’m sure you understand, it’s challenging to provide you with any comment. Thank you-

Karlstack: I have attached ''AppendixAJPS.pdf'', which is the 9-page appendix to the investigation.

Harvard: Appreciate the prompt response, Chris.And just to be clear- it’s a hard 2pm deadline, correct?

Karlstack: No, it is a soft deadline, I am happy to wait for a response, even if it takes a day or two. My top priority is publishing fair and accurate information.

Harvard: I think it’s likely I will be providing you a statement. I’m hoping to get it to you by about 2:15pm. If it’s going to be later than that, I’ll let you know asap. And understand, you might not hold off much longer to publish. Thanks.

Karlstack: No urgent rush, thanks again for being so polite and professional.

Harvard: Thanks again for holding on the deadline. Below please find a statement that can be attributed to me regarding your upcoming piece. As we haven’t seen the full document yet, I might potentially provide an updated or new statement after we’ve had a chance to review it. Again, thanks for waiting for me.

Here comes the juicy bit. After providing me with that statement, Harvard followed up with another email just 12 minutes later:

Did you catch that?

Harvard sent me a statement that included the phrase, ‘‘Professor of Government Ryan Enos has been publicly transparent about his research methods and has offered extensive explanations regarding his findings." And then, just 12 minutes later, they followed up and asked me to strike that part of the statement.

These comms departments are vast—there are entire meetings with entire teams of people before any email gets sent.

This isn't just a minor revision—it’s a deliberate signal that Alan Garber’s pro-Israel administration is distancing itself from Enos and Gay.

This isn't just a minor revision—it’s a glaring acknowledgment of the fragility of their position. Harvard is actively distancing itself from Enos’s claims of transparency, they know that any further scrutiny would likely unravel their carefully maintained narrative, exposing the extent of their complicity in shielding a scholar whose work has already been proven to be fraudulent.

TODAY’S LEAKED DOCUMENT

Here is the Table of Contents from today’s leaked Ryan Enos investigation😃:

• Notice how the irregularities in Enos' AJPS article are said to impact his book, since he essentially turned the fraudulent article into a book. This means he now needs to retract an entire book, which only amplifies the scale of this fraud.

• Also, pay attention to how three of the bullet points merely say: "How the author responded"— meaning Harvard interviewed Enos.

I now present the Appendix of the internal Enos investigation, which you can download in full:

Appendixajps2

411KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

This Appendix concludes that Enos exhibited "irregularities in data," "unjustified deletions," and "inexplicable non-deletions."

Below are some relevant screenshots:

So, there you have it.

Ryan Enos is guilty of massive data fraud, and Claudine Gay covered it up.

Alan Garber appears to be throwing Ryan Enos under the bus.

National media will report on it soon.

Here is an email that the New York Times sent me yesterday:

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But hold on! You've only seen the Table of Contents and the Appendix. What about the full report? Will Ryan Enos face consequences, be stripped of tenure, and retract his book? Let's just say... this is only the beginning. Stay tuned for the full report and the professional fallout for Enos. Thanks for reading, and subscribe now to get the next update on Ryan Enos delivered straight to your inbox:

UPDATE

Ryan Enos posted this link on BlueSky a few hours ago, after not posting on that website for the last 4 weeks. It's a Harvard Magazine article about Harvard professors leaving for private-sector research.

• https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/01/harvard-academia-to-biomedical-research

Is he paving the way for his resignation announcement? Recall that when Hauser resigned he cited "exciting opportunities in the private sector." Harvard still continued the investigation, as per the policies, and found him solely responsible for misconduct.

BONUS FRAUD: Dustin Tingley

Dustin Tingley is a tenured professor in the same department as Enos and Gay. I found one of his papers that doesn’t replicate. I have contacted him, but he ignored me. It involves Figure 1 of Tingley’s The Dark Side of the Future: An Experimental Test of Commitment Problems in Bargaining, published in International Studies Quarterly in 2011.

Buried in that footnote of Figure 1 is the phrase: Standard errors clustered at the individual level and confidence intervals calculated using a parametric bootstrap running for 1000 iterations. The problem is that when you actually download his R code, there is no bootstrapping.

He obviously lied about doing bootstrapping.

This is not a “coding error.” Rather, he grossly misrepresented the research processes by claiming his reported SEs are bootstrap estimates clustered at the individual level. As per the Zelig documentation, no such bootstrapping functionality ever existed in his chosen probit regression package. For him to have bootstrapped, he would have needed to write the clustered bootstrap code himself, matching data within clusters, and there is no indication any such custom bootstrap code was ever written. So the resulting robustness claims he makes in the paper are entirely false.

A researcher could not inadvertently believe they wrote some code to implement a procedure to check the robustness of their results, when in fact they hadn’t actually written such code. There’s no plausible scenario under which the claims made in the empirical analyses are honest errors. This is cut-and-dried research fraud by definition.

Tingley totally and utterly misunderstands the Fearon (1995) model.... The Fearon (1995) model presupposes two players (states) A and B whose preferences can be represented on the [0,1] interval on the real line; state A’s most preferred location is 1, whereas state B’s most preferred location is 0 (Fearon 1995, p. 386). That is, this is a model entailing player preferences in one-dimensional Euclidean space. In contrast, Tingley’s (2011) model is a different type of game, a so-called “divide-the-dollar” game, where both players A and B maximize utility at 1, that is, 100% of the resource to be divided (Tingley 2011, pp. 6-7).

Instead of deriving his comparative statics from first principles, Tingley starts from a constraint already derived in Fearon (1995), stated as Equation (1) on p. 8. The problem, of course, is that in Fearon (1995) the constraint is derived based on the assumption that A and B maximize utility at 1 resp. 0, whereas in Tingley (2011) both players maximize utility at 1. This implies that all subsequent derivations and comparative statics in Tingley (2011) are incorrect given his model assumptions. Further, this implies that Tingley’s hypotheses are based on incorrect equilibrium results and comparative statics. As such, Tingley’s model is completely disconnected from the experiment he conducts, and fails to test the theoretical claims and make the substantive contribution the author purports to make.

— Anonymous Economist

Eleven years ago, I quit an abusive academic relationship with my former co-author Ricardo Hausmann, presently a Professor of Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School. This abuse has now returned in a new act of plagiarism. Today, I am pushing back.

A few months ago, I learned about two new working papers that Hausmann and his team posted at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) [1,2]. The first one claims to introduce a “multidimensional approach” to economic complexity by combining data on trade, patents, and publications, and concludes that these metrics are complementary when explaining economic growth. Yet, this is exactly what my co-authors and I did in a 2023 peer-reviewed journal paper [3] that Hausmann and his co-authors were perfectly aware of (as I document below). Instead of giving proper acknowledgement to our work, however, Hausmann and his team hide it in a footnote on page 18 clouded in a factually incorrect statement. The footnote says that “other studies have developed similar complexity metrics under different names.” That is not true. Our 2023 paper uses the same name as Hausmann et al.’s 2024 “new” working paper, namely, the “Economic Complexity Index (ECI).”

Now, it is reasonable to wonder if this is a misunderstanding or oversight. People sometimes forget to cite others for innocent reasons. But there is clear evidence to the contrary in two other working papers published almost simultaneously with the first one. One of them, is another WIPO working paper by his coauthors but without Hausmann [4]. This paper does properly acknowledge the existence of our work in multidimensional economic complexity in the main text: “Following […] Stojkoski et al. (2023).” So, the team clearly knew about the work. The third working paper [2], also at WIPO, includes Hausmann as a first author making a call for the use of multidimensional economic complexity methods in innovation policy. Here, the only example of multidimensional work cited by Hausmann et al. is his own 2024 working paper [1], this time completely ignoring the 2023 peer-reviewed paper he knew about (“In Hausmann et al. (2024), we measure this for each country in different dimensions (e.g., trade and patents).”). Unsurprisingly, I had made a similar call for multidimensional expansion of the field in a paper that was also published after peer-review in 2023 (Hidalgo CA, Research Policy, 2023 [5]) and that had been available as a pre-print for two years. In that paper, I cite our original multidimensional economic complexity contribution and also two other papers that had introduced multidimensional approaches to relatedness, another key concept in the field, which Hausmann does not cite either.

In my view, these three documents provide clear evidence of an attempt by Hausmann to misappropriate an idea published by a former co-author while knowing of that work. This, violates Harvard’s honor code [6] which requires the “accurate attribution of sources” and considers “plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own” as a violation of its community standards. In the first working paper [1], he copies the idea while hiding the attribution in a factually incorrect footnote. Simultaneously, he releases a second working paper citing this unpublished work as the only example of prior art [2]. The third paper [4], the one by his co-authors but not him, shows that the team knows about the work and behaves differently when the senior member of the team (Hausmann) is not an author. My co-authors and I were dismayed by Hausmann’s attempt to misappropriate our ideas. Why bother doing original work and getting it past peer-review (which for both of our papers was a lengthy process), if authors with a platform such as Harvard University take your ideas and pass them as their own? But this is not the first time. In 2019, Hausmann and his team announced a “first-of-its-kind” and “unique” feature in their trade data visualization website (“Atlas Online”): the “country profiles.” Yet, my group had supported country profiles in the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) since 2012, several months before Hausmann and I parted ways in 2013 (see full story document for details [7]). The reason that the profiles disappeared in Hausmann’s copy of the Observatory in 2013 was that they were deleted by his team, probably because they did not understand that we had conceived these pages for search engine optimization.

In short, the original OEC that I designed with my group and placed in the public domain had country profiles in 2012 and was redesigned in 2015 to make the country and product profiles the main part of the site. Today, http://OEC.world serves over 100,000 profiles, a design concept we use prominently when constructing other data distribution platforms (e.g. Data USA, Data Mexico, etc). In fact, in 2016 I published a “how to” guide in Scientific American for this kind of work in 2016 [9]. But when Hausmann and his team at Harvard finally built country profiles in 2019, seven years after we did, they claimed a “revolutionary first-of-its-kind” and “unique” feature, in their lab’s own website [10] and in the Harvard Gazette [11]

So why share this now?

I have three reasons.

First, I broke off my relationship with Hausmann in 2013 after several unpleasant experiences, which included having to fight for the authorship rights of junior authors (which Hausmann wanted to exclude from our joint book: The Atlas of Economic Complexity) and being exploited when we were equal partners in a company that I had registered for us to do joint consulting work (see full story document [7]). From there on, I just wanted to forget about him. The tacit deal was that, if he stopped the abuse, I could put this in the past. But Hausmann has repeatedly broken this tacit deal. His 2024 working paper research agenda seems to involve putting forward, without proper acknowledgement, ideas my team and I published after peer-review in 2023 and made available online in 2022. It has been more than a decade. This has to stop.

The second reason is that because Hausmann has done this before, I am concerned that if I don’t push back, he will do it again. Right now, my research group and I have a great thing going on. Should we worry that in 2026 Hausmann will try to pass off our 2024 and 2025 papers as his own?

The third reason is that this egregious behavior is supported by a power asymmetry that is highly profitable for Hausmann thanks to the Harvard platform. Soon after we split ways in 2013, Hausmann sold this [12] embarrassingly bad economic data visualization website to the Mexican Government as part of a project rumored to be about USD 5,000,000 (paid using an undisclosed and untraceable escrow account (“fideicomiso”)). The online platform was so sloppy that some government officials started to call it “El Mamarracho” (a derogatory term in Spanish for extremely shoddy work). I learned about this in 2019, after a new team entered Mexico’s economic ministry and invited us to build Data Mexico [13], a properly built open data portal integrating dozens of datasets in thousands of profiles for a fraction of the cost of the “Mamarracho.”

Hausmann has engaged in commercial endeavors with many governments (e.g. Albania, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Mexico, etc.). So, in my opinion, the target audience for these misappropriated working papers are not other scholars, but the officials who purchase economic development contracts from him and take the word of the Harvard Professor of Practice at face value.

This is what makes misappropriating the multidimensional economic complexity idea important. A strong motivation for any consulting work in this space is the fact that trade-based measures of economic complexity explain future economic growth. This was established in a paper Hausmann and I published together in 2009 [14], based on work we did together while I was a PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. But the 2023 multidimensional economic complexity paper made that idea obsolete. On the one hand, it simultaneously considers multiple expressions of complexity (trade, patents, and research), and on the other hand, it looks at multiple outcomes (growth, inequality, and emissions). Giving advice based on the latest developments in the field requires using a multidimensional framework.

Finally, I want to say that I have nothing against Hausmann’s co-authors, some of whom I know personally and some of whom I don’t. I understand that they are in a situation in which they may depend financially and professionally on Hausmann. His first attempt to spin my publicizing these facts may be to argue that someone of his caliber does not have the time to look at petty things like footnotes and references (pinning the responsibility on them). I don’t think that’s fair.

I also want to say that I do not consider Ricardo’s behavior necessarily representative of Harvard University or of the World Intellectual Property Organization. I have met many people at those organizations and continue to collaborate with some of them. They are outstanding scholars.

I have decided to go public with this statement after consulting with several senior colleagues and lawyers specialized in disputes in higher education.

I am absolutely distraught by having to deal with this situation eleven-years after I quit that abusive relationship. But he needs to cut it out.

Full Story Document:

• https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/eye27gan0uhe81xml5n1d/FullStory_HH.pdf?rlkey=gmefhrz5s4a5forlxonn009xe&e=1&dl=0

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References:

[1] Hausmann, Ricardo, Muhammed Ali Yildirim, Christian Chacua, Matte Hartog, and Shreyas Gadgin Matha. "Global trends in innovation patterns: A complexity approach." World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Economic Research Working Paper Series 80 (2024). https://wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo-pub-econstat-wp-80-en-global-trends-in-innovation-patterns-a-complexity-approach.pdf…

[2] Hausmann, Ricardo, Muhammed Ali Yildirim, Christian Chacua, Matte Hartog, and Shreyas Gadgin Matha. "Innovation Policies Under Economic Complexity." World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Economic Research Working Paper Series 79 (2024). https://wipo.int/publications/en/details.jsp?id=4726…

[3] Stojkoski, Viktor, Philipp Koch, and César A. Hidalgo. "Multidimensional economic complexity and inclusive green growth." Communications Earth & Environment 4, no. 1 (2023): 130. https://nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00770-0…

[4] Moscatelli, Federico, Christian Chacua, Shreyas Gadgin Matha, Matte Hartog, Eduardo Hernandez Rodriguez, and Muhammed Ali Yildirim. "Can we map innovation capabilities?." World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Economic Research Working Paper Series 81 (2024). https://wipo.int/publications/en/details.jsp?id=4728…

[5] Hidalgo, César A. "The policy implications of economic complexity." Research Policy 52, no. 9 (2023): 104863. https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048733323001476…

[6] Harvard College Honor Code https://oaisc.fas.harvard.edu/honor-code/

[7] Full Story Document https://dropbox.com/scl/fi/eye27gan0uhe81xml5n1d/FullStory_HH.pdf?rlkey=gmefhrz5s4a5forlxonn009xe&dl=0…

[8] The Observatory of Economic Complexity https://oec.world

[9] Scientific American Article on the Design of Open Data Sites https://dati.cittametropolitana.genova.it/sites/default/files/news-allegati/What%27s%20Wrong%20with%20Open-Data%20Sites--and%20How%20We%20Can%20Fix%20Them%20-%20Scientific%20American%20Blog%20Network.pdf…

[10] Growth Lab claim of profiles being first-of-its-kind https://growthlab.hks.harvard.edu/podcasts/country-profiles

[11…] Harvard Gazette claim of profiles being first-of-its-kind https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/growth-labs-new-data-viz-tool-identifies-diversification-opportunities-for-130-countries/…

[12] Atlas de Complejidad Economica Mexico https://datos.gob.mx/complejidad/

[13] Data Mexico https://economia.gob.mx/datamexico

[14] Hidalgo, César A., and Ricardo Hausmann. "The building blocks of economic complexity." Proceedings of the national academy of sciences 106, no. 26 (2009): 10570-10575. https://pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0900943106

A couple of months ago, MIT became the first elite university to eliminate DEI statements in faculty hiring:

• MIT becomes first elite university to ban diversity statements (UnHerd)

• MIT stops using DEI statements in faculty hiring (FIRE)

• Yet Another Victory Over DEI: MIT Abolishes ‘Diversity Statements’ (Goldwater Institute)

• MIT abolishes mandatory DEI statements in faculty hiring (Campus Reform)

• MIT bans mandatory DEI statements in faculty hiring (College Fix)

The Liberty Sentinel

MIT Drops Forced DEI Statements: “They Don’t Work”

The dominoes are falling faster on Marxist “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programs in higher education, with Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently becoming the first “elite” U.S. university to eliminate DEI considerations in its hiring. Analysts are referring to the decision as a turning point in the battle against “wokeness” in academia…

Read more

2 years ago · 23 likes · 2 comments · Alex Newman

#2: MIT stops affirmative action

…and then just yesterday, MIT became the first major university to reveal the ethnic composition of its incoming undergraduate class since SCOTUS ruled against affirmative action last year. Unsurprisingly, asians showed a large (7%) gain, while blacks (-10%) and hispanics (-5) saw large drops. Whites were not impacted. See the black line plummet:

• MIT's Black student enrollment drops significantly after Supreme Court affirmative action ruling (NBC News)

• MIT: Newest students less diverse due to Supreme Court affirmative action decision (The Hill)

• At M.I.T., Black and Latino Enrollment Drops Sharply After Affirmative Action Ban (New York Times)

• Top US college says diversity slumps after affirmative action ban (BBC)

Steve Sailer

MIT cuts black freshmen share from 15% to 5%

Yesterday, MIT became the first elite undergraduate college to announce the racial/ethnic composition of its first post-Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard freshman class. College admission aficionados like myself had been waiting around to find out, if when push came to shove, whether top colleges actually were going to obey the Supreme Court. Or w…

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2 years ago · 47 likes · 32 comments · Steve Sailer

IQ purists argue this 15% —> 5% black decrease doesn’t go far enough, lol, maintaining that ‘‘less than 1% of those admitted would be black if admissions were based purely on academic qualifications.’’

#3: Nathan Cofnas sues Emmanuel College

This IQ argument is what got friend-of-the-blog in trouble — his university began investigating him when he made the statistical argument that ‘‘Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students."

Karlstack

Philosophy heavyweights defend free speech after Cambridge lecturer is canceled over Substack article that constituted a ''rejection of DEI policies''

There are dozens of Substack accounts dedicated to writing about IQ — I am not one of them! I’ve written hundreds of articles, and zero have been about race & IQ. I don’t find it very interesting. Some people do…

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2 years ago · 117 likes · 27 comments · Christopher Brunet

Today we have a major update on that Cofnas article.

As of 9 days ago, he is suing Emmanuel College (a subset of Cambridge University) for firing him:

He is being represented by the Free Speech Union, you can donate here:

• https://donorbox.org/academic-freedom-under-threat-at-cambridge

#4: Edelman’s lawsuit moves forward

Speaking of lawsuits, here's a notable one involving Ben Edelman, a former Harvard economics professor. You might remember him from 2014 when he became internet-famous for a viral spat with a Chinese restaurant over a $4 discrepancy on his bill.

After that incident, Edelman didn't get tenure at Harvard, so he left in 2018 and became Microsoft's Chief Economist for Web Experiences, Strategy, and Policy —not a bad fallback option! Fast forward to 2023, five years later, and Edelman is now suing Harvard for denying him tenure.

The lawsuit is complicated, tangled with personal vendettas and grudges, so bear with me if I don't do it justice. Among the grievances, there's a mention of the $4 overcharge at a Chinese restaurant incident, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The case is filled with seemingly petty drama, like a heated argument over projector screens in an MBA classroom, where the person Edelman clashed with over projector screens later voted against him for tenure.

Basically, it seems like Edelman made enemies, and those enemies played a key role in blocking his tenure.

The heart of Edelman’s lawsuit revolves around the tenure process.

Although 59% of the faculty voted in favor of his tenure, the dean allegedly shifted the goalposts mid-process, suddenly imposing a new requirement for a two-thirds majority to move Edelman’s case forward. It appears this rule was made up on the fly to undermine him, which certainly seems like a valid grievance.

Here's the latest update: A couple of months ago, a judge rejected Harvard’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, allowing the case to move forward.

You can follow the lawsuit’s developments here:

• https://www.edelman-v-harvard.org/denial-of-harvard-mtd/

Edelman is seeking damages, which is fair, but also seeking a review of his tenure application, almost a decade later, which strikes me as implausible. He maintains that he would leave Microsoft and accept a tenured position if offered.

#5: Cheaters land on their feet

Two years ago, I published this investigation into a Harvard Business School professor, Marco Di Maggio, who played a central role in a massive criminal fraud that ruined countless lives.

Karlstack

Marco Di Maggio: Putting the BS in HBS

If you even tangentially follow the crypto markets, you have heard of Terra/Luna…

Read more

4 years ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Christopher Brunet

Because of this scandal, Di Maggio failed to obtain tenure at Harvard.

Update: he has now resurfaced at Imperial College’s business school:

• https://profiles.imperial.ac.uk/m.di-maggio

Academia sometimes reminds me of how the Catholic Church handled its paedophile scandals, shuffling problematic priests around from one parish to another, rather than holding them accountable. Similarly, immoral academics are merely shuffled off to slightly less prestigious institutions, continuing their careers almost unscathed.

#6: Yale IRB head retires

Normally, when an old lady retires from an administrative position, it’s mundane.

• https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/sandy-alfano-retires/

But Karlstack has beef with the corrupt Yale IRB.

Beef from back when they swept Florian Ederer's hacking under the rug:

Karlstack

My email to Yale IRB, legal counsel, provost, president, and deans

Subject: Urgent Inquiry: Ethical and Legal Concerns Regarding Yale's Handling of the EJMR Hack…

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3 years ago · 58 likes · 12 comments · Christopher Brunet

I've maintained from day one that Yale grossly violated its own IRB policies in this scandal, creating significant legal liability. I've consistently argued that they should be sued for this. It seems, with this retirement, that perhaps Yale's leadership might even share that concern... or maybe I am overthinking a mundane retirement…

#7: Mount Royal Lawsuit

Kathleen’s Substack

Mount Royal University and Frances Widdowson

A judgement has been rendered regarding Frances Widdowson’s dismissal from Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. 9 of 10 counts went against her, but the the most important count went her way. The arbitrator judged MRU was wrong to have fired her, saying: “dismissal was not the appropriate disciplinary penalty.” He judged the employment relati…

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2 years ago · 25 likes · 12 comments · Kathleen Lowrey

#8: Guiliano and Nunn (2021) fails to replicate

Nunn & Giuliano are two superstar econ professors:

In 2021 they co-authored an influential paper, in a top journal, which has garnered 400+ citations in only 3 years since:

Unfortunately, this paper was recently debunked by a team of Europeans.

• https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/i4rdps/116.html

Their replication’s conclusion is devastating:

EJMR discussion of this replication is equally as devastating:

• https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/giuliano-and-nunn-2021-does-not-replicate

Here are a few of the top comments:

I am a tenured academic economist. I believe the allegations are serious. I briefly read the abstracts of the criticisms and the response. One of the two sides is lying; there is no third alternative. Those individuals, on both sides, are costing their university money and taking a spot that could be filled by someone else. Given the amount of money and power involved, it's not unreasonable to hire two independent research assistants to evaluate who is lying and proceed with academic misconduct proceedings against the side that lied. This is not a joke. I am disturbed by how everything continues as normal. Not taking action is damaging the credibility of everyone involved, including mine, and is not fair play. I am also disturbed by the other retraction of Giuliano. She admitted the mistake, kudos. But she did only after the comment. The identification strategy she did had a scientific credit regardless of the findings. If her paper is retracted, her paper does not exist. There is at least another person who deserves the credit for being the first comer on that identification and who was damaged.

— Anonymous Economist

Wow. Read the paper. The mistakes are all "we did not care enough to check anything."

— Anonymous Economist

I wouldn’t be surprised if more than 90% of Nunn doesn’t replicate

— Anonymous Economist

“We are able to correct most of these mistakes by realigning the code with the text.”

If that’s an accurate statement, economics is circling the drain.

— Anonymous Economist

This is appalling. At this point, there are several people who are highly-regarded and have publications in top journals who have been exposed as publishing results based on simple coding errors, sloppy reading of codebooks, data manipulation. Or worse.

No retractions, and there are no consequences for these people. Voth was elected to Econometric Society even after his fraud was spelled-out. Nunn remains QJE editor even though for years people have known his empirical work is not to be trusted.

It's hard to understand what role empirical work plays these days. I admire the replicators for their care and hard work, but I suspect they just don't understand the profession. I don't either. I would have thought that when you test a hypothesis using data and econometrics, the point is to understand something important. But experience suggests not.

— Anonymous Economist

When I see empirical papers on completely new topics, the weight I give to them in terms of credibility is close to zero. Knowing how hard it is to get coherent results on well known and studied relationships of interest using high quality data, there is no way that complex relationships on which no further evidence exists just happen to provide perfectly coherent results on the first try. I just assume some form of fishing is going on for such papers

— Anonymous Economist

There are different kinds of bad empirical researchers. As "Arrow" said, this is not fraud in the sense of "we played games to get the results we wanted." It's more like "we ran the program and got the results we wanted and so never checked anything.

Another kind is deliberate fraud: messing until you get the results you want.

Not sure which is worse. But Guiliano and Nunn should be *really* embarrassed. FE that are really just missing values; coding things in completely wrong ways; and my personal favorite, regressing non-existing variables.

Both of these people are repeat offenders. I don't see there being any bad consequences for them.

— Anonymous Economist

Giuliano and Nunn later responded with a ‘‘correction’’ rather than a retraction, but it didn’t seem to convince anyone:

• https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/i4rdps/117.html

Both Nunn & Giuliano are repeat offenders — here is another Nunn paper that doesn’t replicate:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l_p9LShvjV-NVzA0MrTGnKrNLNWaB4pS/view

But what's truly shocking is that Giuliano had her top paper retracted just last year! I had almost forgotten, but I actually wrote about Giuliano’s previous retraction in February 2023:

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

It is worth noting that Dr. Guiliano almost certainly would not have gotten tenure at UCLA without this paper — ReStud is one of the top 5 journals in the world, and she was already a borderline case *with* this paper on her CV.

So, she got tenure based on a broken & wrong paper. Classic! Perhaps obtaining tenure could have been the incentive to fudge the code/data, or perhaps this was a bona fide coding error. Impossible to say.

So, this is her second huge fraud in as many years, involving her two best papers. Her entire career obviously rests on a foundation of deceit, or at best, sheer incompetence. UCLA could make a solid case for her dismissal; she ought to lose her tenure, and she might actually lose this tenure if she were in a state like Florida. But California will probably protect her.

The rest of this article is paywalled, sorry.

Read more

Karlstack

Exclusive: Scandal at America's Top Science Fair

The Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) is the world’s largest and most prestigious science fair. ISEF 2024 took place last week (May 11-17) at the Los Angeles Convention Center. https://www.societyforscience.org/isef/ Krish Pai won first place in the environmental engineering division, which came with a prize of $55,000 and the…

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2 years ago · 103 likes · 84 comments · Christopher Brunet

…. tonight there is a major update. It is worth noting that this was a Friday night news dump, in an attempt to bury it.

Statement from the Society for Science

So, the project has been withdrawn, and the money returned.

Success?

These are my initial thoughts, per my DMs with someone:

I am the first to break this update, I think.

Now that something has happened, CNN can cover it. Cowards.

Here are some initial takes from Twitter:

What do you think?

Leave a comment

• https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/5/23/plagiarism-culture-war-feature/

The funniest quote is this one:

That the allegations targeted DEI administrators and scholars of race was, to Brunet, simply an ironic illustration of the intellectual bankruptcy of liberal institutions.

“[DEI admins plagiarizing] is funnier than if a biology professor got hit, or if a physics professor or an English professor,” Brunet said. “They’re not real scholars. It’s a fake profession to begin with. So, when it’s fake and plagiarized, it makes it double funny.”

But I am mentioned several other times:

And amidst it all — as the Harvard Corporation met to discuss Gay’s future at the University — right-wing activist Christopher F. Rufo and journalist Christopher Brunet hit publish on a piece that would add a new element to the controversy: allegations that Gay had plagiarized large sections of her Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard.

The report was timed to make waves. Rufo, a prominent critic of critical race theory, boasted on X that their timing had been intentional. They had the tip for about a week, he wrote, and held it till “the precise moment of maximum impact.”

Rufo’s report was quickly followed by an article by Aaron Sibarium in the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon, which unearthed additional allegations spanning Gay’s academic career.

The duo — Rufo and Brunet — had successfully hijacked the conversation, expanding a ballooning national scandal over antisemitism at Harvard to include both Gay’s academic credentials and the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, which they said were to blame for Gay’s presidency.

The Corporation, backed into a corner, could not ignore the new attacks. After a review of Gay’s work, they said that though Gay would submit seven corrections to add citations across her dissertation and published works, they found that she had not committed academic misconduct.

…

Rufo has rejected the notion that his work has racial motivations, as have Sibarium and Brunet. Still, he was startlingly candid about the demographics of those he had accused.

…

Brunet said he found the original tip and brought it to Rufo while he was reporting on academic fraud.

“I think the plagiarism speaks for itself,” Brunet said, referring to Gay’s corrections. “I’m just an academic scandal guy and sometimes race gets caught up there.”

…

Brunet said that he felt “conservatives have a duty to weaponize” plagiarism allegations “as much as possible.”

“Liberals would be weaponizing it as much as possible, if they could,” he said.

…

But Brunet, the journalist who reported on Gay, offered a counterpoint: institutions’ reviews are “so broken,” he said, that “there’s no other choice than to play it out in the public arena.” Brunet argued that schools are biased actors, with “every incentive to sweep” allegations against faculty and administrators “under the rug.”

…

While the threat of such reviews — and their subsequent politicization — looms larger than ever, Brunet said he believes plagiarism stories don’t have much left in the tank.

“I see the public getting tired of it eventually,” Brunet said.

“I think there’ll be one big [plagiarism] wave eventually and maybe continued stories here or there, but I don’t think it’s going to be a consistent theme for the next five years,” he added.

In other news, the SPLC is writing a hitpiece about me:

https://x.com/realChrisBrunet/status/1793708983754309673

• https://www.societyforscience.org/isef/

Krish Pai won first place in the environmental engineering division, which came with a prize of $55,000 and the Regeneron Young Scientist Award.

Pai cheated.

Subscribe now

Pai is an intern at the University of Southern California.

I had reservations about writing on a 17-year-old, so I consulted with a few more senior journalists to discuss the ethical considerations.

Of course it's worth covering, major media outlets, like CNN cover science fairs all the time. 17 is old enough to get charged as an adult in every jurisdiction. Egregious conduct by 17 year olds is not excusable. Important to bust this for several reasons, one of which is that he's clearly on the fast track to a high level gig in neuroscience. Can we investigate this? If you won't, we will.

— Anonymous journalist

It's completely fine to publish on this. It's a big award, a prestigious organization—but you might angle it against the org, which allowed this to pass its process.

— Anonymous journalist

Think of all the other kids who got fucked over.

— Anonymous journalist

Plus, he is already outed extensively on Reddit, Twitter, and via a Google Doc currently circulating that thousands of people have seen. This anonymous Google Docs dossier is the source of my article and is signed by, ‘‘ISEF 2024 and future competitors, ISEF & Society for Science alums, Concerned researchers.’’

You can download the dossier here:

Open Letter To Regeneron Isef

13.9MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

As per the dossier:

The ISEF winner student uses the following image as a key claim of the 100% plastic degraded in their presentation and more:

However, the image boxed in red above is a falsified image taken from online, and has had mirroring performed in the hopes that no one would notice.

The original image can be found here: https://www.mci.edu/en/news-filter-en/228-researchnews/4728-microorganisms-can-degrade-plastics and is from a European University Ulysseus lab testing Ideonella sakaiensis, a completely different organism than the one the Regeneron ISEF finalist used.

The ISEF finalist very clearly labels the figure as: ‘‘Plastic degraded by discovered microbes’’, which is clearly false - a clear cut case of fraud. The ISEF Finalist is taking other people’s data for completely different research projects, and claiming it as their own.

Original image from European University Ulysseus lab:

The ISEF finalist flipped the image to generate the below image shown on their poster, presentation, etc:

If you compare the shapes of the plastics as seen above, you will quickly notice the Regeneron ISEF Finalist’s figure is a mirror image of the past published image! This is blatant data fabrication and research fraud. 

The image was not only altered by mirroring it, but was combined with another image by the finalist. This goes to show this is not an accident — the Regeneron ISEF finalist intentionally manipulated the image to play it off as their own creation and result. They also placed an image of themself right next to this result, making it seem like it was their own data.

In the spotting-academic-fraud business, we call this a slam dunk.

But there’s more.

The researcher also steals the wavelength vs reflectivity plot as shown (top right), making it seem like it came from their data:

This figure is right next to a picture of themself to make it seem like it was their own collection and creation.

Original source by Zhu et al., 2019:

(PDF) Plastic Solid Waste identification system based on Near Infrared Spectroscopy in combination with support vector machine

And much more.

The dossier thoroughly documents numerous additional instances of theft of figures, exaggerated claims of novelty, misappropriation of a previous researcher's device, plagiarism, citation fraud, similarities to past winning ISEF projects, and potential scientific inaccuracies. It’s a brutal takedown. I find this evidence highly compelling; however, I am not including it all in my article to save space.

I strongly encourage you to read the dossier yourself:

Open Letter To Regeneron Isef

13.9MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Here's another example of a stolen image. This appeared in Pai’s slide and research paper; he claimed to have built a near infrared spectrometer:

This image was taken from a Rasberry Pi article from 2021:

[Pai] does not give any credit to the original creator of the device, or its images and acts like they “built a custom sensor” and “developed [the] tool.” This is very clearly an attempt to conceal the original creator … it is clear that the finalist did not actually build the device, and faked this part completely.

Conclusion

These actions, while serious, should not define Pai’s entire life. Everyone makes mistakes — Lord knows I did plenty of stupid, immoral things when I was 17 — and there is always the opportunity for growth and redemption. I sincerely hope that Pai repents and strives to become a more ethical person. In my view, he should still have the opportunity to attend a good university and build a long, accomplished career.

However, his award should be revoked. The current situation is unfair to the other participants. The fraud is clear. The $55,000 prize should be given to the runner-up.

This case highlights a significant oversight failure by the world's most prestigious science fair. The responsibility now lies with The International Science and Engineering Fair to take action and issue a statement.

I anticipate that the mainstream media will cover this story later this week.

Expect to see this story on CNN soon.

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sebjenseb

IQ and Job Performance - a brief review

In the 1950s, Duke Power's Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina had a policy restricting black employees to its "Labor" department, where the highest-paying position paid less than the lowest-paying position in the four other departments. In 1955, the company added the requirement of a…

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2 years ago · 19 likes · 1 comment · Sebastian Jensen

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Applying IQ to IQ

The holidays are upon us. By way of thanking all of you for being so willing to support my fledgling substack project, this week I'm releasing a little set of year-end mini-posts. These are five quick daily reads about the state as I see it of five sectors I follow. Might have been perfect for raising the level of chitchat at a normal year's run of Dece…

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5 years ago · 109 likes · 19 comments · Razib Khan

Aporia

Don't shut up about race and IQ

Written by Bo Winegard Despite diligent efforts to equalize races in the West, stubborn disparities remain. The best explanation for the apparent intransigence of these disparities is that they are caused by underlying differences in traits, e.g., cognitive…

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2 years ago · 93 likes · 119 comments · Aporia

Joseph Bronski

How much of the Black-White IQ Gap is Genetics?

It’s reasonable to claim that the biggest success story in the history of psychology research is the development of the IQ test. An IQ test is a serious predictive tool, unlike most of what is put out by “social psychologists,” “behavioral scientists,” “behavioral economics,” “nudge theorists,” and so on. For a taste of IQ’s success, one meta-analysis w…

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3 years ago · 42 likes · 5 comments · Joseph Bronski

I am, however, passionate about freedom of speech, especially as it relates to academia, as are many of my readers — 30% of whom possess a PhD. So when I see this core principle of Western Civilization under threat, I feel inclined to speak up, especially now that I have built up a semi-influential platform.

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The latest academic to get ‘‘canceled’’ over free speech is Nathan Cofnas, a lecturer and postdoc at the University of Cambridge.

• https://nathancofnas.com/

His crime? On February 5th, Cofnas published a Substack article arguing that in order for conservatives to defeat “the woke left” they must accept ‘‘race realism”.

Conservative advocates of soft realism who claim that we can fix the problem of racial disparities by improving “culture” are making false promises. If we ever put their theories to the test, they will (at tremendous cost) be proved wrong, and conservatives will be discredited.

…

In the light of race differences, certain core liberal values will have to be reexamined. We will probably have to rethink ideals like multiculturalism and a borderless world. Legislators should take into consideration how their policies will influence the racial makeup of society, and what effects this is likely to have.

…

Race realism is not utopianism. It is not the solution to the problem of political organization, which our species has been grappling with for a quarter-of-a-million years. The fact that race and race differences are real does not tell us what our ultimate values should be, or what kind of society we should strive for within the limits of what is possible.

You should read the article — everything he wrote was scholarly and based on statistics — and I would also recommend reading the 200+ comments at the bottom of that article, full of great scholarly debate.

Cofnas gave an interview today defending his position:

It’s wrong to eschew intellectual discourse in favor of ideological conformity under the pretext of ‘‘DEI’’. The proper way to reject his ideas is to prove them wrong. Until counterarguments are substantiated, the denial of a platform to articulate dissenting perspectives constitutes a grave injustice.

Instead of debating his ideas, Cambridge campus threw a hissy fit, launched a petition to terminate his employment which defamed him as a ‘‘eugenecist’’, and held a ‘‘Fire Cofnas rally’’ as depicted in this video posted by :

Shortly after that rally, the Leverhulme Trust (which funds his postdoc) and Cambridge both launched investigations into his employment, while on April 5th Emmanuel College, where Cofnas holds an unpaid position, fired him. His main job is with the University, and they haven’t fired him from that yet, but they still might.

Emmanuel College justified its firing because Cofnas ‘‘rejected DEI policies’’.

The Committee first considered the meaning of the blog and concluded that it amounted to, or could reasonably be construed as amounting to, a rejection of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI and EDI) policies… The Committee concluded that the core mission of the College was to achieve educational excellence and that diversity and inclusion were inseparable from that. The ideas promoted by the blog therefore represented a challenge to the College’s core values and mission. 

Following his termination from Emmanual College on April 5th, on April 12th, the most famous philosopher in the world, Peter Singer (Singer has 41528 citations on Google Scholar), stood up for Cofnas by writing a full-throated blog post:

These sentences imply that at Emmanuel College, freedom of expression does not include the freedom to challenge its DEI policies, and that challenging them may be grounds for dismissal. That is an extraordinary statement for a tertiary institution to make. It is even more surprising given that the adoption of DEI policies is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Emmanuel College’s decision does not prevent Cofnas from continuing to hold his research fellowship in the Faculty of Philosophy. But that would cease to be the case if the university inquiry were to reach the same conclusion as the college.

The academic world will be watching what happens. Were the University of Cambridge to dismiss Cofnas, it would sound a warning to students and academics everywhere: when it comes to controversial topics, even the world’s most renowned universities can no longer be relied upon to stand by their commitment to defend freedom of thought and discussion.

— Peter Singer

Today, a group of philosophers published a letter in The Times defending Cofnas:

Proving that Cofnas isn’t some alt-right crackpot, this letter was signed by:

The purpose of my article today is to highlight their new letter and to disseminate it more broadly.

I further reached out to The Free Speech Union, who is defending Cofnas throughout the ongoing investigation, for an exclusive comment. This is their statement:

Please consider joining/donating to The Free Speech Union:

• https://freespeechunion.org/join/

And again, consider subscribing to Cofnas’ Substack:

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These articles always seem to perform well, probably because my audience is heavily academic, as per the poll I ran showing that 31% of my subscribers have a PhD and 25% work in academia.

According to the US Census Bureau, only 1.2% of the US population has a PhD.

I have nearly 10,000 subscribers in 111 countries, but the bulk are American… I don’t need to run a poll to find this out:

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Note: there are hundreds of ‘academic scandals’ that have happened recently involving Israel/Palestine — endless boycotts on campus, hunger strikes, protests, fights, etc. I chose not to include any of these because I have a policy against blogging about the Middle East.

#1 - Florida fires all DEI staff

This story goes first because it is the biggest news of the month — on March 1st, the University of Florida fired all DEI staff (13 full-time positions + 15 administrative DEI roles) and will redirect the $5 million in savings towards recruiting new faculty.

• University of Florida Eliminates All D.E.I.-Related Positions (New York Times)

• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion employees will no longer have a job at UF (Gainesville Sun)

• University of Florida fires all DEI employees in compliance with state law (Fox News)

• University of Florida terminates all DEI positions to comply with new law (The Hill)

• University of Florida Guts DEI Offices and Fires All Staff Over New Statute (Daily Beast)

• University of Florida Closes Diversity Department, Fires All DEI Staff (National Review)

Bureaucrats are already attempting to skirt the new law by rebranding DEI.

At UFlorida’s College of Pharmacy, for example, DEI has been rebranded into “Accessibility, Belonging, and Community” (ABC), while UFlorida’s Law School rebranded the ‘‘Dean for Inclusion’’ to the ‘‘Dean for Experiential Learning and Engagement.’’

The person who deserves the most credit for this development, aside from DeSantis, is , who has been at the forefront of the fight against DEI in Florida for years. He wrote this article over a year ago, calling his shot, and now succeeded.

Christopher F. Rufo

DEI Captures the University of Florida

The University of Florida has created a radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy that promotes racial and political preferences in faculty hiring, encourages white employees to engage with a twelve-step program called Racists Anonymous, and maintains racially segregated scholarship programs that violate federal civil rights law…

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3 years ago · 166 likes · 42 comments · Christopher F. Rufo

#2 - Alabama bans DEI funding at universities

Three weeks later, Alabama copied Florida in banning DEI:

• https://www.nationalreview.com/news/alabama-governor-signs-bill-banning-dei-programs-at-public-schools-and-universities/

Alabama governor Kay Ivey signed a bill into law on Wednesday effectively banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public schools and universities.

The legislation, known as S.B. 129, prohibits local boards of education, public institutions of higher education, and state agencies from maintaining or funding DEI programs that promote “divisive concepts” such as guilting someone over their race or sex. Additionally, all public schools, universities, and agencies in Alabama have the authority to “discipline or terminate the employment of any employee or contractor who knowingly violates this act,” the legislation reads.

…

The signing of the anti-DEI bill comes after Florida’s numerous steps to ban DEI. In January, the board of governors of the State University System of Florida officially banned its public universities from using state and federal funds for DEI programs. The University of Florida eliminated all DEI-related positions on its campus earlier this month.

#3 - Texas bans DEI funding at universities

Just yesterday, Texas followed!

Christopher F. Rufo

Abolished!

The University of Texas has announced that, following the mandate of the state legislature, it will unwind its DEI bureaucracy. Specifically, administrators will close down its DEI division, require some DEI deans to return to teaching, and eliminate other DEI positions altogether…

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2 years ago · 402 likes · 101 comments · Christopher F. Rufo

The University of Texas has announced that, following the mandate of the state legislature, it will unwind its DEI bureaucracy. Specifically, administrators will close down its DEI division, require some DEI deans to return to teaching, and eliminate other DEI positions altogether.

This is the culmination of a year-long campaign to abolish DEI and restore the principle of colorblind equality.

Many states are following Alabama, Florida, and Texas… but it’s moving fast and hard to keep track… I probably need to do a deep dive to get a comprehensive picture of DEI at a state-by-state level, but it certainly seems to be a nationwide trend, in red states at least.

#4 - Another Harvard Plagiarism Scandal

Not to be a blatant Chris Rufo booster, but he is involved in many of the top scandals this month, so it makes sense to keep linking to him. Just like he called his DEI-in-Florida shot in advance, a couple of months ago, Rufo declared a ‘‘plagiarism war’’:

In March he delivered the most recent blow in that war, breaking a new plagiarism scandal at Harvard:

Christopher F. Rufo

Copy and Paste

Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she…

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2 years ago · 252 likes · 126 comments · Christopher F. Rufo

Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article titled “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”

Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.

According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”

Weirdly, the Harvard professor in question, Christina Cross, followed me on Twitter the day it broke, although I had nothing to do with this story.