#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:
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
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So far this year, 37 papers have been retracted, and 144 have been published.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.
#6: Oklahoma Professor alleges his work was plagiarized
#7: Harvard is allegedly hiring 2 conservative professors
After I wrote this article about Harvard:
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:
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”:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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, Lorenzo Warby had a nice write-up on the economics profession discrediting itself.
#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:
Now, MIT has a second AI paper retraction.
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:
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
#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:
Shortly after it was posted, it was deleted from Chinese social media:
But I have archived it here on the Western internet:
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
Sam Cooper, 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 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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
“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:
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?
Excellent work as always. I would like to humbly offer an unsolicited suggestion regarding your posts. I think there is so much content in each one, I feel that it would help your readers and your substack numbers if you posted more frequently with less content in each one.
Good to see that Texas has been successful in getting the universities under some level of control