University of Michigan Pulls Hacked EJMR Dataset and Launches Investigation
For over two years, my Substack has relentlessly chronicled a saga involving a team of Yale economists who illegally hacked a prominent economics forum. I’ve written more than a dozen articles exposing this hack.
In my previous update, published a month ago, I reported a major development: the Trump administration opened an investigation. That article also contains links to my previous dozen pieces on the topic.
The next day, Marginal Revolution, the most influential econ blog in the world, picked up my story, and I was heartened to see that their comments section was overwhelmingly supportive of my perspective:
Today brings another significant development.
The dataset at the center of this controversy—the hacked EJMR data—had been hosted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a major academic data repository housed at the University of Michigan.
Yesterday, in an unprecedented move, ICPSR removed the dataset and sent an urgent email to everyone who had previously downloaded it. The message read:
‘‘Please delete all data files you downloaded from this project and confirm you have done so by replying all to this email.’’
This is an extraordinary request. In all my years of covering academic misconduct, I’ve never seen a dataset pulled like this—especially one that had already been cleared for academic use. Even more unusual is the demand that everyone who downloaded it confirm its deletion. It signals a serious escalation.
Shortly afterward, ICPSR Director Margaret C. Levenstein confirmed via email that ‘‘we [the University of Michigan] are investigating.’’
I’m sharing this update not just to document what happened, but to ensure it doesn’t get buried. This story needs eyeballs on it. For two years, I’ve autistically dragged this story into the light, one painstaking step at a time. Every new development continues to validate what I’ve been reporting: this scandal is real, it’s serious, and it’s finally catching up to the people and institutions involved.
The story isn’t over. And I’ll be here until the end.
Well done Chris. Great work here.
"Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) is an anonymous online forum and clearinghouse for information about the academic job market for economists. It also includes speech that is considered abusive, defamatory, racist, misogynistic, or otherwise “toxic”. Using computational methods new to economics, we geolocate the majority of EJMR posts and show that posting on the platform is wide-spread in academia : 10% of posts originate from universities including all top-ranked universities in the United States. A substantial number of posts also come from government agencies, companies, and non-profit organizations employing economists."
https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/yale-university-vows-to-geolocate
This is helpful in getting caught up.