Bethan Staton and Chris Cook write:
A Cambridge university professor who copied parts of an undergraduate’s essays and published them as his own work will remain in his job, despite an investigation upholding a complaint that he had committed plagiarism.
Dr William O’Reilly, an associate professor in early modern history, submitted a paper that was published in the Journal of Austrian-American History in 2018. However, large sections of the work had been copied from essays by one of his undergraduate students.
The decision to leave O’Reilly in post casts doubt on the internal disciplinary processes of Cambridge, which rely on academics judging their peers.
Dude’s not a statistician, but I think this alone should be enough to make him a strong candidate for the American Statistical Association’s Founders Award.
And, early modern history is not quite the same thing as political science, but the copying thing should definitely make him eligible for the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award from the American Political Science Association. Long after all our research has been forgotten, the robots of the 21st century will be able to sift through the internet archive and find this guy’s story.
Or . . . what about the Edge Foundation? Plagiarism isn’t quite the same thing as misrepresenting your data, but it’s close enough that I think this guy would have a shot at joining that elite club. I’ve heard they no longer give out flights to private Caribbean islands, but I’m sure there are some lesser perks available.
According to the news article:
Documents seen by the Financial Times, including two essays submitted by the third-year student, show nearly half of the pages of O’Reilly’s published article — entitled “Fredrick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, Orientalism, and the Austrian Militärgrenze” — had been plagiarised.
Jeez, some people are so picky! Only half the pages were plagiarized, right? Or maybe not? Maybe this prof did a “Quentin Rowan” and constructed his entire article based on unacknowledged copying from other sources. As Rowan said:
It felt very much like putting an elaborate puzzle together. Every new passage added has its own peculiar set of edges that had to find a way in.
I guess that’s how it felt when they were making maps of the Habsburg empire.
On the plus side, reading about this story motivated me to take a look at the Journal of Austrian-American History, and there I found this cool article by Thomas Riegler, “The Spy Story Behind The Third Man.” That’s one of my favorite movies! I don’t know how watchable it would be to a modern audience—the story might seem a bit too simplistic—but I loved it.
P.S. I laugh but only because that’s more pleasant than crying. Just to be clear: the upsetting thing is not that some sleazeball managed to climb halfway up the greasy pole of academia by cheating. Lots of students cheat, some of these students become professors, etc. The upsetting thing is that the organization closed ranks to defend him. We’ve seen this sort of thing before, over and over—for example, Columbia never seemed to make any effort whatsoever to track down whoever was faking its U.S. News numbers—, so this behavior by Cambridge University doesn’t surprise me, but it still makes me sad. I’m guessing it’s some combination of (a) the perp is plugged in, the people who make the decisions are his personal friends, (b) a decision that the negative publicity for letting this guy stay on at his job is not as bad as the negative publicity for firing him.
Can you imagine what it would be like to work in the same department as this guy?? Fun conversations at the water cooler, I guess. “Whassup with the Austrian Militärgrenze, dude?”
Meanwhile . . .
There are people who actually do their own research, and they’re probably good teachers too, but they didn’t get that Cambridge job. It’s hard to compete with an academic cheater, if the institution he’s working for seems to act as if cheating is just fine, and if professional societies such as the American Statistical Association and the American Political Science Association don’t seem to care either.
The story is sad, but three thumbs up for the reference to the Third Man. What a great movie, and the theme song – is it a zither that is played I can’t remember. Some of the shots in the film are astounding,
> “The decision to leave O’Reilly in post casts doubt on the internal disciplinary processes of Cambridge…”
What an odd statement! I would say that the decision dispels any hint of doubt. I guess that shows what I know about principles of even-handed journalism!
Snark aside, a more clearly true statement would be, “The decision plainly demonstrates that the internal disciplinary process at Cambridge is not a reliably serious mechanism for enforcing even the most basic rules of integrity.” Is that biased? More biased than the “casts doubt” statement?
From his webpage (https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/dr-william-oreilly): “I welcome inquiries from prospective students wishing to work …”. This seems like a great opportunity for students, spread the word.
A link that is not pay-walled:
https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/26105
The defense put forward for him was that he inadvertently used material from his notes which happened to be verbatim passages from a student. But in his confession he writes “I have never denied that in a situation of extreme personal difficulty I inadvertently used material from two student essays stored on my computer.” Wha? The “extreme personal difficulty” part is what you say when you did something wrong like axe-murdering your family and you know that any explanation involving “inadvertent” is not going to work.
I nominate this guy as the new poster child for plagiarism on the blog!
Matt:
I’m waiting for American Statistical Association or the American Political Science Association to give him an award, or for the Edge Foundation to invite them to one of their Billionaire’s Dinners, or at the very least for him to give a Ted talk and be featured on NPR. Or publish a book on chess.
It seems that he has been newsworthy for matters other than plagiarism.
https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/18799
https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/18799
Plus ca change…
In the early 1970s, I was a CMPSC Instructor, and in first class I warned students that if they cheated by copying programs, I would flunk them, in course usually ranked as the most work per credit.
Every term a few students plagiarized, typically by copying the (large) final programming project. I caught them,* and flunked them.
This was in the punched-card era, with students gathered in the computer center, often late at night to get good turnaround.
They knew who was there working and who wasn’t, so weren’t surprised.
Every term honest students quietly thanked me for flunking the cheaters….in part because they didn’t want them damaging the value of their grades with prospective employers. I never forgot that lesson, that proofs of plagiarism are not just to discourage it, but to protect the hard work of honest people.
*It was so easy. I got a weekly report of each job each student ran (batch processing on mainframe). Real projects accumulated dozens of runs. If someone ran nothing for weeks and then suddenly got one working run… flag.
Also, the project description had suggestions, which differed slightly from term to term, and I knew the differences.
This course was a lot of work, most students got A’s or B’s.
Has anyone looked into the statistics on whether men get away with stuff like this while women don’t? I was thinking about Gino vs Ariely. She got fired, but Ariely seems to be doing just fine (same paper).
Shravan:
It’s an interesting question, and I could see it going either way, as there are also examples of women who’ve gotten away with it and men who’ve been fired. There’s also the time dimension, for example I recall reading somewhere that Ariely is currently under investigation, also it seems that MIT may have kicked him out years ago because of his misconduct.
If studying the topic, I think you’d want to use some sort of continuous notation of severity of the offense and of the outcome.
For example, Bruno Frey committed research misconduct by publishing the same material in different journals without cross-reference, which maybe is a 5 on a 0-10 scale of misconduct? And he was not fired, but he seems to have taken an early retirement, which maybe is a 2 on a 0-10 scale of consequences?
Or what about Satoshi Kanazawa, who wrote a series of papers using bad statistics to make strong claims unsupported by data? Do we say that’s not research misconduct at all? At some point, if you keep doing bad work even after the experts point it out to you, maybe it is? So should we label that as a 2 out of 10? He was not fired either, but his reputation took a dive. Is that a 0 on a 0-10 scale of consequences?
Etc.
The above examples suggest to me that it would be very hard to perform a comparative study in any systematic way, given the small number of cases and the difficulty of coding. One starting point could be to design some rubrics for severity of scholarly misconduct and professional consequences and then go through and code every case in Retraction Watch. That itself would be subject to whatever implicit selection biases arise in Retraction Watch’s decisions of what to report, but I guess it would be a start.
Andrew and Matt Skaggs,
have you seen her legal document, in which she outlines her complaint? I quote:
> Harvard Business School discriminated against Plaintiff on the basis of sex when it
elected to investigate her under a newly created policy specific to her case as opposed to relying
on its existing policy and procedures. Harvard has treated similarly situated male professors
differently. It recently investigated allegations of research misconduct against a male junior faculty
member pursuant to its existing “Research Integrity” policy, (which, unlike the Interim Policy, did
not specify any particular sanctions for violations), and its usual Faculty Review Board procedures,
a policy and procedures that Harvard University chose to abandon in Plaintiff’s case. In contrast
to its treatment of Plaintiff, Harvard Business School protected the confidentiality of the male
junior faculty member, and it subsequently promoted him to tenure.
I am interested in this single-case analysis as it is, in a sense, a natural within-university experiment. Same university, different outcomes. We could use Andrew’s quantitative approach to locating the degree of misconduct if we knew who this male professor was and what he did. We don’t need to do any statistical analysis, it would be easy to just get a subjective sense of whether the male/female discrimination accusation is fair or not.
Gino also writes in her complaint that Data Colada have targeted women in particular. This is surely something that can be checked easily without any complex calculations.
> Through the Data Colada blog, Defendants Simonsohn, Nelson, and Simmons have
targeted the work of prominent female academics and subjected it to an exceptionally high level
of public scrutiny.
I did a quick scan of the Data Colada website and classified by hand the first 13 cases I saw (indexed by entry number on their blog so others can check that I got this right):
Male Female
105_Gerlach 109_Gino
101_Shah 98_Gino
99_Young 97_Etkin
98_Ariely 96_Dupas
94_Luca 92_Sokolova
91_Brodeur
90_Vanbergen
89_Park
One decision I made in this initial classification was to name either a “famous” author (like Ariely or Gino) or, if I didn’t recognize any name, the first author. I could not find out who the corresponding author is, because the papers are usually paywalled, and anyway it is possible to have a young student as the corresponding author even though the work was directed by the senior author. Maybe a better way to classify could be to list all authors for every case by gender (assuming of course a binary classification into male and female).
It’d be very informative if someone would take the time to complete this table. I’m surprised that Gino didn’t do this work in her formal complaint, because if I were her and wanted to sue someone for sexism with the claim that they are unfairly targeting women, then the first thing I would have done is counted the cases and displayed them already in the complaint. The data is out there on the Data Colada website. Although I do have to say that even if they do end up having more women than men in this list of targets, it could be due to the fact that more women work in a particular field that they are targeting; so some kind of correction would need to be done to figure out whether there is a prior dominance of women in a particular field (personally, I suspect this is unlikely as men dominate in almost every field, but it’s theoretically a possibility).
Here is her official complaint:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64e37384f8314c0ebe1a5469/t/6505dc466e0e9935261342d2/1694882888120/Complaint.pdf
“I was thinking about Gino vs Ariely. She got fired, but Ariely seems to be doing just fine (same paper).”
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Here is what Gino wrote after the Ariely data was found to be fabricated but before most of the evidence was available:
https://datacolada.org/storage_strong/Gino-memo-data-colada-August16.pdf
Off in the distance, she can hear the faint baying of hounds…
Duke is supposedly investigating Ariely but has put no limitations at all on him so far. It sure looks like Duke is hoping this will die out so they don’t have to deal with it. If they were serious about misconduct they would have moved already, since we now have solid evidence that only Ariely could have changed the data (and fabricated the experimental protocol, yeesh.)
Meanwhile, though, the Many Coauthors project is slowly moving forward. Ariely will be involved in one way or the other, most likely as a target. Duke’s favored strategy is doomed to fail.
No way I am going to buy Ariely’s silly book, but I would love to know if he defends himself against the allegations by describing them as misbelief.
I really don’t understand why he didn’t just co-author with the student–should be a win-win.