It’s bezzle time: The Dean of Engineering at the University of Nevada gets paid $372,127 a year and wrote a paper that’s so bad, you can’t believe it.

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“As we look to sleep and neuroscience for answers we can study flies specifically the Drosophila melanogaster we highlight in our research.”

1. The story

Someone writes:

I recently read a paper of yours in the Chronicle about how academic fraudsters get away with it. I came across a strange case that I thought you would at least have some interest in when a faculty members owns an open access journal that costs to publish and then publishes a large number of papers in the journal.  The most recent issue is all from the same authors (family affair).

It is from an administrator at University of Nevada Reno.  This concern is related to publications within a journal that may not be reputable.   The Dean of Engineering has a number of publications in the International Supply Chain Technology Journal that are in question Google Scholar.  Normally, I would contact the editor, or publisher, but in this case, there are complexities.

This may not  be an issue but many of the articles are short, being 1 or 2 pages. In addition, some have a peer review process of 3 days or less. Another concern is that many of the papers do not even discuss what is in the title.  Take the following paper: It presents nothing about the title. Many of the papers read as if AI was used.

While the quality of these papers may not be of concern, the representation of these as publications could be. The person publishing them should have ethical standards that exceed those that are under his leadership. He is also the highest ranking official of the college of engineering and is expected to lead by example and be a good model to those under him.

If that is not enough, looking into the journal in more detail alludes to more ethical questions. The journal is published by PWD Group out of Texas. Lookup of PWD Group out of Texas yields that Erick Jones is the Director and President.  Erick Jones was also the Editor of the journal.  In addition to the journal articles, even books authored by Erick Jones are published by PWD.

Further looking into the journal publications you will see that there are a large number with Erick Jones Sr. and Erick Jones Jr.  There are also a large number with Felicia Jefferson.  Felicia is also a faculty member at UNR and the spouse of Dean Jones.  A few of the papers raise concerns related to deer supply chains. The following has a very fast peer review process of a few days and the caption of a white tailed deer is a reindeer. Another paper is even shorter, with a very fast peer review, and captions yet a different deer which is still not a white tail. It is unlikely these papers went through a robust peer review.

While these papers affiliation are prior to coming to UNR, the incoherence, conflict of interest, and incorrect data do lot look good for UNR and they were published either when Dr. Jefferson was applying to UNR or early upon her arrival. Similar issues with the timing of this article. Also, in the print version of the journal, Dr. Jefferson handles submissions (pp3).

Maybe this information is nothing to be concerned about.  At the very least, it sheds a poor light on the scientific process, especially when a Dean is the potential abuser.  It is not clear how he can encourage high quality manuscripts from other faculty when he has been able to climb the ladder using his own publishing house. I’ll leave you with a paper with a relevant title on minimizing train accidents through minimizing sleep deprivation. It seems like a really important study.  The short read should convince you otherwise and make you question the understanding of the scientific process by these authors.

Of specific concern is whether these publications led to he, or his spouse, being hired at UNR.  If these are considered legitimate papers, the entire hiring and tenure process at UNR is compromised.  Similar arguments exist if these papers are used in the annual evaluation process. It also raises a conflict of interest if he pays to publish and then receives proceeds on the back end.

I have no comment on the hiring, tenure, and evaluation process at UNR, or on any conflicts of interest. I know nothing about what is going on at UNR. It’s a horrifying story, though.

2. The published paper

OK, here it is, in its entirety (except for references). You absolutely have to see it to believe it:

Compared to this, the Why We Sleep guy is a goddamn titan of science.

3. The Dean of Engineering

From the webpage of the Dean of Engineering at the University of Reno:

Dr. Erick C. Jones is a former senior science advisor in the Office of the Chief Economist at the U.S. State Department. He is a former professor and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at the College of Engineering at The University of Texas at Arlington.

From the press release announcing his appointment, dated July 01, 2022:

Jones is an internationally recognized researcher in industrial manufacturing and systems engineering. . . . “In Erick Jones, our University has a dynamic leader who understands how to seize moments of opportunity in order to further an agenda of excellence,” University President Brian Sandoval said. . . . Jones was on a three-year rotating detail at National Science Foundation where he was a Program Director in the Engineering Directorate for Engineering Research Centers Program. . . .

Jones is internationally recognized for his pioneering work with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies, Lean Six Sigma Quality Management (the understanding of whether a process is well controlled), and autonomous inventory control. He has published more than 243 manuscripts . . .

According to this source, his salary in 2022 was $372,127.

According to wikipedia, UNR is the state’s flagship public university.

I was curious to see what else Jones had published so I searched him on Google scholar and took a look at his three most-cited publications. The second of these appeared to be a textbook, and the third was basically 8 straight pages of empty jargon—ironic that a journal called Total Quality Management would publish something that has no positive qualities! The most-cited paper on the list was pretty bad too, an empty bit of make-work, the scientific equivalent of the reports that white-collar workers need to fill out and give to their bosses who can then pass these along to their bosses to demonstrate how productive they are. In short, this guy seems to be a well-connected time server in the Ed Wegman mode, minus the plagiarism.

He was a Program Director at the National Science Foundation! Your tax dollars at work.

Can you imagine what it would feel like to be a student in the engineering school at the flagship university of the state of Nevada, and it turns out the school is being run by the author of this:

Our recent study has the premise that both humans and flies sleep during the night and are awake during the day, and both species require a significant amount of sleep each day when their neural systems are developing in specific activities. This trait is shared by both species. An investigation was segmented into three subfields, which were titled “Life span,” “Time-to-death,” and “Chronological age.” In D. melanogaster, there was a positive correlation between life span, the intensity of young male medflies, and the persistence of movement. Time-to-death analysis revealed that the male flies passed away two weeks after exhibiting the supine behavior. Chronological age, activity in D. melanogaster was adversely correlated with age; however, there was no correlation between chronological age and time-to-death. It is probable that the incorporation the findings of age-related health factors and increased sleep may lead toless train accidents. of these age factors when considering these options supply chain procedure for maintaining will be beneficial.

I can’t even.

P.S. The thing I still can’t figure out is, why did Jones publish this paper at all? He’d already landed the juicy Dean of Engineering job, months before submitting it to his own journal. To then put his name on something so ludicrously bad . . . it can’t help his career at all, could only hurt. And obviously it’s not going to do anything to reduce train accidents. What was he possibly thinking?

P.P.S. I guess this happens all the time; it’s what Galbraith called the “bezzle.” We’re just more likely to hear about when it happens at some big-name place like Stanford, Harvard, Ohio State, or Cornell. It still makes me mad, though. I’m sure there are lots of engineers who are doing good work and could be wonderful teachers, and instead UNR spends $372,127 on this guy.

I’ll leave the last word to another UNR employee, from the above-linked press release:

“What is exciting about having Jones as our new dean for the College of Engineering is how he clearly understands the current landscape for what it means to be a Carnegie R1 ‘Very High Research’ institution,” Provost Jeff Thompson said. “He very clearly understands how we can amplify every aspect of our College of Engineering, so that we can continue to build transcendent programs for engineering education and research.”

They’re transcending something, that’s for sure.

My challenge for Jeff Thompson: Show up at an engineering class at your institution, read aloud the entire contents (i.e., the two paragraphs) of “Using Science to Minimize Sleep Deprivation that may reduce Train Accidents,” then engage the students in a discussion of what this says about “the current landscape for what it means to be a Carnegie R1 ‘Very High Research’ institution.”

Should be fun, no? Just remember, the best way to keep the students’ attention is to remind them that, yes, this will be covered on the final exam.

P.P.P.S. More here from Retraction Watch.

P.P.P.P.S. Still more here.

P.P.P.P.P.S. Retraction Watch found more plagiarism, this time on a report for the National Science Foundation.

208 thoughts on “It’s bezzle time: The Dean of Engineering at the University of Nevada gets paid $372,127 a year and wrote a paper that’s so bad, you can’t believe it.”

  2. “Our recent study has the premise that both humans and flies sleep during the night and are awake during the day, and both species require a significant amount of sleep each day when their neural systems are developing in specific activities.”

    I dunno Andrew… can you really argue with something based so solidly on the premise that “these two species sleep at night”?! Novel work being done out in Reno. Being known as “the divorce capital of the world” does that city no justice with this kind of work just out there for the benefit of humanity.

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  3. Down a rabbit hole! I could spend weeks devouring this journal with astounding findings around every turn. Here is just one of the things I discovered: https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/306/295. After a short excursion in different issues, I noticed a few things. Most issues start with a somewhat longer article (like the one I linked) not coauthored by Jones. Then articles follow, mostly with Jones as a coauthor. Almost universally the articles are without content. The one I linked is a good example – it repeats the same things multiple times, never providing any new information. There are apparently 4 kinds of relevant analyses for hospital supply chains, all of which the authors have previously studied, and which they now propose should be integrated into a holistic process. How the integration is supposed to take place is never articulated, i.e. there is no content. Each sub-category of analysis has its own acronym, repeated over and over again (how’s that for repetition?). There are 2 case “studies” provided, neither of which say anything new.

    I’m left wondering whether the whole discipline of supply chain management has any value at all.
    Nepotism? Resume padding? False peer review?
    Wow, simply wow.
    I’m now speechless.

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  4. They should issue an erratum asap: the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) is not the same species as the Med fly (Ceratitis capitata). It’s important we keep the scientific record straight and accurate. This could lead to some much train wrecks if left uncorrected.

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    • As a zoologist who has worked on Drosophila melanogaster, I was intrigued by the inability to recognize reindeer or flies. The fly in the picture is definitely not a med fly, and doesn’t look like a wild D. melanogaster: that species has a banded abdomen, though less distinct in males banding, which have a large and quite noticeable terminal dark band. It could, perhaps, be from a lab stock with a body color mutation. The picture itself is a free stock image from Pixabay. The contributing photographer is a wildlife photographer from Estonia, and a look at some of his his other pictures do not indicate that he hangs out in generics labs. So, they may have confused *three* species of flies!

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      • Gregory, I think you’re pretty close to a publication with all those facts! You just need a better hook to tie it to current events. How about this for your intro:

        “The inability to distinguish among things that are, in fact, different from one another can have grave consequences.” [next, reference pretty much any political issue, paste in your comment verbatim, and send it off to the journal!]

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  6. “. . . it can’t help his career at all, could only help.”

    Unless you were deliberately parodying Jones-type reasoning, “Could only help” wants to read “could only hurt”

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    • Typo or not, this is really the most interesting part. I’d guess he has not actually read it. Two of the authors appear to be students who probably did the “work”, starting about 15 minutes before the homework deadline. Jefferson is apparently faculty and has published a number of these word salad papers with Reed.

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  7. Seems like a purposefully unsophisticated scam. Ie, the target is administrators and grant reviewers who maybe check CVs but never actually read the documents. It is too (personally, legally, professionally) embarrassing to admit such a large and obvious error so they become incorporated into the scam. Possibly without even consciously realizing it.

    Its like how NHST works, to get the degree 99+% of people will need to produce the low standard BS since there simply isn’t time to do the real job. Then they can’t critique other bad jobs without undermining their own position. Of course, the NHST thing is more sophisticated than this one. Its more decentralized and organic, evolving as people navigated the incentives in the new environment of industrial scale research.

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  8. Naturally, since I am ignorant of the topic, I instead latched on to the grammar of the accusation made:

    “Of specific concern is whether these publications led to he, or his spouse, being hired at UNR.”

    I will admit that this grammatical mistake might eventually, in due time, be the (only) correct way to put it. The other day, I wrote in to the NYT criticizing the use of “fortuitous” because it was unclear whether the author meant “fortunate” or “accidental,” and was told by others “to get over it.”
    As to self publishing in one’s own journal, that has always been a dream of mine, so I can’t really criticize Jones and Jefferson.

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    • Neither do I think that publishing in one’s own journal is a moral transgression per se. I do not know how such an author would be reviewed anonymously, but the anonymity of the referee is not, in my view, the secret sauce that turns peer review from good to bad or vice versa. There was no anonymous peer review for Leibniz or Newton or Gauss, yet they made valuable contributions to science.

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      • Raphael:

        I agree that self-publishing is just fine. I say this as someone who’s self-published 10,000 blog entries, and, well, my colleagues and I didn’t literally self-publish our books, but we could’ve: the publishers served more as distributors than anything else. Stephen Wolfram self-publishes and, yes, the authorship of his work isn’t always clear and there are debates about its quality, but there’s definitely content there.

        The problem with the Jones et al. papers discussed here was that they are not just content-free but so bad, just unfathomably bad, enough so that the entire scenario is baffling. Can you imagine being an engineering student at UNR and getting a C on a paper because it had some flaws—and then seeing what the dean of school is attaching his name to? The whole thing is just nuts.

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  11. This isn’t about just pulling out sentences. Here, read this paper in its entirety (I promise it won’t take long): https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/286/281

    And let us know if you think: 1) It represents even a hour of work of someone who is getting paid over 300K/year 2) It would be acceptable as an essay turned in by a college student 3) What kind of grade it would get if turned in by a high school student.

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    • Interestingly, as I peruse some of the other issues, the first few years seem quite different than the more recent issues. The early years I’d say are equivalent to a poor undergraduate research paper. Canned statistical work, poor measurements, small sample sizes, NHST, but at least there is content. Somewhere along the way, the content from most of the articles disappeared. I even found one early article that was published in two separate issues of the journal a year apart (gives new meaning to plagiarism) – at least the vitae of the author only listed the publication once.

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    • Adede:

      Wow. What’s amazing is that any of the five listed authors of this paper must have had the ability to write something at least half coherent on the topic. Just start with the title, “Working Towards Sustainable Net Neutral Critical Mineral Supply Chains,” and go from there, five-paragraph-high-school-essay style. But they couldn’t even be bothered to do that! In some sense, maybe UNR should be happy about this: if their dean is going to spew out worthless publications, at least he’s not wasting any time on researching or writing them. The whole thing is just so damn weird.

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    • Deb:

      If you want to characterize contentless word salad as “real world research,” that’s your call, whatever. But no more insults and abusive comments. There’s plenty of room for that sort of thing on twitter, 4chan, etc.

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  12. As a professional scientist at another University, I am appalled. I cannot imagine this level of scholarship would not be flagged by a search committee, which really does give me pause. Unless we go down the path of accusing the entire search committee, we must try to find a credible way that your assessment is mistaken. For example, the papers highlighted here seem more like a short commentaries to highlight featured articles in the journal. In which case, it would probably be okay….but it really doesn’t add up to me, even so. The quality of writing, the non-specific prose; its is not academic or scholarly. Note: I evaluated his papers before seeing his profile picture, so I do not think my assessment could possibly be tinged by any implicit biases.
    I hope this article gets picked up and answered. There are a lot of hard working talented scientists out there with too few positions available.

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    • Joshua:

      Yeah, I’ve seen lots of bad stuff published by faculty at legitimate universities. But never anything that was so clearly this bad. It’s “if a student were to turn this in, it would get a grade of 0” bad. It’s “if a chatbot produced this, you’d get another chatbot” bad. It makes the writing of Ed Wegman look like Henry James.

      Regarding the committee: in hiring a dean, I guess the main goals are controlling the budget, having a strategic vision, etc., not scholarly work. I’m guessing that Jones had some strong letters of recommendation. Obviously, though, yes, this is all an insult to the students and faculty at UNR, who are themselves held to high standards. Also I guess an insult to UNLV, which doesn’t get to be called the state’s flagship university.

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      • Beware of strong letters of recommendation. I know personally of one case where a premier research institution got rid of a terrible researcher by making it clear he was not wanted and then writing the most glowing letters of recommendation for him. That could have been the case here.

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      • I work on campus and recently started on my MBA and I can unequivocally say that neither the students nor the faculty are held to high standards. There isn’t even training when you get a job, just two year old “knowledge base” articles; your job is learning your job from people who don’t know how to do their job.

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    • Those titles remind me of that great game Mad Libs. Virtually all of the titles are the conjunction of 2 completely disparate ideas. I’d say they could only be generated by a computer, but I did it all the time in Mad Libs.

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  15. Here is proof that I did read the complaint by Andrew’s informant: I spotted the innocent typo in this sentence:

    “While these papers affiliation are prior to coming to UNR, the incoherence, conflict of interest, and incorrect data do lot look good for UNR and they were published either when Dr. Jefferson was applying to UNR or early upon her arrival.”

    I assume the informant’s intent is to indicate that Jefferson’s contribution is mere resume padding for an existent significant other. Somehow, and perhaps nonsensically, this reminded me of Cyril Burt’s famous “ladies,” Miss Howard and Miss Conway,” his coworkers who supposedly did the ANOVA calculations on his identical twins separated at birth studies. Most people now believe that neither one of the “ladies” ever existed; however, I assume that there is ample evidence (other than just her name on various publications) that Dr. Jefferson does exist.

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  16. I took about 5 minutes to dig into the history of people named Deb on blogs since I thought she was a blog. I’m not going to drag up the specific details, but I recommend you use whatever moderation tools are available to you to ban her or at least everybody stop engaging before things get somewhat dangerous for everyone involved, because it seems like this is a genuinely unstable person.

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  17. That is precisely word salad. Nowhere in the article is it explained how these systems are to be integrated – they are simply listed (and repeatedly). If this passes as research then I should start writing and publishing major works such as:

    Economic development should address income, environmental quality, and issues of equity. Each of these issues is important and the complexities and challenges in integrating them needs to be explored.

    NSF money please.

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  18. As a faculty member at a major research university, I am, unfortunately, not surprised. I’ve been on thesis committees where none of the members had read the thesis, even the thesis advisor! And I’ve been on hiring committees where the candidates were hardly vetted. Most of us are simply too bogged with the huge amount of minutiae that comes with the profession to have time for such things.

    Having said this, I must admit this particular case is completely egregious.

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  20. It is very difficult to prove “moral corruption” on the part of anyone involved, and frankly that is not our job. But I can’t think of *any* scenario in which the claim that the journal “publishes original, high-quality, supply chain technology empirical research that will have a significant impact on Supply Chain Technology, Research, and Practice” is anything but a deliberate lie. Usually, willfully saying something wrong is considered immoral.
    Also, building on previous comments, if the submissions were paid for with university funds, this construct may not only be fruitless (no doubt) or a lie (even giving them the benefit of the doubt, it most likely is), but a case of embezzlement. This is not bad research, indistinguishable from fraud (called Clarke’s Law on this blog). It is no research that is indistinguishable from criminal embezzlement. I would recommend to the Universities of Nevada, Reno and Texas, Arlington that they should investigate whether they hemorrhage funds into publications of this journal.

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    • Yes, that’s it. I don’t know how I missed the embezzlement angle on first read, but EJ is the owner of the journal and is funneling funds to himself through open access fees (and the $199 “honorarium” that they charge to publish).
      I bet UN-Reno’s College of Engineering recently established a generous program to pay the open access publication fees of its faculty.

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  21. Raphael K… Here is a particular doozy:
    https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/178/176

    Try reading it out loud and see if you can find “torment executioners”.
    This section of the paper plagiarized the abstract of:
    https://theprofesional.com/index.php/tpmj/article/view/3259
    “torment executioners” is a synonym replacement for “painkillers”

    Someone needs to look into Federal Funding i.e. NSF/NIH bio sketches, reported grant products for EJ and FJ. There could be a false claims suit.

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    • What a time-waster. I should be doing something useful but this is addictive.

      From the linked article
      Out of all members, 68.5% needed to wear sports shoes, 24.0% of the other members had foot torment or issues. Having consolation in their shoes, having vigor in their shoes, and having quality in their shoes come to play within the behavioral design of youthful and talented kids with respect to the footwear they select to wear. Those who had all the foot and lower back torment were considered to have such things as quality, wellness for their foot wellbeing, adaptability within the shoe, and delicacy in footwear so it would be more comfortable to walk.

      From the Journal of Back and Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation 32 (2019) 141–147 141
      DOI 10.3233/BMR-171036
      IOS Press
      Musculoskeletal problems and attitudes towards footwear among university students
      Sevgi Özdinça;, Serap Ünsarb and Melahat Akgün Kostakb

      RESULTS: Of the participants, 68.5% preferred to wear sports shoes; 24.0% of the participants had foot pain. Comfort, robustness and quality come to the fore in the behavioural patterns of young and healthy individuals regarding footwear. Those who experienced foot and lower back pain considered such parameters as quality, fitness for foot health, flexibility and lightness in footwear.

      CONCLUSIONS: While patterns such as foot health, flexibility and lightness are reflected in the footwear preferences of those who have lower back pain, those who have pain or problems in their feet take into consideration the quality, lightness, fitness to foot health. The relationship determined in the present study shows that those who experience pain are more selective in their footwear preferences.

      The above provides further support for Anonymous’s (9:31 AM) suggestion that a text spinner was used.

      Bob76
      PS. As one with who suffers from planar fasciitis from time-to-time, I like the phrase “foot torment” but it is unusual English. I did get 15,800 hits on Google for a search for “foot torment”. In contrast, “foot pain” got about 18,300,000.

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    • The discussed facts here, if true, highlight a couple of key points:

      If Erick C. Jones’ own journal charges publishing fees, and if he used federal grant money to pay for his and his wife’s extensive ‘fake’ papers, with the funds ultimately circulating back to his own pocket, it potentially constitutes a violation of wire fraud.

      If Erick C. Jones employs these extensive ‘fake’ papers for his NSF grant reports, it may constitute a violation of the False Claims Act.

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  22. I used to take life much too seriously. It was to the point where I wasn’t enjoying, and had no prospect of enjoying, my time here. While I haven’t quite extinguished being serious entirely (I’m a structural engineer so that’s probably a good thing!) I now take life a lot less seriously and as a result am much happier. Examples like this help me maintain that view and so in a sad sense do serve some purpose.

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  23. (60 papers to page CV)x($199 per paper back in your pocket from your grant/institution) is an ok side hustle.

    Some of the other papers are clearly just poor quality intro undergraduate basic data analysis and seem to copy each other. They include flight data in an article about school energy usage and school energy usage data. His son, also a prof, is implicated in this:

    https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/259/257
    https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/262/261

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  26. Public salaries are public information because Utah taxpayers have a right to know how their tax money is spent. It’s up to the public to judge, and up to AG’s to provide his readers with elements to judge. No mocking, shaming needed. The evidence speaks for itself.

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  28. I haven’t read all the comments so I’m sorry if this is redundant: One possibility is co-author fraud. We have had some cases at SocArXiv where bogus authors submit papers claiming to be co-authored with real people, maybe trying to establish their fake identity or something. Just a thought – it’s possible he’s not the perpetrator in all cases.

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  29. Hi this is Erick Jones, typically I don’t reply to these type of hatchet jobs but I do respect honest criticism. I gave up being the editor of the journal a few years back but I was the founder and initial editor of the journal. The journal loses money so I am still an investor in the company that owns it. The journal is peer reviewed and it was designed initially for more American supply chain practitioners, researchers and undergraduate students in applied application labs to publish with faculty, from internships and class papers on applied engineering activities that are related to supply chain technologies. I believed that publication in top journal took to long review and get published and that many in the field were not able to publish applied papers in this field in a timely fashion.

    Generally, I don’t count these on my resume. I starred the journal after I was twice tenured and a full professor. I wanted to make sure this was seen as a ploy for tenure.
    Please note I have several textbooks and many articles from other journals that are higher indexed and quite frankly more accepted in the field. Personally when I started I did not expect to be an administrator just a faculty member who tried to make a difference and provide access to more applied supply chain engineering technology ideas, projects and research.

    As far as the criticisms of the many contributors, editorial board and current activities of the journal I feel you are being unfair.

    As far as some topics especially the one you are highlighting that was worked on by US students that a new thought backed by something believed to be novel and clearly states further investigation will be needed, written as more of a background study. It’s really short and is seeking to connect science to application and is a short item of note on the connection.

    I believe you are wrong in the crucification and analysis of this piece. Though as faculty and as an academic I believe it is fair to do so. I sent this to the current editor so he could officially send your criticism to the corresponding author so all authors can be contacted for rebuttal. The reviewers will then decide on the fate of the article as every normal paper publication.

    I really hate you are using a blog to hurt the publication process for journals given that current state of accusations on plagiarism for administrators. I do respect you can criticize the content.

    As far a focusing on my expectations on publications for faculty. I do expect tenured state funded faculty to publish their works on federally funded grants to the public. I believe publications are the means new knowledge can get back to students the US classroom and for our students to connect to the research at our state supported labs. I also believe that different levels of publications are needed to do this in a way that our students, industry and the public can understand and use it. I am very proud of our faculty and many are doing this at all levels. I am not sure of your comment but technically I believe I have best faculty in the US, we are just less known than schools like…. Columbia.

    That being said, I stand by that commitment.

    Again if you want to take potshots at me for having our faculty not just do research in a vacuum where there are no writings, no lab to market opportunities and patents and no ability to communicate inspiration to society because we lose the general public in understanding, then I understand it is that I have taken.

    I still believe that publishing readable applications of large scale tax driven investments in innovation is still a must.

    I appreciate your concerns for our journak but if you represent Columbia who don’t want to publish for the public good well fine.

    Yes, not all of my publications are in Science but I do focus on access. Otherwise you would have to pay a fee to find my papers to trash me with. Again normally you send comments to editors as a process of criticism.

    I standby having public access to new thought. I am sorry you want to make this about something else, I did appreciate the governor giving all state employees a raise in Nevada and being a public institution our salaries are posted.

    I am not sure what Deans make at Columbia.

    I do publish in a range of topics related to supply chain. I also think it’s important to publish in all level of journals. I can’t ask faculty to publish papers if I do not.
    Hopefully you will see some of the other publications in different journals and book chapters that are under review.

    Best Erick Jones

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    • Erick:

      Most of your comment is generalities regarding that you want to do good in the world. That’s fine.

      The substance of my post and of the comments were on the papers that you published under your name in your journal. I will address the aspects of your comments that address this substance.

      You write that your paper, “was worked on by US students that a new thought backed by something believed to be novel and clearly states further investigation will be needed.” I cannot imagine what could be considered novel in that paper, except perhaps the mislabeling of an image and the bizarre attempt to connect fruit flies to train crashes.

      You write that your paper is “really short and is seeking to connect science to application.” I agree that is really short. I disagree that it is seeking to connect science to application. It contains no science and no application. And, no, I don’t think that mentioning a topic (in this case, train accidents) counts as an application. For it to be an application you have to actually do something or say something with some content.

      You write that “publications are the means new knowledge can get back to students the US classroom and for our students to connect to the research at our state supported labs.” The trouble is that these papers of yours discussed in the above post and in the comments have no new knowledge. They contain no information that is relevant to research in any way.

      You write that you are “very proud of our faculty and many are doing this [conducting and publishing research] at all levels.” I believe this. UNR is a good university. That’s one reason I was so shocked to see that its dean is publishing multiple papers in his own journal that have zero content. Criticism of your published papers should in no way be taken as criticism of the faculty at UNR; it is a criticism of the administration.

      You write, “I stand by that commitment.” I do not think your job entails any commitment to publish junk papers, duplicate papers, etc.

      You write, “I do focus on access. Otherwise you would have to pay a fee to find my papers to trash me with.” I am not trashing you. The commenters here and I are pointing out multiple papers you have published in that journal that have zero value. They don’t have value as research, they don’t have value as review, they add nothing.

      You write, “if you want to take potshots at me for having our faculty not just do research in a vacuum where there are no writings, no lab to market opportunities and patents and no ability to communicate inspiration to society because we lose the general public in understanding, then I understand it is that I have taken.” I don’t quite follow where that sentence is going so let me just say that (a) I’m not taking potshots at you, I’m criticizing particular papers that you chose to put your name on and publish, and (b) I’m not criticizing anything done by your faculty. I feel bad for your faculty that they have to be associated with this mess, which they did not choose to be involved with.

      You write, “I still believe that publishing readable applications of large scale tax driven investments in innovation is still a must.” I agree; however that does not describe your paper, which is not an application of anything; it is are bizarrely-strung-together set of sentences and images on train accidents, sleep, and flies.

      You write, “Yes, not all of my publications are in Science but I do focus on access. Otherwise you would have to pay a fee to find my papers to trash me with.” The problem is that these papers are horrible. No value is created by creating access to these papers which have no scientific content and would receive failing grades in a high school or college science class.

      You write, “I standby having public access to new thought.” The trouble is that these papers make no contribution whatsoever to science, engineering, commerce, policy, or the communication of any of these things.

      You write, “I do publish in a range of topics related to supply chain.” Maybe so. The above post focuses on a stunningly bad paper that you published under your name and others in your journal. Commenters point out some other incredibly bad papers you published in your journal, for example here. I remained stunned that a dean at a serious university could be publishing things like this.

      I can see how you could be annoyed when it comes out in public that you published these ridiculous which so many people feel are ridiculous. But that was your choice. To publish an article is to make it public.

      I emphasize that this is not a “hatchet job” or a personal criticism, nor is it a criticism of the faculty or students at UNR. Nor is it a criticism of public outreach. It is a criticism of some aspect of the UNR administration in which the dean of engineering is running a journal that is publishing junk papers by himself and others. If I were a student I would not be happy that this is where my tuition is going.

      Reply ↓

      • This fly paper strikes me as vapid, empty and silly. However, we don’t generally regard it as an ethical obligation that our publications be deep, profound or even informative. If publishing crap was misconduct I’m not sure how many academics would be left. Generally we leave it up to the readers/departments to decide on how to rate w journal’s quality.

        Seems to me the ethical issue here is the suggestion he did it to mislead people about his quality of research. So imagine he published this paper in a journal that he had no connection with — do you still see an ethical problem?

        In my mind any ethical rule against publishing crap papers makes it harder to combat publication bias. IMO in an ideal world even studies that are total dumb get published somewhere and if you want to mention why you think it’s actually important so be it.

        —

        To be clear I’m not saying the question of misleading people is settled just that it’s where the action is.

        Reply ↓

        • Publishing bad papers is one thing. Embarrassing, but not disqualifying. It’s AN issue for the leader of a College, but the sum total of the issues are more than being misleading:

          He owns and is/was editor for the journal, so he is responsible for its decisions and whether it has made money or not is irrelevant.

          The journal has published an identical paper at least four times some with the owner/editor’s name added as co-author (https://x.com/triplebankshot/status/1755146506057785625?s=20). As another example, the first issue includes a paper on using RFID on detecting in-home falls. The identical paper with the same title is also published again three years later in another issue.

          Numerous articles co-authored by the journal owner/editor suffer from blatant plagiarism. The fall paper is very short, but also includes several examples of sentences directly lifted from a Consumer Product Safety Commission report. It’s cited, but that doesn’t permit you to copy/paste complete sentences to create an introduction.

          Numerous articles are authored or co-authored by family-members of the journal owner/editor. They are of dubious quality, but they are clearly well-beyond the scope of a supply chain journal. On its own that is just ethically dubious, but when the journal is charging a $199 fee per paper (likely paid from grants or their home institutions) that creates a clear ethical violation and a grift.

          Additionally, it not just this journal. Chapters of his books also suffer from the same issues of poor quality, likely plagiarism, and nepotism/scope creep.

          It’s never in isolation. He was just finally caught. I’m sure a further investigation would find these issues throughout his published works.

          If he had any integrity he’d resign and withdraw all these papers (as would his family members), but given his response that isn’t likely. UNR needs to suspend him and initiate a full investigation.

        • Peter:

          To say that these papers are “vapid, empty and silly” is to way understate the issue. Over the years, I’ve seen lots of vapid, empty and silly papers. Some of the papers being discussed here seem to me to be just bizarre, really beyond comprehension. For example, as our correspondent noted, the paper, “Utilizing Unmanned Land and Air Vehicles Based AI to Mitigate Climate and Cascading Hazards from Critical Minerals Mining on Communities of Color,” presents nothing about the title. Similarly, the paper, “Using Science to Minimize Sleep Deprivation that may reduce Train Accidents,” has no scientific content relating to train accidents. Etc.

          I’m taking no position on what UNR should do here. If they want to spend their money on an administrator who is doing this, that’s their call. It bothers me, but what UNR does is not up to me, nor should it be. I don’t think there is any ethical obligation for a university administrator to publish good publications, or to avoid publishing bad publications, or to publish anything at all. My concern and bafflement over this situation is how amazingly bad these papers are. That was what motivated this post. “Academic employee publishes empty and silly work,” that’s not news. What made this news to me was how absurdly bad these papers were and the unusual way that they’re being published. The whole thing just seemed a little “off” to me, in a way different from the usual stories of bad research. These papers aren’t research at all, nor are they exposition nor do they do anything else that one would usually expect of a journal article in science or engineering. They read a little bit like very bad student term papers, but worse than any student papers I’ve ever received . . . and all this makes me confused about why Jones would be writing and publishing these at all, especially given his position as dean of engineering. So, again, my post was motivated by bafflement more than anything else.

          I was also bothered by the academic/corporate babble being sprouted by the senior administrators at UNR (“how we can amplify every aspect of our College of Engineering, so that we can continue to build transcendent programs for engineering education and research”), etc. Again, it’s not up to me, they can say and do what they want; the whole thing just seemed particularly ridiculous in this case. I recommend you read some of those papers in their entirety (don’t worry, it won’t take long) to see the utter absurdity of this situation.

        • “This fly paper strikes me as vapid, empty and silly. However, we don’t generally regard it as an ethical obligation that our publications be deep, profound or even informative. If publishing crap was misconduct I’m not sure how many academics would be left.”

          This is just pure nihilism.

        • Andrew,

          I agree with everything you just said here. Something definitely feels ‘off’ . Indeed, in my mind it does raise questions about whether the motive is to somehow create a false impression (I mean why else…though I can’t be totally sure there isn’t some motive I just haven’t thought of and ofc there are degrees).

          I was just misinterpreting you and thought you were saying the things you just explained you weren’t. Thanks for clarifying.

    • I just learned that a true engineer and one of my former professors died today so I perhaps more reactive to your inanities than I usually would. However, if you are going to justify fraud, please do it on your own time and elsewhere.

      Genuine engineers are hard at work trying to solve real problems and your nonsense insults their legacy.

      Reply ↓

  30. Dear Andrew, – this is the grammar corrected version
    Hello, my name is Erick Jones. Ordinarily, I refrain from responding to critiques of this nature, but I do value genuine criticism. I stepped down as the editor of the journal a few years ago, though I was its founder and initial editor. Despite the journal not being profitable, I continue to support it financially as an investor in the owning company. The journal is peer-reviewed and was originally created to cater to American supply chain practitioners, researchers, and undergraduate students engaged in applied application labs. It aimed to facilitate publishing for faculty and students involved in internships and class projects on applied engineering activities relevant to supply chain technologies. My belief was that publishing in top-tier journals was excessively time-consuming, and many professionals in the field struggled to timely publish applied research.

    I typically do not include this endeavor in my resume. I founded the journal after securing tenure twice and achieving full professorship, ensuring it was not perceived as a strategy for tenure. It’s important to note that I have authored several textbooks and numerous articles in other journals that are more highly regarded and, frankly, more recognized in the field. When I began, my intention was not to become an administrator but rather a faculty member dedicated to making a difference, enhancing access to applied ideas, projects, and research in supply chain engineering technology.

    Regarding your critique of the numerous contributors, the editorial board, and the journal’s current operations, I believe your assessment is unjust. Specifically, concerning the topic you emphasized, which was developed by U.S. students, it presents a new idea supported by what is considered novel findings. It acknowledges the need for further investigation and serves primarily as a foundational study. Its brevity aims to bridge the gap between science and practical application, offering a concise note on this connection.

    I disagree with your harsh critique and analysis of this work. However, as a faculty member and academic, I recognize the importance of such evaluations. I have forwarded your comments to the current editor, enabling them to formally convey your critique to the corresponding author. This process allows all authors the opportunity to respond. The fate of the article will then be determined by the reviewers, following the standard procedure for any paper publication.

    I am disheartened to see a blog being used in a manner that potentially undermines the integrity of the journal publishing process, especially in the current climate where accusations of plagiarism among administrators are prevalent. However, I acknowledge your right to critique the content.

    Regarding my expectations for faculty publications, I firmly believe that tenured faculty funded by state and federal grants should make their research publicly accessible. Publications serve as a vital conduit for transferring new knowledge back to students in U.S. classrooms and connecting them with research conducted in our state-supported laboratories. I am of the opinion that a variety of publication levels are necessary to achieve this goal effectively, ensuring that our students, the industry, and the broader public can comprehend and utilize the findings. I take great pride in our faculty’s efforts to disseminate their research across all levels. While I acknowledge that our institution may not be as widely recognized as some, like Columbia, I genuinely believe we have among the best faculty in the country.

    I remain steadfast in this commitment.

    Should you choose to criticize me for encouraging our faculty to engage in research that extends beyond the confines of academia—research that leads to tangible outputs like patents, lab-to-market initiatives, and the ability to inspire society by making our work accessible and understandable to the general public—I accept such criticism as part of my chosen path.

    I maintain that publishing accessible discussions on the impact of large-scale, tax-driven investments in innovation is essential.

    Your concerns about our journal are noted, but if you are representing Columbia and prefer not to publish for the public good, that is your prerogative.

    Indeed, not all my work appears in journals like Science, but my emphasis is on ensuring accessibility. Without such access, one might incur a fee to access my papers, potentially to criticize them. Typically, feedback is directed to editors as part of the critique process.

    I am a proponent of public access to innovative ideas. It’s regrettable if the intent of this discourse is being diverted. I did welcome the governor’s decision to award state employees in Nevada a raise, which, given our public institution status, includes the publication of our salaries.

    The salaries of Deans at Columbia are not something I’m familiar with.

    My publications cover a broad range of supply chain-related topics, and I believe it’s vital to contribute to journals of all levels. I cannot expect faculty to publish if I do not lead by example. I hope you’ll consider looking at some of my other works in various journals and book chapters currently under review.

    Best wishes,

    Erick Jones.

    Reply ↓

    • Erick:

      Just to reiterate:

      You write that your study “presents a new idea supported by what is considered novel findings.” I do not think the study presents any new ideas, nor do I think it has any novel findings.

      You write, “Should you choose to criticize me for encouraging our faculty to engage in research that extends beyond the confines of academia—research that leads to tangible outputs like patents, lab-to-market initiatives, and the ability to inspire society by making our work accessible and understandable to the general public . . .” Don’t worry. I’m not criticizing you for encouraging your faculty in any way. I’m criticizing some really really bad papers that you published.

      You write, “I maintain that publishing accessible discussions on the impact of large-scale, tax-driven investments in innovation is essential.” I do not think that your papers that were being flagged here fit this description at all.

      You write, “my emphasis is on ensuring accessibility.” My criticism of those papers is not on grounds of accessibility. My criticism is that I think the papers are really really bad.

      You write, “if you are representing Columbia and prefer not to publish for the public good, that is your prerogative.” That would indeed be my prerogative, but I do publish for the public good. I prefer to publish for the public good and I do so, to the best of my abilities. I also teach, and if anyone were to hand in a term paper like the ones discussed above in your journal, I think I’d give a grade of 0. I don’t know for sure, as nobody has ever submitted anything close to that low quality.

      You write, “I cannot expect faculty to publish if I do not lead by example.” I think that by publishing such bad work, you are not leading by example. I think these papers are a bad example for the school of engineering at UNR and send a terrible message to the students who are paying tuition and working so hard in your classes. It makes me very sad. I understand that you are in a difficult position, but I implore you to think of the students and faculty at your institution and consider what message is being sent by the dean of the school publishing these papers. It’s never too late to step back, take a deep breath, and reconsider.

      Reply ↓

    • Dr. Jones,
      Many of the papers published in the journal are not just bad, but are blatant plagiarism:
      Even the example that started this post lacks inline citation, which is both a documented requirement of the journal and a form of plagiarism.

      For an even more extreme example of plagiarisms see this: https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/178/176

      Although you wrote the editor’s note, I question whether you actually read the paper. I encourage you to do so now (simply click the link and read). Better yet, do so out loud to your spouse who is the senior author. Tape record yourself doing it, and then play it for your faculty, staff and students.

      OK, that is cruel. On a more serious note: Undoubtedly, UNR will initiate a formal investigation that will ultimately identify and take steps to mitigate the obvious Professional and Academic Misconduct. This will likely be a time consuming and protracted process that has the potential to snowball into a litigious and acrimonious affair that will have a negative impact on University’s reputation and student/faculty morale. For the sake of everyone involved I sincerely ask you to please proactively take the necessary steps to formally retract any and all of these fraudulent papers, notify the editorial board of the ISCT Journal and take steps to shut the entire endeavor immediately. Please also contact the Research Offices at UNR, fort Valley State and UT Arlington and alert them to any potential violations of the Federal False Claims Act. I also encourage you to open an honest and frank conversation with your son who is in the run-up to tenure at UTA and whose seemingly promising career is gravely threatened by your and your spouse’s academic misconduct. Finally, I encourage you and your spouse to resign from the University immediately. For what it is worth, we are all human, and it is in our nature to screw up. Admitting our wrong-doing and taking proactive steps to mitigate the resultant damage is noble and any subsequent fallout/suffering can be redemptive. Doing the right thing is always better than the alternative.
      Please.
      P.S. Thank you for bringing “Torment Executioner” into the lexicon.

      Reply ↓

      • The opinion of a bad paper and comments has been sent back to journal for re-review. I can see the points and when the journal editors ask the team to address them for possible re-review, as one of the authors we will. In all fairness they may retract the paper, I hope not and we get a chance to address the concerns and have a better paper, but that’s for them to decide.

        The anonymous commenter who continues to make weird and nasty unfounded personal statements this is not appreciated.

        The personal attack on the authors on the papers who contributed to papers through their hard work it’s truly unfounded whether they are related to me or not. The external review process was upheld. I will make sure all comments will be sent to editors and reviewers.

        Obviously, Ii will meet with them ask them about the current quality of reviews, the use of citation software, and requesting of higher quality for the process of the journal.

        Thanks for the discord

        Reply ↓

      • Erick:
        We can all read the papers. Trying to play the victim here is not a good look. It’s not just the lack of any quality, editing, or review process, it’s the duplicates and plagiarism documented above and again here.

        Most of the intro is copy-and-pasted from https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/pdfs/older.pdf

        VOL. 4 NO. 05 (2018): MAY 2018 :
        Investigating Walk Pressure Pattern Monitoring on Supply Chain Product-Related Injuries
        https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/135/133

        Vol. 1 No. 01 (2015): October 2015
        Investigating Walk Pressure Pattern Monitoring on Supply Chain Product-Related Injuries
        https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/115/113

        Do your institution, your faculty, and the academic field a favor: retract these all and resign.

        Reply ↓

  31. Erick and Felicia have fleeced the NSF for hundreds of thousands of dollars for grants that generated garbage that went into their journal. Just use the award search. Erick has raised well over a million dollars alone. Now, many of these grants were for conferences and providing opportunities for those in underserved opportunities. Those are fine. But the bullshit covid money grab and the rfid in space nonsense that have no accessible models, data, etc. in the publication sections of these grants is enraging. Felicia has the nerve to do this again for nearly $300k in an ongoing grant about sleep and AI. I’m sure the author of this (https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/192/190) [already commented] is not capable of spending that $300k in any beneficial way to society, and the funding should be retracted immediately. Although I suspect that when UNR fires these two clowns that this retraction of funds will be pretty straightforward.

    Reply ↓

  33. anonymous is correct. well said.
    Better yet, do so out loud to your spouse who is the senior author. Tape record yourself doing it, and then play it for your faculty, staff and students.

    OK, that is cruel. On a more serious note: Undoubtedly, UNR will initiate a formal investigation that will ultimately identify and take steps to mitigate the obvious Professional and Academic Misconduct. This will likely be a time consuming and protracted process that has the potential to snowball into a litigious and acrimonious affair that will have a negative impact on University’s reputation and student/faculty morale. For the sake of everyone involved I sincerely ask you to please proactively take the necessary steps to formally retract any and all of these fraudulent papers, notify the editorial board of the ISCT Journal and take steps to shut the entire endeavor immediately. Please also contact the Research Offices at UNR, fort Valley State and UT Arlington and alert them to any potential violations of the Federal False Claims Act. I also encourage you to open an honest and frank conversation with your son who is in the run-up to tenure at UTA and whose seemingly promising career is gravely threatened by your and your spouse’s academic misconduct. Finally, I encourage you and your spouse to resign from the University immediately.

    Reply ↓

  34. As a faculty at the College of Engineering at UNR, my students and I are trying our best to provide high-quality research results to the academic field, although they may not be excellent enough to be accepted by some top journals. Dean Jones’ behavior and publication records really surprised me. I don’t know how to let my students believe what we insist is worthful.
    PS: I have to be anonymous because I believe I need to protect myself!

    Reply ↓

    • The college of Engineering at UNR has had its issues, but by and large, the faculty and students of the UNR College of Engineering are world class, internationally respected and true treasures for the State of Nevada. Keep up the good work and know that you are appreciated, respected and valued.

      Reply ↓

        • I’ll call that bet. I’m a grad student in CoEn in UNR, and nominally college personnel as a research assistant. With the usual disclaimer that this opinion is my own and not that of my employer (obviously): Dean Jones must resign. His publishing record makes me concerned for the reputation of my school, and the brazen, sustained conflict of interest that it represents makes me skeptical of his efficacy as an administrator. Anonymous is right in that we are, by and large, good and hard-working people. I am saddened that I find myself yet again having to insist upon that fact in spite of repeated administrative failures.

          The papers are there for anyone to read. Dr. Jones doesn’t deny putting his name on them, nor collecting the fees for their publication. In the end, I don’t think I want to be affiliated anyone from whom I would require “protection” for my objections in view of those facts. And I am confident that I shall in fact require none, if UNR as an institution has the integrity we ought to expect.

          https://www.change.org/p/resign-dean-jones

  35. It is getting difficult to parse out the myriad issues that have been raised. There are some disturbing overlaps with the Gino and Gay affairs – for example (just one) the plagiarism issues with Claudine Gay. While there is truth to those concerns, I don’t believe those were the real reasons why Gay was a target, nor do I find those the most disturbing aspects of this case. Jones’ responses here have some similarity to Gino’s defenses – not quite directly responding to the issues but circling around them.

    Unfortunately, one common issue – and one I will admit some personal responsibility for – is the personal nature of the criticism. It is hard to separate raising concerns about the quality and value of research without it becoming personal attacks. I won’t speak for anybody else here – I think most people don’t feel they were attacking Jones personally – but I will admit to my own difficulty steering clear of that.

    I do think the absence of meaningful content, the numerous errors (including plagiarism), and preponderance of articles authored by a small group of related people (which is at odds with a purported outlet for student research, which itself is at odds with the stated mission for the journal), and the responsibility of the UNR administration are all legitimate issues. I can share many of Jones’ stated goals for accessible applied research, but I share Andrew’s views that making examples of bad research and applications devoid of content does not further such goals. I am appalled by many of the examples I’ve seen, and by a system that appears to reward this work. How to express this without it becoming personal I have more difficulty with. I feel that I have stepped over that line at times, at least in tone if not in substance.

    As a general matter, some of these issues concern me greatly. I have rarely been employed at tier1 universities and I appreciate that there should be different levels of rigor for academic research. I find applied research more satisfying and more valuable than theoretical work (my own preference). But I’ve seen too many examples where “applied’ takes on the meaning of “mentioning something in the real world” without actually applying anything or contributing to how research may be applied to a real problem. For example, stating that hospital supply chains should consider multiple objectives and systems is not applied research – unless it either shows how such application can be achieved or enhanced. Merely stating it should be done is not applied research. Providing “case studies” that simply assert a hypothetical application, without any details of how it was accomplished or hurdles faced in such application, does not enhance this goal. I do think it is important to highlight these things – that is part of our roles as researchers and instructors. When these examples become common (not just isolated cases), then it becomes more paramount to do so.

    I hope that the prior paragraph comes closer to separating the real issues from the personal attacks that some may have perceived in my other comments. The issues of salary and position do bother me, in light of my other concerns. But other than mentioning them, perhaps no more should be said.

    Reply ↓

    • The only reason this exists is to pad resume/cvs with more publications. People aren’t going to be reading these papers and making some kind of life/business decision based on them any more than some blog comment.

      Since no one should be using number of publications as a metric anyway, I don’t really see how it is harming anyone. Whatever harm there is was already done by whoever chose to start counting such things.

      In fact we would be better if everyone had one of these journals so citation counters would be forced to actually assess the merit of the research (replicability, precise predictions, etc).

      Reply ↓

    • Dale:

      I don’t see much similarity between the issues discussed in this post and the cases of Gino and Gay.

      Gino and Gay wrote interesting papers that were published in top journals. After careful examination, people found issues with these papers. It is not a mystery how these papers were accepted by journals and taken seriously by hiring committees: these were serious academic papers, or appeared to be. (There’s another concern here, which is linking Gino and Gay, so let me just emphasize that the concerns raised regarding Gino’s papers were much bigger than the concerns raised regarding Gay’s papers; my point here is that from the outside their papers looked just fine: they were coherent explorations of real topics, including theory, data analysis, etc.)

      In contrast, the papers by Jones and his collaborators discussed above are completely empty, and this immediately apparent. The papers are disjointed, feature mislabeled images taken off the internet, citations that are not mentioned in the text, entire articles that don’t address topics in the titles of the papers, etc. It’s just an entirely different universe.

      And this is not a UNR vs. Harvard thing. Go to the webpage of UNR faculty and you’ll see that they have normal research papers. The Jones papers are not normal at all. As you say in your comment, despite their applied-sounding titles, they are not applied either. They’re more like really bad high school science project reports, where the student is given some topic and is required to write at least a page on the topic with at least 5 references, and then the student just throws in some vaguely relevant words and images, does a quick google to get the references, and calls it a day.

      I agree that this should not be personal toward Jones, whose behavior in publishing this stuff is inexplicable to me; it’s certainly not doing anything to help anyone learn about supply chain management or whatever.

      Reply ↓

      • I should add that I can see a possible good reason for UNR to have hired Jones, which is if he is an excellent administrator and dean. In that case, it is not important for him to do research, and the fact that he publishes really bad journal articles could be seen as an irrelevance, in the same way that Columbia wouldn’t care if I were to write a really bad play.

        I’m doubtful of this possible reason, partly because a key part of a dean’s job is communication, and the papers in question are very poorly written and are also terrible examples of communication in the sense that the content, or lack of content, in the papers does not match what is claimed in the titles, and partly because Jones in his comment above appeared to say that those journal articles are “encouraging our faculty to engage in research that extends beyond the confines of academia”—but the articles in question have no research content, nor do they have any implications extending beyond (or, for that matter, within) the confines of academia. Indeed, for him to make that claim seems to me to be a kind of insult to all the UNR engineering faculty members who work hard, do actual applied research and communication, and so forth. To have a dean who demonstrates poor communication skills and who seems to be misunderstanding his faculty’s research, that doesn’t seem good. So it baffles me why UNR hired him in the first place. But I don’t have the whole story; I’m just giving one perspective here.

        Reply ↓

        • Andrew,
          Please keep in mind that these are not just “really bad journal articles”… they are ALSO textbook examples of plagiarism. This is a very important distinction. As such, I see you analogy to bad play writing at Columbia as a little off base. More apropos, would be if you took someone else’s play (which might be good) without their knowledge, word-swapped to convert it to nonsense, claimed it as your own and then used it to advance your career, in the process potentially defrauding the Fed Gov. in Columbia’s name (or UT Arlington/Fort Valley State U). In such a case, I think Columbia et al. would most certainly care.

          Keep in mind that every legitimate paper out there lies on a spectrum from bad to good. Yes, these papers taken at face value would lie beyond awful on the spectrum, but the key is that they are NOT legitimate.

        • > the papers in question are very poorly written

          Looking at the original response comment from Jones here, and then the cleaned up version, I think Jones is capable of writing sufficiently well-enough to communicate in writing as a administrator may need to do.

  36. I’m now wondering who did what because there are two Erick C. Joneses: Erick C. Jones Sr., who was at University of Texas-Arlington and is now dean at University of Nevada-Reno; and Erick C. Jones Jr., who is currently an assistant professor of Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering at UT-Arlington. The email address on the sleep train fly paper currently is the one listed for Jr., but the affiliation footnote of course says University of Nevada. Currently, Jr. is the one listed on the Editorial Board of ISCTJ, and the Editor-in-Chief of the ISCTJ a visiting scientist at UT-Arlington. But Sr. is the one listed as the director and president of PWD Group, which publishes ISCTJ.

    Reply ↓

    • The search committeeS (there were multiple involved as the spouse was “given” a job at UNR too) did their job, admin ignored/looked the other way from the MANY red flags, warnings provided by faculty across several departments. This is absolutely a failure of UNR admin and process. It will come out in the wash once this goes through proper due process if that’s what Dr. Jones and Dr. Jefferson want. The real problem is that these folks are continuing their corruption by “recruiting” UNR students to this “game” they playing

      Reply ↓

  38. Prior to Jones’ hiring, the engineering college was a top performer on the campus by a number of measures.

    Jones was hired by the provost, not the faculty committees.

    Since Jones was hired, engineering has been hemorrhaging faculty members leaving for other institutions, including several NSF CAREER awardees.

    Since Jones was hired, the entire college-level staff has turned over.

    The provost (formerly the dean of the college of science) could not have enabled a more effective takedown of the engineering college than this hire.

    The faculty senate is nowhere to be found.

    Tips of icebergs and all that.

    Reply ↓

    • The search was bad They did not even provide a CV initially. They told the faculty to google him. It was probably a clever scheme for search engine optimization and to hide this embarrassment.

      Reply ↓

    • On September 7, 2021, the then-Dean Maragakis sent out a dear-colleague letter. The letter states,

      “I am writing to inform you that I will be stepping down from my role as Dean of the College of Engineering effective June 30, 2022. I was named Interim Dean in June 2008, and I accepted the position on a permanent basis in March 2009.” and

      “I have discussed my decision to step down as Dean with our University’s Central Administration. A national search headed by an independent firm will identify the best candidate for the position. I have great hope that my successor will take the College of Engineering to the next level.”

      UNR President Brian E. Sandoval, who lacks a background in education but previously served as a judge, attorney general, and two-time governor, then hired Erick C. Jones as the Dean of Engineering. https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2022/engineering-dean

      Reply ↓

    • According to my contact on campus, the original search process for the Dean of Engineering ended without success — no offer was made to the best candidate. The Dean of Education, who was chair of the search committee, then provided Dr. Jones’ name to the Provost, though the rest of the committee didn’t want to interview him. Thus the search committee (except for its chair) was not involved in selecting Dr. Jones for the position, as the above commenter has stated.

      Reply ↓

  39. I won’t comment on the quality of any of the published articles. Instead, I will present a few facts:

    1. As of the Feb 2024 issue, ISCTJ has published 300 papers, of which Erick Jones authors 148 of the articles. His wife authors 47 of the articles (on many, but not all, they are co-authors). Erick Jones, Jr. also authors and co-authors many of the papers. Sure would be nice to pad a CV with 148 peer-reviewed journal articles.

    2. Of his 148 papers, there are only 88 unique papers because 22 of them appear in more than one issue. 15 papers appear in two issues. Three papers appear in three issues. Two appear in four issues. And two papers each appear in six different issues. Publishing the same paper in different journals is bad. Publishing the same paper in the same journal is really bad. Publishing the same paper SIX TIMES in the same journal is….

    Reply ↓

      • In case it gets removed from the web, let’s preserve the contents of that paper in perpetuity right here.

        The title is “White-tailed Deer and Eco-friendly Supply Chain,” and here is the text, in its entirety:

        Both humans and deer have the potential to contract the intracellular bacterium that is transmitted by the bite of the Amblyomma americanum tick. This tick is a vector for the illnesses Ehrlichia chaffeensis and Ehrlichosis ewingii. They are intracellular bacteria that are gram-negative and can be discovered as individuals or clusters in the cytoplasm of an infected host cell. These bacteria live in membrane-lined vacuoles within the infected host cell.
        The effect of deer reduction on blacklegged tick has been done on various areas, and the results illustrated that the number of adults, nymphs, and larvae ticks all decreased as a result of the absence of deer. With community-wide prevention methods being appealing, the deer reduction is, to the best of our knowledge, the only other stated measure that acts at a community level and treats deer topically. The procedure for keeping the zoo’s eco-friendly supply chain maintained could stand to benefit from the facts presented in this article.

        There is also a photo of a deer, captioned “Figure. White-tailed Deer,” and three references, none of which are cited in the text.

        The paper is great. It tells a whole story in just two paragraphs! And I love how the authors introduce a zoo in the last sentence that had not been mentioned earlier. Chekov could learn a thing or two from these writers.

        Reply ↓

        • Another two paragraph 2022 paper from the same authors as above: Rheygan Reed & Felicia Jefferson Both currently employed by UNR Biochemistry & Molecular Biology.
          Title: “The Significance of Supply Chain Research”
          Complete text: The success of parasitic nematodes comes at a cost to humans, including a negative impact on human health, as well as a negative impact on plant and livestock productivity in the form of costly invoices from parasite control businesses. Anthelmintic medications are necessary for the management of animal nematodes that are parasitic. Certain species of the nematode that can infect livestock tend to only parasitize a single host, and they are only occasionally discovered in different hosts. White-tailed deer directly affect many aspects of our lives, particularly hunters, farmers, foresters, motorists, gardeners, and homeowners are all impacted by deer abundance levels. This could be through car deer collisions, crop damage, loss of desirable landscaping, disease transmission, or over-browsed woodlands. The intake of deer meat by humans has been linked in some cases to the transmission of Mycobacterium bovis and another significant zoonotic disease. Deer serves as reservoir hosts for both of these pathogens. Hepatitis E, which is formed from genotypes of the hepatitis E virus (HEV), and it is increasing in red deer, but the prevalence of it in white-tailed deer is unknown. Hepatitis E can be transmitted to humans by the consumption of deer meat. White-tailed deer conservationists could improve their supply-chain management tactics by utilizing this data.

          The rest the page is a picture or a Reindeer captioned as: “White tail deer”
          3 references follow.
          Link to paper was still active today: https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/256/255

          Hope their Biochemistry & Molecular Biology department also scrutinize the scholarship quality of this Faculty.

  41. I’m a researcher (not in engineering) at UNR and I want to first assure folks that some of us here are in fact doing good work. But also this isn’t surprising. It really does seem like in this rush to become R1, or at least appear to be R1, the university is just hiring total hucksters. Not necessarily as faculty or researchers, since those people still have to pass muster with the departments that are going to talk to them every day, but definitely in these quasi-administrative positions. It’s pretty depressing to have a department head who doesn’t know what real research looks like.

    Reply ↓

    • If true, then this is good. Very good. Dr. Jones, if you are initiating the deletions, good for you. The longer these papers are online, the greater the chance they get vacuumed into the training sets of one or more LLMs.

      Reply ↓

  43. As some of the papers that earlier commenters flagged as low quality have been deleted from the journal’s portal, I had to find the record of these articles elsewhere. Here is one of them. As other commenters, it is hard to believe that this piece needed to be written by five authors, including both Jones and Jeferson, and that it passed a formal review process.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20231020025715/https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/download/286/281

    Reply ↓

  44. I got curious about where the fruit fly picture was from. The author was conscientious enough to use a freely available photo. The source seems to be:

    https://pixabay.com/de/photos/fruchtfliege-fliege-insekt-tier-6831034/

    So in his defence, he does have some ethical boundaries he will not cross. However, the caption on the figure does say that that fly was the exact one used for the “study”, which is impossible. Given that the title of the paper is not even grammatical, maybe the Dean has difficulty with English and didn’t understand what it means to write “Picture of the [fruit fly] that was used to study sleep”? If this was not the fruit fly that was investigated in the study, does the paper need to be retracted for using a fake image?

    Reply ↓

  45. Interesting side note: I looked at his supply chain paper in his own journal. On the main page of the journal, he lists himself and someone else as co-author:

    Supply Chain Strategies in Virtually Distributed Supply Chain Project Teams During and Post-COVID-19
    Article Sidebar
    International Supply Chain Technology Journal
    Published: Sep 21, 2022
    Keywords:
    Organizational change Supply Chain Management Project management Virtual teams Collaboration Tools Supply Chain Uncertainity COVID-19 Post-COVID-19
    Main Article Content
    Erick Jones
    Goldston, J.L

    But if you click on the pdf, it’s only Goldston, J.L. as sole author. Goldston’s affiliation is academiaworldwide.com, which seems to be a service (presumably in exchange for money) for writing your cover letter, cv, etc. Very odd.

    Reply ↓

    • My problem with everyone piling on to critique this obvious BS is no one cares about stuff like this that actually matters:
      https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/12/19/covid-roughly-twice-as-deadly-in-poorer-countries

      I don’t mean to pick on it, but also don’t get why no one cares to correct the obvious problems with that paper. Like where is the cutoff to make a bunch of people post stuff?

      Shouldn’t you care more about correcting those issues rather than talking about this obvious scam that anyone would ignore once they read any of it?

      Reply ↓

      • Interesting and really surprising that the author did not even respond to you on the blog. Also odd is the fast publication timeline for that article:

        Received January 9, 2022
        Accepted May 5, 2022

        My articles take 1-2 years usually to go from received to published. Never faster than a year I think.

        Reply ↓

        • Interesting and really surprising that the author did not even respond to you on the blog. Also odd is the fast publication timeline for that article:

          Received January 9, 2022
          Accepted May 5, 2022

          My articles take 1-2 years usually to go from received to published. Never faster than a year I think.

          That’s astonishing. I work in a molecular biology/biomed field and our papers generally take between 3 and 6 months from submission to acceptance (and on line publishing normally follows v soon after acceptance – usually within two weeks). Why do papers in your field take so long? I would find that quite dispiriting.

          The timeline is normally (1) submit; (2) receive two-three reviews within 6 weeks; (3) resbmit within another 8 weeks (usually; sometimes longer); (3) paper normally accepted. So 14-16 weeks altogether, tho a little longer if the reviewers are slow; that your revisions take a little longer; you need another round of review and resubmission (v. rare).

          IMO no one has to respond to stuff random people assert on blogs. One learns, for example, that interacting with some particular bloggers is ultimately pointless. Anyway, I expect the authors of that paper will be reassessing some of their analyses in the light of post-pub critique.

        • Hi Chris,

          I would have thought that a criticism of a paper posted on Gelman’s blog is not just a random critique on a blog, and deserves a response, perhaps a debunking by the person who posted it on Gelman’s blog (at the very least). Don’t know if the poster of the critique is a known troll; maybe if that’s the case I can see why nobody replied.

          Psycholinguistics / linguistics is a joke when it comes to reviewing timelines. One source of delay is the slow review process, but another source is that often reviewers want extensive revisions, including even new studies, which can take another year to complete. Then the second round of reviews is also time consuming. Then publishers like Elsevier sit on the proof-preparation for quite some time, I think they outsource to India, judging from the correspondence we get re the proofs. Until recently, the quality of the typesetting was so low that they would introduce up to 500 errors in a paper after they prepare the proof (I am talking about the Journal of Memory and Language in particular). But in their defence, they have cleaned up their act quite a bit in recent years.

          My first paper, in the journal Language, was submitted in 2002 and was published in 2006. I was pre-tenure then and it was super costly for me to wait this long, professionally. Another paper was submitted in 2006 or so in Language and Cognitive Processes and appeared there in 2011. One paper in Wiley’s journal Cognitive Science was not even sent out to review for nine months, so it took forever to get accepted. The action editor was some senior prof in Edinburgh who was probably playing candy crush all day, too busy to follow up; that editor never even replied to our concerns about the paper not being sent out for review for nine months, the chief editor had to take over the whole thing. More recently, one of my postdocs submitted a paper to MIT’s Open Mind, and after two rounds of reviews, the editor suddenly rejected the paper. That was an extremely costly process of revision; we assumed that the fact that we were in the second round that once we address the concerns the paper would be published. It was very damaging for my postdoc. I thought about complaining to the editor in chief, whom I know, but I didn’t want to whine about a rejection.

          Yes, it’s dispiriting but also very damaging for young people.

        • Go to paper, follow any of the citations I happened to follow, and the claimed info won’t be there.

          Amazing that people can discover pretzel logic to come up with reasons not to address this.

          And the ultimate point is nobody is actually reading each others papers, its a good old boys club of people patting each other on the back. Then when people actually turn to them for help, they fail to produce anything useful and resort to excusrs like “its complicated” or just claim they did a great job because they said so as people are dying everywhere.

    • Unr:

      I followed the link and it said, “College of Engineering Dean Erick Jones has been named to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for STEM Education Advisory Committee.”

      That’s scary that they have an education committee featuring someone who runs a journal that is regularly publishing student work that’s incoherent, apparently plagiarized, or worse.

      Given what I’ve seen from Jones’s journal, I’d think that education would be the very last thing you’d want him involved in! OK, I guess we’d also want him to be kept far away from anything relating to supply-chain management.

      I can only imagine how frustrating it would be for a student at UNR, working hard and getting a B on some paper that represents weeks of learning and effort, to know that there tuition dollars are going to pay the salary of someone who writes and publishes articles that are so stunningly bad. And how frustrating it would be for UNR engineering faculty, fighting over budgets, class sizes, etc., having to report to someone whose idea of education seems to have something to do with “torment executioners” (search above comment thread for where that phrase came from).

      Reply ↓

  49. The current model at UNR is scary for the future of the University. The President has no academic background and is totally ignorant of any academic standards or procedures. Despite his weakness and ignorance in this very important aspect for a University President’s job, he has hired a weak Provost and as a consequence very weak deans.

    The hiring of Eric Jones is the result of the lack of any consideration for academic rigor or performance standards in this University. Search committee recommendations are ignored, faculty recommendations are ignored and these committees waste everyone’s time and serve as a leverage to hire people who are weak and will simply go along, without challenging, the central administration. This was the case with the Provost’s hiring, with promotion of several administrators in positions that are totally unnecessary and with placement in key positions of incompetent not qualified people ( most recent example the Director of University Advancement).

    In the case of Eric Jones the committee DID NOT recommend him. The President and the Provost ( who is a mediocre academic and always follows what the President wants) took the recommendation of the Dean of the College of Education who chaired the search committee. This Dean is another example of a mediocre academic who just follows self-serving practices!

    I am a faculty in the University and I want to ask for the obvious: if the Dean of Engineering does not have the decency to quit please remove him immediately. This will not address the problems I mentioned above, but it will at least show some minimum respect for fundamental and obvious standards of academic quality, integrity and ethics.

    Reply ↓

      • UNR was run by academics for long time. It was a great administration that was never in faculty and staff gossip. That President announced his retirement and the then provost applied for the job. However, the board of regents stacked the finalists so the former (and very popular 85% approval) Nevada Governor could become the president. Nothing wrong so far.

        As someone pointed out, it was the presidents job to pick a strong academic as provost. Unfortunately, this was mistake #1. He picked the then Dean of Sciences. As soon as he was picked, 6 other Deans left their positions. Tells you how they saw working with the new provost. So the new provost had to hire deans. 6 of them. He hired weak deans (Mistake #2). Including an untenured assistant professor as the Dean of school of nursing. Why weak deans? Because he paid them very well and so they will be loyal and do what he wants and not question him. Is this true academia? NO.

        The hiring of Jones has been documented earlier so I will skip that. Faculty and search cmte were not in favor of this. But the Provost is a boneheaded guy. How can i say that? (a) he has created several vice provosts positions now and hired without any search, (b) he hires whom he wants without a fair search process – he thinks he is invincible and operating guidelines do not apply to him.

        As a further example of this corruption and nepotism at the highest level – he recently hired his own former student into the department of physics. Our department had no say in this. There was no search. Department was told to take him or not get anything. He was hired as a Tenured Associate Professor at the highest salary of any associate professor. Why is that bad – because this person has never taught a course in their life. So how can you bring them with tenure. The salary is also well outside the norm. For comparison- he is the highest paid associate and also higher than most full professors. He makes 45% more than chair of the department and 50% more than other associate professors. Imagine the morale of the faculty. The provost hires whom he wants without any fair chance for others.

        So the mistake all comes back to an ignorant president hiring an inept provost.

        Will the board of regents look at these nepotism and corruption issues? NO… then you wonder why Nevada remains 49 of the 50 states in education.

        If I were to bet nothing will happen of this anytime soon.

        Reply ↓

  50. Andrew writes: “So it baffles me why UNR hired him in the first place.”

    Are you trolling us? Are you really that naive? Can you not use Google image search?

    UNR faculty anonymous writes: “The President and the Provost ( who is a mediocre academic and always follows what the President wants) took the recommendation of the Dean of the College of Education [Donald Easton-Brooks, Ph.D.] who chaired the search committee.”

    Any guesses as to what Google image search tells us about Dean Easton-Brooks?

    Since 2020, and really for the 50 years before that, the people who run universities have been under pressure to do X. And they often really want to do X. Given that fact, you shouldn’t ignore X when trying to figure out why they do what they do. It really isn’t a big mystery!

    Reply ↓

    • Anon:

      I’m not trolling you. I don’t troll. I think you’re suggesting that UNR hired this person because of his ethnicity. My concern with the hiring has nothing to do with his ethnicity; it’s about the incredibly bad papers he published under his name, and with the practices of the journal he edited. Universities hire and promote white people who demonstrate all sorts of incompetence too. It’s possible that those people were hired because they were white or because they were in the same social networks as various powerful white people. I guess there are lots of reasons for organizations to hire people who can’t do the job. I’m not saying it’s always easy to find a good job candidate, but that’s the job of the president and the provost. I don’t want them hiring a well-connected but incompetent candidate of any ethnicity.

      Reply ↓

      • > I think you’re suggesting that UNR hired this person because of his ethnicity.

        Yes, although perhaps someone at UNR can provide more info.

        > It’s possible that those people were hired because they were white

        Really? Do you personally know of anyone in US higher ed who would hire a white candidate over similarly qualified non-white candidate? I doubt. Such people are no longer at Columbia, to the extent they ever were. But, on the other hand, you surely no dozens of people at Columbia who would hire a black candidate over similarly qualified non-black candidate. And that is OK. That is what affirmative action means.

        > Universities hire and promote white people who demonstrate all sorts of incompetence too.

        Do they? Then let’s find a specific example. Point us toward a Dean at an R1 university who has a publication record like Jones. This isn’t to say that you can’t find Deans that are incompetent/sleazy/p-hacky/sinful in various ways. You can! But this absolute nonsense, this utter gibberish, is almost always a sign of race preferences run amok.

        I am making a very specific claim: If Jones were not black, he would never have been hired by UNR. Would you disagree with that claim?

        Reply ↓

        • >Do they? Then let’s find a specific example. Point us toward a Dean at an R1 university who has a publication record like Jones.

          Are you seriously pushing this? Can you find another provost at other R1 universities whose scholarly achievements are as lacking as those of UNR Provost Jeff Thompson? (Let’s exclude UNLV, as both UNR and UNLV are NSHE’s institutions.)

      • Attempting to attribute the root cause to ethnicity is a diversionary tactic to shift focus.
        If you carefully examine the ethical behavior of UNR President during his tenure as a federal judge and state governor, you’ll see that ‘birds of a feather flock together’.

        Reply ↓

        • > Attempting to attribute the root cause to ethnicity is a diversionary tactic to shift focus.

          Nah. I doubt it’s a diversionary tactic. Methinks Afor has a clear agenda and is actively pursuing that agenda.

        • Joshua on February 10, 2024 9:19 AM at 9:19 am said:
          UF anonymous

          Can you just briefly describe how the situation at UNR reached its current state? What were the first elements that led down that path?

          Reply ↓
          UNR ignorant on February 10, 2024 5:41 PM at 5:41 pm said:
          UNR was run by academics for long time. It was a great administration that was never in faculty and staff gossip. That President announced his retirement and the then provost applied for the job. However, the board of regents stacked the finalists so the former (and very popular 85% approval) Nevada Governor could become the president. Nothing wrong so far.

          As someone pointed out, it was the presidents job to pick a strong academic as provost. Unfortunately, this was mistake #1. He picked the then Dean of Sciences. As soon as he was picked, 6 other Deans left their positions. Tells you how they saw working with the new provost. So the new provost had to hire deans. 6 of them. He hired weak deans (Mistake #2). Including an untenured assistant professor as the Dean of school of nursing. Why weak deans? Because he paid them very well and so they will be loyal and do what he wants and not question him. Is this true academia? NO.

          The hiring of Jones has been documented earlier so I will skip that. Faculty and search cmte were not in favor of this. But the Provost is a boneheaded guy. How can i say that? (a) he has created several vice provosts positions now and hired without any search, (b) he hires whom he wants without a fair search process – he thinks he is invincible and operating guidelines do not apply to him.

          As a further example of this corruption and nepotism at the highest level – he recently hired his own former student into the department of physics. Our department had no say in this. There was no search. Department was told to take him or not get anything. He was hired as a Tenured Associate Professor at the highest salary of any associate professor. Why is that bad – because this person has never taught a course in their life. So how can you bring them with tenure. The salary is also well outside the norm. For comparison- he is the highest paid associate and also higher than most full professors. He makes 45% more than chair of the department and 50% more than other associate professors. Imagine the morale of the faculty. The provost hires whom he wants without any fair chance for others.

          So the mistake all comes back to an ignorant president hiring an inept provost.

          Will the board of regents look at these nepotism and corruption issues? NO… then you wonder why Nevada remains 49 of the 50 states in education.

          If I were to bet nothing will happen of this anytime soon.

  51. Jones’ publication record, full of very questionable practices and “articles” of the lowest possible quality, has brought up several issues related to the hiring practices of this President at UNR. Let’s mention a few:

    The hiring of the Provost was a clear indication of what this President wants: people with no quality so that he will not be challenged or overshadowed. Is this a Provost for an R1 University? He was a mediocre underperforming Dean and has a pitiful academic record.

    Jones hiring was, perhaps, an attempt by the President to show his”commitment” to diversity. An issue that he addresses superficially not because he truly believes in it, but just because it is politically correct to do so. The result was a hire with the lowest possible academic standards.

    Continuing on, the inept Provost hired weak deans by paying non qualified candidates high salaries so that they do not challenge him. He also created new administrative positions and hired his own people without any searches. Other mediocre deans remain in place and they feel comfortable getting paid high salaries with little work in exchange for loyalty and silence.

    But also take a look at some critical non academic positions. One of the President’s personal friends/collaborators , with many accusations for sexual harassment in the past, was hired in the position of Vice President and Finance.

    The position of the Director of University Advancement has been filled by an incompetent person without any qualifications, who just happens to be loyal to the President. All of them are giving themselves credit for major gifts secured through the efforts of previous administrations.

    The list goes on and on!

    Erick Jones and his wife should be removed from their positions. There is little doubt about this. However, their compromised academic practices have brought the attention to major problems for the whole University. Disregard for fundamental well established hiring practices, favoritism, nepotism and total ignorance, neglect and disregard for academic quality. Are the Regents listening? And do they care to help this University find its way back to high standards? If so they need to act.

    Reply ↓

    • From the Retraction Watch post:

      “Jones’s son, Erick Jones Jr., who is also a prolific author in the journal and a member of the editorial board, calls the controversy “growing pains.”

      “You can criticize the science, you can say this paper is shit, but, you know, a year from now, the papers are going to get better, and, hopefully, we can actually be a legitimate journal,” he told Retraction Watch.”

      Strange comment for a journal that’s existed for 7+ years. Even stranger given that if you compare the early issues with the later issues, the quality has markedly decreased. I find the early issues to have content – not written well, not well designed research, but at least with content. I termed it as undergraduate C grade work. In the later issues the content often disappears entirely. Growing pains?

      Reply ↓

      • Dale:

        My take on this sort of thing is that, when people have had success, they keep doing what they’ve been doing before. Jones etc. have been doing just fine for many years publishing empty papers, making friends in high places . . . it’s yielded positions with the National Science Foundation, National Academies, a high-paying job at a flagship campus of a state university, so why stop now?

        Reply ↓

  53. NSF allows you to search for awards by PI, at https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearch.jsp If you do so, you’ll find a number of awards given to Jones and Jefferson. (Check the “expired” box to see the ones that have ended.) You can select each one to see what results they reported. For example, we have https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2028612&HistoricalAwards=false whose results include two papers in Jones’ journal.

    NSF has an Office of Inspector General which investigates fraud related to grants. https://oig.nsf.gov/

    Perhaps you’d be the best person to make a complaint with them?

    Reply ↓

  54. An important related question is how widespread are similar problematic actions by either Thompson and/or Sandoval? A possible defense for them is that this is an isolated incident. Of course, in all its particulars, it is. But is this accurate, or are there many similar problems? Should the vitae of all recently hired administrators be examined? The comments here regarding the physics department are on point. I don’t think this kind of problematic judgment and mismanagement is isolated to these hirings–they have attitudes and a style that will cause these to be frequent. It might be useful for others to post here about other concerns. It would be particularly useful to specify the exact ways these are wrong–do these violate the university administrative manual, federal protections such as those found in Title IX, NRS, or just reasonable judgment, or collegiality? Most of us who have been around UNR for a while know there is a long-standing pattern of these types of violations, and the Jones hire is one example. If we want better leadership soon, we need not hide any knowledge of these–but use mechanisms available to us as faculty to provide sunshine and accountability–such as the grievance procedures of the Faculty Senate, complaints to the Board of Regents, information to the NFA, or letters to our representatives, or even information given to the excellent student journalists at the Sagebrush. Nevadans deserve better.

    Reply ↓

      • I am glad to see the statement from NFA. It is a first step to address the many profound issues that come from the way the UNR President envisions appointments and conducts searches. The NFA recommends steps to improve future searches. However, we need to also address the issues related to searches and appointments in key administrative positions in the recent past.

        The search for the Dean of Engineering did not fail. The Provost made it fail. One or two of the top three candidates were not contacted, a female candidate was but no serious effort was made to attract her, the fourth candidate, a stellar internal candidate, was not contacted and then the search was declared as “failed”. Then, during the summer break, they interviewed and hired Jones who was practically imposed in the finalist list (number 7 or 8) by the Chair of the search committee, the Dean of Education.

        The search for Provost was also staged. The current Provost was hired as acting with the President declaring that he could not apply for the permanent job. We were very pleasantly surprised by his decision back then, as it appeared that he was prepared to hire a top rated Provost from a national pool. But soon after that he converted him to interim and allowed him to apply. Everyone knew what was going to happen at that time. The search committee was staged, the chair was obviously executing orders given by the President and two members from the College of Science who pushed with heroic efforts for Thompson were promoted to well -paid central administration positions.

        The problem is that even when search «procedures “ were “followed”, the searches were used as leverage to hire candidates who were predetermined.

        I recommend that the current Provost be removed and a new search be conducted to hire a Provost from a competitive national pool.

        The Engineering Dean should also be removed immediately and a new national search should be conducted.

        Reply ↓

        • “The search for Provost was also staged. The current Provost was hired as acting with the President declaring that he could not apply for the permanent job. We were very pleasantly surprised by his decision back then, as it appeared that he was prepared to hire a top rated Provost from a national pool. But soon after that he converted him to interim and allowed him to apply. Everyone knew what was going to happen at that time. The search committee was staged, the chair was obviously executing orders given by the President and two members from the College of Science who pushed with heroic efforts for Thompson were promoted to well -paid central administration positions.”

          This is an accurate reflection of how leadership turnover at the institution has been happening for some time.

          A review of the promotional histories over the years of certain c-suite members would reveal anomalies like intentionally failed searches and the search chair “graciously” volunteering to take the “interim” position themselves…for several years along with higher salaries and perks such as course releases and titles.

          All to circumvent poor relative academic performance. And to hide abusive behavior of students and staff.

          This method of failing up was well honed under multiple previous presidents’ administrations. Presidents come and go, but the core upper admin/staff culture has persisted here.

          Faculty senate has no teeth or will to do their job to protect institutional and academic integrity. Too many policy and personality compromises over the years.

    • I like the statement ” We now require an LLM statement from authors who use ChatGPT or other LLM to help them write their articles.” Because professors who do “cutting-edge” science regularly are unable to write papers without the use of ChatGPT.

      Reply ↓

    • The current editor stating, “Funding: The journal has been running at a loss since its inception. We have allowed student papers and non-tenured faculty to publish for free. In the last two years though the open access fee is listed as $199, we have generally had no fee or reduced the fee to $9.99 for faculty as appropriate. We do ask authors who have federally funded grants who are funded to pay the fees if their grant allows for publication fees…”

      Saying you only charge those with federal grants to publish in your sham journal is not something I’d advise at this point.

      There is also familiar name in the author list of this past retraction:
      https://retractionwatch.com/2018/01/10/journal-retracts-hopelessly-flawed-paper-linking-cell-phone-radiation-pain/

      Reply ↓

      • Indeed, if true this would at least appear to be a violation of the False Claims Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Claims_Act

        Speculation: it might be very tempting for the owner of a publishing company with such a policy to pay themself from their sponsor’s pocket by producing volumes of meaningless but superficially passable publications under the auspices of grants, submitting these to their own journal, and quietly pocketing the publication fees. This would be hard to detect, especially since the fee is graciously waived for everyone else.

        I… can’t actually be justified in this concern, can I? It’s such an obvious loophole that I HAVE to believe the NSF has bumpers in place against it. The simple fact that there would be obvious potential and obvious incentive for such behavior, regardless of whether it has actually occurred, should have started ringing alarm bells a long, LONG time ago. Someone PLEASE tell me I’m wrong.

        Reply ↓

        • Usually institutions have stops in place for external activities and engagements. Especially those that have a perceived conflict of interest or financial interest need to be disclosed and approved. This is to prevent (amongst other but an example) copier paper contracts from being given to a firm that is owned by the spouse of the signing authority.

  56. I can’t imagine what the Dean’s Office at the College of Engineering has been like the past few days. What I would give to be a drosophila melanogaster on the wall!

    Reply ↓

    • I think you mean a dragon fly: https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/257
      (Not by Jones, but Jefferson; same journal.)

      For those who can’t bring themselves to click: “The Dragon fly, particularly Fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, has displayed all the behavioral traits that are associated with sleep in mammals.” From the future classic, “Impact of Dragon Fly Research on Healthcare Supply Chain” . I have saved a PDF, in case I later suspect that this was all a dream. My dreams, though, make more sense.

      Reply ↓

      • Raghu:

        It’s all so hard to look away from. I saw the paper you linked the other day and got sucked back in because I study dragonflies (the aquatic insects). It’s never spelled “dragon fly”, always “dragonfly” and never, never, never used to describe a fruit fly. There is no such thing as a “dragon fly” that I know of. That’s what makes it fascinating. When I write “Stan” in a manusript, I still google to make sure it’s not supposed to be all caps or lower case…even though I’ve been using it daily for years. Not only are the taxa wrong, but they couldn’t even be bothered to take 3 seconds to make sure they spelled a word correctly. And in the title no less.

        Reply ↓

      • I really have to quit looking at this blog.

        However, regarding the linked “Dragon fly == Fruit fly” paper, the first of the two paragraphs of that paper is:

        The Dragon fly, particularly Fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, has displayed all the behavioral traits that are associated with sleep in mammals. Some of the processes and genes that describe the sleep state of Drosophila have been linked to a protein called cyclic adenosine monophosphate response element-binding protein (CAMPER). Mutants that are able to lower insulin have been demonstrated to extend the healthy lifespan of nematode worms and mice, and this effect may also be seen in the aging process in humans. Drosophila’s genetic regulation scheme relies heavily on the involvement of neuroendocrine neurons as key components.

        The first two paragraphs of “Regulation of Sleep by Insulin-like Peptide System in Drosophila melanogaster”, by Xiaona Cong, PhD,* Haili Wang, MS,* Zhenxing Liu, PhD, Chunxia He, PhD, Chunju An, PhD, and Zhangwu Zhao, PhD. doi: 10.5665/sleep.4816 follow. Highlighted text below is mirrored in the paragraph above.

        Sleep is widespread from insects to mammals. Longer waking periods lead to longer and more intense sleep periods. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster exhibits all the behavioral characteristics of mammalian sleep,3 thereby establishing Drosophila as a powerful genetic model organism to identify novel genes that modulate sleep.4

        Sleep does not appear to be controlled by a single locus or dedicated genes. Over the past decade, some genes and pathways that modulate Drosophila sleep have been identified, such as cyclic adenosine monophosphate response-element binding protein (CREB),5,6 epidermal growth factor receptor, Shaker,2 sleepless,7 the gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptor,8 EcR,9 cyclin A,10 and insomniac.11

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  57. Mr. President will you make a statement about this situation? Your choices for key positions and their actions along with your hiring practices are a topic of discussion across the nation! The reputation of your University has already received a huge blow! Your students, faculty and staff are watching in disbelief. Nothing works in your institution. Please take some action!

    Reply ↓

    • The reality is this has not received any attention beyond this blog post, two local news articles, and social media.

      No national news outlets have covered this. Not even the Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed have run a story on this.

      As far as the President is concerned this entire thing will likely blow over soon as the attention of social media shifts to the next scandal, and so there is no incentive to say anything about this.

      Reply ↓

  58. Copy from a post above, for increased visibility to people who scroll to the bottom for updates:

    Joseph Dailey on February 13, 2024 3:21 AM at 3:21 am said:

    I’ll call that bet. I’m a grad student in CoEn in UNR, and nominally college personnel as a research assistant. With the usual disclaimer that this opinion is my own and not that of my employer (obviously): Dean Jones must resign. His publishing record makes me concerned for the reputation of my school, and the brazen, sustained conflict of interest that it represents makes me skeptical of his efficacy as an administrator. Anonymous is right in that we are, by and large, good and hard-working people. I am saddened that I find myself yet again having to insist upon that fact in spite of repeated administrative failures.

    The papers are there for anyone to read. Dr. Jones doesn’t deny putting his name on them, nor collecting the fees for their publication. In the end, I don’t think I want to be affiliated anyone from whom I would require “protection” for my objections in view of those facts. And I am confident that I shall in fact require none, if UNR as an institution has the integrity we ought to expect.

    https://www.change.org/p/resign-dean-jones

    Reply ↓

    • Erick Jones: please respect your students, faculty and staff and resign.

      President Sandoval: please remove your inept Provost, change your hiring practices and hire a new Provost with a strong background and record, who can evaluate the current personnel and run the academic operations.

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  60. I am following up on comments made in this blog on February 11 and 12 related to the current climate at UNR. That of unfairness, disrespect, low standards, hypocrisy, nepotism, favoritism and intimidation that leads to demoralization of students, faculty and staff and compromises the University’s reputation and its position as the State’s flagship institution of higher education.

    The Erick Jones publication record is an obvious case of very serious research misconduct and academic fraud. A petition is circulated calling him to resign. Although the University has not issued any statement yet, which shows total disrespect for students, faculty and staff, I still believe he will either resign or be removed.

    However, as noted earlier in this blog, his case has brought focus on a much broader situation that affects the whole University: The hiring processes established by the University’s President and the rest of the Administration.
    It started with the hiring of an inept Provost following a process with a pre-decided outcome!!!! This was so obvious during the Provost’s search two years ago!
    After his placement, the Provost, who has an academic record, at best, equivalent to that of a junior associate professor, hired weak deans and placed people in senior administrative positions without any search process. Topping the list (but not the only ones) are Jill Heaton and Vince Catalano. Both pushed Thompson’s candidacy and were rewarded by placements in the Provost’s office. Both were given titles of “Senior Vice Provost”. The first was “promoted” to this position and the second was placed in a new position created just for him to reward his loyalty to the Provost! If this is not waste of resources and favoritism (perhaps corruption?) what is?
    Needless to say that the Provost is directly responsible for the hiring of Eric Jones. He neglected the search committee’s recommendations and hired a candidate recommended by the Dean of the College of Education, another subpar administrator ready to get involved in conspiracy to further his personal agenda!

    Other hires or internal placements that lack the rigor of fair search, have been brought to focus: Andrew Clinger, Mary Dugan, Michael Flores and Patricia Richard among many others. Richard has been implicated several times in the past in selecting members and manipulating decisions of search committees. She interferes in many cases by intimidating other administrators and faculty, because of her close relationship to the President. She is an unqualified administrator, way below standard and must be removed.

    Mr President: Please remove these individuals and establish rigorous and fair search practices! You are losing your best faculty and staff, you have lost your best academic leaders, you are compromising your students’ education and the reputation of your institution has suffered an unprecedented blow. It is very important for the future of our University, but also your own reputation, that you make these changes!

    Reply ↓

  61. One aspect of this bezzel-time series of posts and replies that puzzles me is how little press coverage has followed.

    This is not an issue where the station/paper/magazine’s lawyers would say, “Oh, be very cautious.” More likely they would say something like, “Use your normal caution but make sure it is not a hoax.”

    The combination of gibberish and plagiarism in many of the papers is undeniable. As is the apparent self-dealing or self-endorsing.

    But a Google search for recent news articles about Erick Jones turns up a few stories in Reno outlets and a Retraction Watch item.

    Why is there no significant coverage of this mess?

    Reply ↓

  62. I just keep coming back to this blog and being depressed. I got hired at UNR recently and felt excited. It’s not a particularly prestigious place but it is (nominally) R1 and I was given some time to work on research. It just feels like this whole place is gonna fall apart and be thought of as a joke… As most academics know, the job market is *not good,* so it’s not like I can just go somewhere else. Fingers crossed people actually do something about this insanity.

    Reply ↓

    • Anon:

      I know what you mean. As I wrote somewhere in this or the other thread, my best friend from grad school is from Reno. He didn’t go to UNR for college, but he could have. And the whole thing makes me sad.

      Then again, I’m still angry about Columbia’s thing with the U.S. News statistics, first that the data were manipulated/faked, and then, when it all came out, that the admin didn’t seem to care. So I’m not at all trying to single out UNR here.

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  63. This was a post on Sagebrush – that shows how corrupt at worst and inept at best the upper administration is.

    Henry February 20, 2024 at 7:52 pm

    The Sagebrush’s February 8, 2024 article entitled “UNR Dean of Engineering’s Questionable Research Papers Arise,” is shocking but not particularly surprising given the overall failures of this president’s administration. The president and the provost’s quotes in the February 6th article from Columbia University entitled “It’s bezzle time: The Dean of Engineering at the University of Nevada gets paid $372,127 a year and wrote a paper that’s so bad, you can’t believe it,” are especially damning and show a real lack of competent leadership on North Virginia Street. Dean Jones was a reach by the administration who could not or would not hire top candidates. In turn, the Jones was brought to the campus in the Summer of 2022 and a deal was reached without proper oversight and vetting. Although Dean Jones’ actions, if true, are reprehensible, the administration ultimately bears responsibility and should be held equally accountable.

    Jones is just another sad chapter for this administration. Given that the president was grossly unqualified to guide an institution of higher education and has approached his role much like his prior political positions – more concerned about his quasi-celebrity image and standing. In turn, he has surrounded himself with cronies rather substantive and qualified individuals, included, among the inner circle, is Andrew Clinger. An individual chased out of his role with the City of Reno for numerous sexual harassment claims that cost the city significantly to settle. Of course, the president raced into to hire him to work in his administration as Governor and, thereafter, used his influence to have the regents hire him. Now, Clinger replaces longtime controller, Vic Redding. Standard operating procedure by the administration that values loyalists rather than individuals who are qualified and of good character.

    To this end, The Sagebrush should be commended for having the editorial integrity to publish an un-sanitized and transparent look at the realities of the campus at Lake Tahoe in its November 1, 2023 article entitled “UNR at Lake Tahoe Campus See Zero Enroll During Fall ’23 Semester.” Not being able to comprehend the administration’s infatuation with Sierra Nevada University (SNU), I followed this acquisition out of morbid curiosity for a lack of better description.

    The recent courtship SNU is not the first time UNR flirted with acquiring this campus. Years ago, a prior administration spent months analyzing a potential acquisition and ultimately determined it was not economically practical. What changed for this administration to become so enamored with having a footprint in Incline Village? With the advantage of having 20 months of hindsight, it will be difficult, if not, impossible to defend this transaction.

    In the summer of 2021, with a newly minted administration in place, the UNR Foundation (UNRF) appears to have been approached about an offer to own the assets comprising SNU at Incline Village. UNRF, according to its website, is a separate and distinct 501(c)(3) charitable entity that accepts cash and non-cash gifts for the benefit of the university. The latter presumably is held for some finite period of time, sold, expenses paid and the balance of the proceeds applied toward the donor’s wishes; if one is stated.

    SNU’s donors (which I am guessing are its board of directors, although that is not entirely clear) demanded that the assets comprising SNU be held or owned by the UNRF indefinitely, rather than by NSHE. Per my research, this appears to be the first time any building or real estate in the NSHE system has been owned by an institutional foundation. In turn, UNRF was also placed in the position of being a long-term landlord by leasing these assets back to NSHE for a nominal fee of $1.00/year for the benefit of UNR, which is not a separate legal entity but rather a dba by which NSHE does business like the other state institutions of higher education in Nevada.

    Upon reviewing the UNRF’s minutes and public meeting recordings from the summer of 2021 through the summer of 2022, one can easily see that the president was the moving force behind this transaction believing it was a “once in a lifetime opportunity.” Specifically, UNRF was told that the transaction would be transformative for UNR and without liability to UNRF, that Lake Tahoe was critical for the university’s growth and the Lake Tahoe campus would continue to be a standalone four-year institution that compliments the Reno campus (although, this business model now appears to have shifted toward some sort of study abroad for UNR students). Moreover, if UNRF failed to act, SNU donors threatened, albeit probably a veiled threat at best, to transfer the assets to UC Davis, which currently occupies approximately 50% of the science building at SNU for its marine biology program. In reality, if UC Davis wanted to acquire the entire SNU campus, it had ample opportunity to do so over the years. Evidently, such an operation is not appealing to it.

    Interestingly enough, UNRF was advised, without explanation, that the donors would not allow NSHE to own the assets. The donors would only consummate the transaction if the assets were transferred to UNRF. However, if UC Davis was the acquiring party, the donors had no similar requirement and would allow the UC Regents, rather than the UC Davis Foundation to own the assets. In the end, UNRF approved the acquisition and subsequent lease agreement by what appears to be a majority vote.

    Now, comes the economics. SNU was a private institution charging $40,000/year in tuition. It had approximately 150 students and those that remain, as you note, are referred to as the “legacy students.” Once the legacy students are gone and with no UNR students enrolling, then what? SNU was only a viable business entity due to the generosity of its donors, who provided the necessary ongoing funding.

    As an extension of UNR, the Lake Tahoe campus charges the same fees as UNR. Out-of-state residents paying $20,000 annually while in-state students pay the per credit rate. Stated more concisely, if SNU was not a self-sustaining entity or one whose revenues did not exceed its expenses, then its public incarnation is in dire financial crisis with substantially less revenues with more expenses. Among these costs are various insurance policies put in place and paid by UNR to try and mitigate liability to UNRF, which appears to be an area of some concern during UNRF’s due diligence. Additionally, SNU had more than $5 million in deferred maintenance and ADA non-compliance issues; including no central air conditioning. In the summertime, the school simply opens its windows, which is not an option during wildfire season. The library is an extension of the Washoe County Library system (i.e., open to the public). SNU was marketed (as set forth on its website and in its materials) to the residents of Incline Village like a community college to take advantage of, most notably, its art facilities. As a Lake Tahoe resident, I took advantage of these opportunities without being a student per se.

    The earlier dalliance with Lake Tahoe was prudently declined by a prior administration. The Lake Tahoe campus is an unnecessary fiscal encumbrance on UNR. Nevertheless, this administration felt the acquisition was strategically important for the university. Obviously, a feeling not shared by the UNR student body who you correctly pointed out are not interested in incurring the additional costs of doing a semester at Lake Tahoe.

    When the administration openly states that it has sizeable headwinds with COLA mandated by the legislature, as well as budget reductions, where will the funding come from to keep the Lake Tahoe campus functioning? Why was this transaction executed? Financially it makes no sense and the enrollment figures bear this out…I understand that less than 25 legacy students remain and no UNR students have enrolled.

    Lake Tahoe is without question the gem of the Sierras. That’s why I live here. UNR is attractive to many students and faculty, in part, due to its location. Lake Tahoe will always be a short drive away for students interested in skiing, snowboarding, hiking, mountain biking, or being on the lake. SNU’s acquisition had no bearing on this. The lake, not the campus is the draw. Absent a donor or donors coming to the rescue with a substantial infusion of cash (which would undoubtedly provide only a temporary reprieve), exponentially increasing enrollment and/or leasing the facilities out for conferences and other events, will be a costly mistake for the administration. One that I can say as a former CEO of a public company would never have been tolerated in the private sector and certainly not without significant consequences. Given that the donors were clearly looking to unload the economic burdens of keeping SNU afloat, it would have been more prudent to donate the venue to Incline Village for use as a library and community center or other civic-based functions. Unfortunately, I would guess that the administration will stubbornly defend the acquisition for no other reason than politics to save face for the president. Any potential resolution or consideration of divesting of these assets will probably not occur until there is a change in the administration or regents, who should hold the administration accountable. In the interim, the limited resources of UNR and UNRF will be adversely impacted when those funds could be redirected to more pressing needs to improve the quality of the education and student life in Reno. Unfortunately, SNU and the damage caused by Dean Jones will have repercussions for the school. As a donor, I am not interested in continuing my support until there is a change in the administration.

    Reply ↓

    • Thank you for shedding some light on the issue of the Lake Tahoe Campus. This campus serves no academic need for UNR. Its funding in the middle of budget cuts is provocative. But, as stated in the recent post, this campus helps with the President’s “ quasi-celebrity image and standing”. It is disheartening to see so many vacant faculty positions, reductions in supporting staff and other positions critical to our students’ education, while the President and his cronies spend precious resources to showcase to the unaware community the Lake Tahoe campus as a great achievement and necessity for the education of our students. The President states very often that the University is stronger than ever. Has he given some thought on what the faculty and staff think when they hear his narcissistic statements?

      Rest assured that every effort to put pressure to the regents so we can get rid of this administration of corruption and intimidation would be greatly appreciated.

      Reply ↓

      • The case of Erick Jones, is the most recent result of the corruption at UNR. He was not in the the top candidates list and he was hired following a compromised search. It was amazing to read in previous posts that he was not the selection of the search committee, but was pushed by another Dean with a low-grade record, who served as the chair of the committee, and was picked by an inept provost whose record and conduct appear to be a huge problem for the University and a big liability for the President, who, although he is completely ignorant of academic issues, appointed him not based on merit but just to have a “yes man” by his side.
        Erick Jones succeeded a very successful Dean, an exemplary academic and administrator, who managed to advance the College, build relationships with the community and was very successful with his efforts for a new building. The College of Engineering was the gem of the University under his leadership. All of us in the community thought that the President would do his best to use the abilities, experience and expertise of faculty like the former Engineering Dean. However, he fled the University soon after the President’s appointment. Now we understand that for a person of his caliber it would be impossible to report to this President and his inept Provost and work with people like Clinger, Richard, Dugan, Heaton, Catalano and all the rest of the President’s cronies. Their cases of corruption were analyzed in other posts, so I will not elaborate further.
        Unfortunately, more capable faculty, staff and administrators will flee the University creating a huge vacuum of talent and dedication and hurting our students’ education!!

        Reply ↓

    • Kinda sad. You’d think that a flagship state university would pretty much run itself, so that being a university president would be a pleasant way to slide into retirement while still feeling that you’re contributing in some way to the world. But I guess that just about any job can be screwed up.

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  65. Well over a month ago the Engineering Dean’s publication scandal was revealed! Many of us were shocked to see the quality of the person who was hired to lead one of the most prominent colleges of UNR. But, after we gathered our thoughts, we understood the reason. This person was hired not at the recommendation of the search committee, but by a President who is absolutely clueless regarding higher education and academic metrics and by an inept Provost who exemplifies the lowest grade of mediocracy, who was a low performing Dean and was hired after a pre determined search, after he had applied for Provost positions several times around the country and was rejected every single one of them!!!

    Well over a month later nothing has happened. This is embarrassing but not surprising. The administration is late to respond because themselves are involved in budget mishandling, favoritism, appointments with no search or transparency, nepotism and intimidation. The posts in this blog have revealed how UNR is run these days!

    Perhaps Erick Jones will, at the end, be removed. I see no way around this.
    However, based on all that was revealed in this blog, this will not be enough. So, will other steps be taken? Will the President remain in his position? If so, will he remove this incapable Provost and the Clingers and Richards of UNR and rebuild an operation with high standards? It remains to be seen but I am not optimistic!

    Reply ↓

    • Your continued non-content posts are tiresome. Yes, the situation is terrible and perhaps nothing is being done about it (I have no way to verify this). But putting the same non-content post every few days is not the standard I am used to on this blog. Are you imploring readers to do something? If so, what exactly would you have us do? Are you providing new information? It feels like you are using this blog as a platform for expressing your anger about UNR administration and Erick Jones. You strike me as an “insider” (at least someone more associated with UNR than me) with an ax to grind. But you’ve expressed that a number of times – must you continue to remind us of how angry you are? I am not optimistic.

      Reply ↓

  67. Likely going on but lately we have not seen the dean in the college. All problems point toward the provost: the Lake Tahoe disaster, the Dean of engineering selection, the current state of affairs at the college of engineering, the title IX debacle, almost all un-budgeted expenses fall under the provost, Vince Catalano and others appointed with no search. More to follow.

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  68. Erick Jones has been on a leave of absence from the college since March 18th. Despite the urgent need for an interim dean to maintain some semblance of stability, the provost has yet to appoint one, leaving the college of engineering without any form leadership or guidance on who is handling what. The silence from the provost’s office regarding all of this would lead us to believe that they prefer to sweep this issue under the rug and simply wait until it blows over. I’m sure in a months time Jones will casually stroll back into his office and continue about his reign of ignorance.

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  70. Indira Chatterjee, Associate Dean of Engineering, has been named as the Acting Dean. She is listed as such on the UNR College of Engineering web site.

    The official statement is that “Dean Jones is currently unavailable.”

    Reply ↓

    • That’s good! I used to think it was silly to list things like “A record of distinguished scholarship and teaching requisite for an appointment as a tenured full
      professor” and “A strong ethical foundation,” as they sound almost like empty phrases, but now I see the point, which is if you end up mistakenly hiring someone who doesn’t have a record of distinguished scholarship and teaching, or who hasn’t shown a strong ethical foundation, you can more easily fire him by pointing out that he did not satisfy the qualifications for the job. Or, better still, before actually hiring the guy, someone on the committee can object on the grounds that he’s unqualified for the position. So, yeah, good to see UNR moving forward in this way. I hope that Columbia does something similar when defining the position for whoever’s in charge of compiling their U.S. News statistics.

      Reply ↓

  75. The ISCTJ website has been scrubbed. Does anyone have a copy or mirror of the papers that were published? I was able to find the train and fruit fly paper. I’m especially interested in papers written by or with Jones Jr., the son. Thank you!

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  76. To put a pin in this: Erick is gone after doing terrible financial damage, our interim dean stabilized things, and we have a new hopefully competent dean starting in August 2025. The president continues to show interest in the football team, and he dresses very nicely in promotional material for the university.

    Thank you for the original post, as it does appear to have helped expedite Erick’s departure.

    Reply ↓

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