
The worsening spectre of academic fraud
Jonathan Pruitt saw spiders do remarkable things. The evolutionary ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario claimed that the “personalities” of African social spiders played a major role in the tasks they performed. Bold and aggressive spiders, for example, were more likely to be hunters and group leaders. Pruitt’s fascinating observations rocketed him to prominence and he accumulated a long list of academic publications; in 2018 was named a Canada 150 Research Chair, one of the youngest scholars to be given the honour.
By 2020, however, Pruitt’s co-authors were having doubts about the reliability of his data and methods. By 2022, 150 of his papers were under scrutiny and a year later he resigned from McMaster following an exhaustive investigation that found he’d repeatedly engaged in data “falsification and fabrication”. Today, perhaps fittingly, he is a fantasy novelist.
Pruitt’s case seems outrageous – but it’s by no means unique. Revelations of academic malfeasance and error seem to be everywhere these days. Last year Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s first black president, was forced to resign after she was found to have committed plagiarism. Canadian-born neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned as president of California’s Stanford University in 2023 after an investigation found “serious flaws” in his work on Alzheimer’s disease.
And the well-publicized transgressions of Pruitt, Gay and Tessier-Lavigne are just the tip of the iceberg. Many other cases at major institutions receive no media attention. In 2022, for example, Romina Mizrahi, currently a psychiatry professor at McGill University, was sanctioned for “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly falsifying data” in U.S. grant applications.
Universities have long cultivated reputations as places of wisdom and integrity where scholars track and expand society’s collective knowledge. Lately, however, it seems many scholars are too busy making stuff up to care much about wisdom or knowledge. What‘s going on inside the ivory towers?