This article focuses on one part of that broader question: how confidential investigations in academia can be good in principle, but also hide instittuional failures.

One of the main arguments I have seen regarding the Jason Arday plagiarism is that it had been investigated and he had previously been cleared.

For people outside of academia, that can seem like good evidence that there was no wrongdoing. I have seen comments from non-academics on social media stating something to the effect of:

“There is no evidence he even plagiarized, because an investigation concluded he didn’t.”

But those are two different issues:

• What does the evidence show?

• What did an institutional process conclude?

In an ideal world, those two things would always be perfectly aligned. A thorough investigation would gather all of the relevant evidence, apply the appropriate standards, reach the correct conclusion, and the institution would act appropriately on whatever the investigation found.

But the reality is, they are not necessarily aligned. Academic investigations do not always end with an outcome proportionate to the evidence, or even one which aligns with established institutional policies and procedures.

An investigation is still a human process occurring within an institution. And, institutions have their own hierarchies, incentives, conflicts, personalities, reputational concerns and tolerance (or intolerance) for confrontation.

Anyone who has worked in academia long enough has probably seen situations where somebody violates the rules, but rather than deal with the underlying problem, an institution chooses a quick fix, a “slap on the wrist,” or some other way of making the immediate problem go away while leaving underlying issues unaddressed. I am not saying this is what always happens - I don’t think we have an idea how common it is. But, we do need to acknowledge “sweeping things under the carpet” is not an unheard of response to reviews of plagiarism, misconduct, or other inappropriate behavior.

Confidentiality is good, in theory

Confidentiality is important.

It can protect someone from having their reputation destroyed by an allegation that later turns out to be false. Confidentiality can protect witnesses and complainants. And, importantly, it allows committees to deliberate without turning every allegation into a public spectacle.

I support all of that.

In the early coverage of the Arday plagiarism case, Professor Hanna Kienzler weighed in on the value of confidentiality in academic investigations:

I agree with that. In fact, I think this is exactly how these cases should be handled.

But the reality doesn’t always match what Kienzler describes. I’ve seen this firsthand, and my guess would be that other academics have also.

Before I describe one example, I want to be clear - care is required in what I can disclose. I have been a full-time university faculty member for nearly 20 years and have worked at multiple institutions in different capacities. I have also participated in various university proceedings where confidentiality is assumed or stated. These include hiring decisions, committee work, and tenure-and-promotion review process, amongst other committees that request confidentiality.

I take those obligations seriously. For that reason, I have deliberately omitted or generalized details that could unnecessarily identify the institution, the individuals involved, the type of oversight involved, or the underlying allegations. I do not intend to disclose those details publicly.

But that limitation precisely demonstrates part of the problem I want to present:

Confidentiality can protect due process, but it can also make failures of due process extraordinarily difficult for outsiders to see.

Personal Experience

NOTE: Certain nonmaterial details have been omitted or generalized to protect the identities of the individuals and institution involved and to preserve the confidentiality of the underlying proceedings.

Many years ago, I served on a formally constituted university research-oversight committee.

This was not an ad hoc committee assembled because somebody was angry with a professor. The committee existed long before the incident I am describing. It had established written policies and procedures. Its authority was defined in university documents and was tied to external regulatory requirements governing that particular area of research oversight. Committee membership was itself governed by institutionally defined criteria regarding the qualifications required to serve in this oversight role.

A serious issue arose involving a faculty member, whom I will call Dr. X.

For clarity, identity was not invoked by Dr. X, the committee, or the administrators as part of this dispute. The disagreement concerned conduct and compliance with established policies.

The committee had spent a substantial amount of time working through the case. We read all of the documents and reviewed the policies. We had met repeatedly and had attempted to follow the process exactly as it had been established. We documented everything in extreme detail and sent our communication to the appropriate channels.

The committee requested meetings with Dr. X. Multiple requests went unanswered. The situation was escalated through the appropriate administrative channels, and eventually a meeting took place involving the committee, Dr. X, and relevant administrators.

During that process, Dr. X acknowledged having taken at least some of the actions at issue. But Dr. X also took the position that some of the applicable requirements should not apply in the circumstances in the same manner the committee understood them to apply generally.

The committee also heard Dr. X make statements that directly contradicted previous written communications already in the committee’s possession. I am not talking about something open to interpretation, or people interpreting the conversation differently.

It was more like this - imagine someone writing: “My research will focus on the effects of eating 100 jellybeans.” And, then later telling the same committee: “I never mentioned anything about jellybeans in my research.” That is a fictional example, but it is analogous to the type of documentary contradiction the committee encountered during the case.

One administrator in the meeting repeatedly suggested that the committee was making too much of the situation and also recommended Dr. X seek legal counsel. Yet, that administrator who expressed support for Dr. X’s position also appeared unfamiliar with some relevant facts about the case and portions of the university’s procedures. Back to the jellybean analogy, imagine that administrator supporting the researcher’s use of jellybeans, but then being surprised to hear that jellybeans came in different colors and flavors. Again, the exchange illustrated what the committee perceived as a disconnect between the position being advocated and familiarity with some of the underlying details.

Following the meeting, Dr. X and an administrator gave a senior university administrator an account that differed in material respects from the committee’s understanding of what had occurred and the proposed path forward. The senior administrator heard their version first, and was quite angry (as another administrator reported to me). The committee subsequently documented discrepancies between aspects of that account and the records and events as the committee understood them.

The committee ultimately approved further action in accordance with the university’s own established oversight framework. The committee understood this action to fall within its authority under the applicable policies.

Yet after months of meetings, documentation, deliberation, attempts to follow the institution’s own procedures, a senior administrator did not recognize the committee as having authority to implement the action it had approved.

There are limits to what I can appropriately disclose about what happened next, so I will leave that part of the story there.

And, that is where the confidentiality of university investigations becomes problematic.

Confidentiality can mask institutional failure

Yes, confidentiality can protect those accused of wrongdoing - which is extremely important.

But confidentiality can also hide what happens when an institutional process breaks down. A group of committee members can know what evidence exists (and what doesn’t), what policies are being followed versus ignored, and what formal decisions are made. And, they can also know about interference from senior administrators, due to personal biases, institutional politics, legal pressure, or optics concerns.

And the committee members may not be able to say any of that publicly.

Meanwhile, someone outside the institution may simply hear: “The matter was investigated. No action was taken. There is no evidence of wrongdoing.” The public can reasonably conclude that allegations must not have been supported.

And for many, that is the belief about Arday. Many have trusted the investigation process and outcome as a form of evidence. And why wouldn’t they trust a university? As I have described, the problem is that it’s not always so simple. I’m not saying that all, or even most or many internal investigations are flawed, biased, or compromised. But, I am saying it does happen and we need to be aware of it.

I don’t know exactly what happened in the investigations surrounding Jason Arday’s accusations of plagiarism. I don’t know how the outcome was reached. But, given the evidence that I have seen regarding the extent of the textual overlap, I am surprised that the earlier review reportedly characterized the relevant problems as honest error.

And others familiar with research integrity are also - with describing it as seen below:

“It is clear that a significant portion of the thesis was copied directly from other people’s work. This is not in doubt, it’s not in question, and the fact that so many people online are arguing that the plagiarism charges are false because a university said so is deeply depressing. It’s arguably the worst case of plagiarism I’ve ever seen.”

My point isn’t that the investigations surrounding Arday’s plagiarism were compromised. We do not know enough about the internal process to make that claim. Instead, my argument was that the existence of an institutional investigation, by itself, cannot tell us everything about:

1. The evidence considered

2. The depth of investigation

3. How decisions were reached

4. What happened after those decisions were made.

To be very clear:

• All individuals should be treated fairly and held to the same standards.

• Scrutiny should be based on reasonable suspicion and the available evidence; not increased or decreased because of someone’s race, identity, ideology, prestige, institutional status, etc.

• Formal process matters.

• People accused of misconduct deserve to know the allegations against them.

• They deserve an opportunity to respond.

• Evidence should be evaluated systematically.

• Confidentiality can protect everyone involved from enormous reputational harm.

But I have also seen what happens when the institution itself becomes part of the problem. An investigation can take place, but the outcome the public sees may not accurately reflect what really happened.

That is why the phrase “he was investigated and cleared” does not carry as much evidentiary weight for me as it once might have. And I suspect a number of academics may be able to identify with experiences like this one.

Again, that does not mean confidential investigations are bad. Rather, we should be careful to recognize that there is a difference between “The institution investigated it and decided no action was required” versus “He was cleared” versus “There was no evidence of wrongdoing.” Those are not the same thing.

And confidentiality can sometimes make it almost impossible for the public to know the difference.

For those who work in academia, I’m especially interested in hearing whether you have witnessed anything similar.

Have you served on a committee or been involved in an institutional review where the formal process seemed to say one thing, but the eventual institutional response did not reflect what the evidence, policies, or committee actually concluded?

You absolutely do not need to share confidential details, identify anyone, name an institution, or tell the full story. In fact, please don’t disclose anything you are obligated to keep confidential.

Even a simple “Yes, I have seen this happen” would be useful.

Part of the difficulty with writing about these processes is that confidentiality means the people who have seen them fail are often the people least able to describe what happened.

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The Jason Arday controversy has become entangled with race, DEI, politics, ideology, the motives of his accusers, his personal history, his resignation, and questions about how he has been treated.

Those issues are all worth discussing.

But I want to temporarily strip all of those away and ask a much simpler question:

Can we all agree that plagiarism is unacceptable in academia?

That’s right.

I am arguing that plagiarism should be judged from the evidence itself, not softened or excused because of who the plagiarist is, who discovered it, or what political meaning people attach to the case.

We all learned plagiarism is not okay at some point in our education

I don’t remember exactly, but I think it was in 4th or 5th grade that we had to start incorportating references into book reports. Usually, it just meant writing that we got our information by looking something up in World Book Encyclopedia. I do recall that in 6th and 7th grade, we had access to the Dow Jones online (dial-up) service that had an online encyclopedia, and that was a big deal. But regardless, we had to provide our references.

By the time I was in college, doing references in a prescribed format was just part of life. Extremely annoying, of course, trying to get the periods and commas all in the right place, but still we had to do it. When I found out about EndNote at the start of my PhD back in 2003, it felt like a life changing experience - citations just became so easy!

And, they have just gotten even easier to do - to the point where people now complain that authors are not reading an article before zapping in the citations (which one might say is the opposite problem of plagiarism).

But let’s get back to plagiarism, including how it relates to the Arday case.

Plagiarism gets more complicated as your status is elevated

Universities don’t seem confused when explaining plagiarism, and its consequences, to students, but when a prominent faculty member is accused, suddenly the conversation becomes more philosophical.

What does Cambridge tell students about plagiarism?

How does Cambridge present plagiarism to the students? Very clearly:

And, they also consider it a form of academic misconduct, for which “Not knowing or forgetting about the rules or their consequences is not a justification for not following them.” Again, screencap from Cambridge below:

What happens when a faculty member plagiarizes?

The more professionally consequential the word “plagiarism” becomes, the greater the temptation to find another word which downplays the action. We call it “citation errors” or “inadequate citations” or “mistakes” or an “attribution problem” and ask them to “correct” the “error.”

This softening terminology on plagiarism is one reason I have been dumbstruck by some of the language surrounding recent plagiarism controversies.

In some cases, it is brushed off as being “very common” as in this example (which was up on Substack a few days before I wrote this, but seems to have been deleted).

Yes, plagiarism is way too common. So is cheating on exams. So is image fraud. But that doesn’t mean we should excuse it. It’s like a speeding ticket. If you are going 80mph in a 65mph zone, pleading “but others were speeding, also” is not a sufficient excuse for breaking the law, especially when it is objectively defined.

Regardless, I DO agree with Chapman’s underlying notion, in that any one specific group should not be targeted moreso than any other. In other words, one’s work should not be scrutinized extra because of one’s race, gender, religion, sexuality etc. Likewise, investigatory and corrective actions should be applied fairly to all - one’s skin color, ethnicity, etc. should not have any influence on how the plagiarism is dealt with.

However, as I have previously described, identification of Arday’s plagiarism seemed to go through the typical pathway… which, as it too often does, failed to adequately address the problem.

In fairness, not all plagiarism is created equally

To be fair, plagiarism can genuinely occur accidentally. I have explained that to students countless times. You can be writing a long paper with more than 100 references. You move paragraphs around. You intend to add a citation and forget. Notes get mixed with draft text. A quotation mark disappears during editing. We’re human. This does happen.

If plagiarism is found, the context does need to be evaluated and the person accused of it should be offered a chance to provide an explanation. They may even be able to demonstrate that it was genuinely unintentional, through providing time-stamped previous drafts or emails. Perhaps there is a passage that they copied and pasted with the intent of reading further up on, and even added some internal notes about it - but through multiple iterations and contributors, somehow it never got translated and cited. Perhaps e-mails reveal that a colleague sent a passage to include with a citation, but it got missed somehow. Who knows, there are lots of possibilities.

So yes, accidents do happen, and perhaps some leniency can be expected if it seems like an isolated incident and an opportunity to learn (and grow) through our mistakes and failures. After all, when concerns over plagiarism came up in 2025 regarding Arday’s PhD, Liverpool John Moores University concluded that the issues were attributable to an “honest and reasonable error.”

Beyond that, we also need to consider that modern plagiarism detection software only identifies overlap, not broader context that can help determine if it is actual plagiarism versus a false positive. It also doesn’t determine if it is an isolated incident or a repeating pattern.

Plagiarism Detection Software is a Tool - Not a Verdict

On that note, it’s important to recognize that plagiarism detection software is simply an algorithm checking one set of writing against a known database. It then highlights identical and similar passages, flags the source, and gives as score on how much overlap there is.

It is then up to experts to interpret that. What I mean is not “do we like this person and are they doing greater good?” but rather “is this actually plagiarism or a false flag?”

For example, with many complex research methods, there’s really only so many ways to describe them in detail. Researchers will often use very similar experimental methods from one study to another, or publish multiple results from the same paper (and there are legitimate reasons for this). Many times, they will copy-and-paste their previously published methods, in part of in full, and state something like “These methods have been described / utilized previously” and then cite that paper. But, if multiple sentences, or even paragraphs, overlap with that previous work, the software will flag it. Further evaluation by a human may reveal it was properly cited.

So, we DO need to be careful when we see a TurnItIn (or similar) report - the actual truth about plagiarism can be more complex than a “similarity score” number and bunch of highlighted passages.

My point is that we shouldn’t have a knee-jerk response to condemn somebody, nor should we have a knee jerk response to downplay it, unless we evaluate the report thoroughly.

From my evaluation of Jason Arday’s report, it seems clear that such a self-citation mix-up is not the case for him. But, you can evaluate it for yourself. has written up some details about it, and the end of his article has the actual report.

“Who Caught Them?” is a valid, but separate question from “Did They Plagiarize”

I have seen plenty of comments shifting the narratve to Nathan Cofnas, describing him as a racist on a witch-hunt to take Arday down.

But, again, as I have described earlier, Cofnas is not the one who caught Arday. Retraction Watch provided a detailed account of how these allegations came to light in the first place.

But, for hypothetical purpose, even if racist ideology that led to Arday getting caught, that doesn’t excuse Arday’s behavior either. In other words, a biased investigation and genuine plagiarism can coexist.

Those really are two separate issues. The manner in one gets caught plagiarizing shouldn’t change the narrative surrounding how serious the allegations are, and how much of one’s academic credibility is tarnished if the plagiarism allegations are true.

Even if the motivation for finding plagiarism is nefarious, that doesn’t excuse the actual plagiarism itself - nor should it distract from further investigation.

Again, the investigation can be readily performed by evaluating Arday’s publicly available documents. One can established the existence of plagiarism without invading his privacy or his rights. Once substantial unattributed overlap is documented, then the accused should be given an opportunity to explain it (as alluded to earlier) and on decision-makers (journal editors, academic deans, etc.) to determine what actions are needed.

Neither Cofnas nor Harris created the textual overlap. The evidence in Arday's work exists independently of either man's motives. The characterstics of the accuser (e.g. Cofnas or Harris), should not overshadow the evidence of academic wrongdoing (i.e., Arday).

I personally believe the documentary evidence is now sufficient to conclude that Arday’s academic work contained serious attribution problems that cannot reasonably be dismissed as a simple similarity-software false positive… So, I feel comfortable calling it plagiarism. Regardless of how it was uncovered, that is what it appears to be.

The best remedy for selective scrutiny is more consistently applied scrutiny. Not selective tolerance of plagiarism. Data sleuth, Nick Brown, likens it to TSA screening:

“Corrective Actions” often do not address the underlying issue

If a student copies several pages into a term paper and gets caught, we don’t normally say, “Just add the citations now. Problem solved. You now earn an A for your grade.” Yet when faculty plagiarism is handled solely through post-publication “correction,” that can effectively be what happens.

Many have dismissed plagiarism claims against Arday is something relatively trivial, especially since some (but not all) of his journal articles have been “corrected.”

1. Examation of some of Arday’s plagiairism goes beyond a simple error. Instead it appears to be quite extenisve, and not confined to just one or two articles.

2. “Corrective” actions by a journal only add the references back once somebody is caught. The journal typically does not:

   1. Attempt to determine if there is a broader plagiarism or research integrity issue beyond the article in question

   2. Determine the factors that led to plagiarism in the first place, in attempt to prevent them from happening in the future

   3. Provide any administrative action to hold the author accountable for plagiarizing

In late 2023 (more than two years before Nathan Cofnas entered into the Arday saga), the journal Social Sciences published “corrections” to Arday’s plagiarism. The journal doesn’t use the term “plagiarism” but rather states that the publication “has been ammended to increase the clarity of citation sources within the text.” This euphemism transforms what is often described as “the theft or misappopriation of intellectual property” into a mere issue that something was simply “unclear” (as opposed to missing entirely).

Here’s a screencap from the journal - one can see that about a dozen distinct sections of the text had to be “amended.” That is not a tiny oversight. Note, the term “plagiarize” or any form of it is not used anywhere here.

I won’t provide a full breakdown of his plagiarism, because others have done that, complete with screencaps. Again, Cofnas’s intentions or ideology do not erase the objective evidence of significant verbatim copying (including mistakes in the original) by Ardas.

My point is that making sure that the article now includes appropriate references to the original author does not solve a broader pattern of misrepresenting somebody else’s ideas as one’s own. This is especially important in the social sciences, where publishing one’s ideas (as opposed to laboratory experimental findings in the biomedical sciences) is a critical component of one’s scholarship, academic reputation, and career advancement.

I’ve written about how hard it is to actually get journals (let alone institutions) to take any action when evidence of wrongdoing is found. I won’t write further on that, here, but I think it’s a big part of the problem in the Arday case. The way the issue was addressed seemed insufficient given the seriousness of it, which ultimately resulted in a series of escalations. If you’re interested in this topic, please see my Beyond the Abstract Piece relevant to the topic:

Beyond the Abstract

Science is self-correcting... Except when its not.

If you spend any time around science, you hear the phrase constantly…

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7 months ago · 23 likes · 52 comments · James Smoliga, DVM, PhD

Intentional Plagiarism vs. Negligence… Neither is Good

Yes, intent matters, especially when determining how serious a plagiarism offense is and what consequences are appropriate. Of course, there is an enormous difference between a missed citation and repeatedly reproducing material from multiple sources throughout a document without proper attribution… and misrepresenting broader areas about one’s biography, etc (as covered extensively by ).

But, let’s say (just for arugment’s sake) that Arday didn’t intent to repeatedly represent other scholars’ work as his own, and is just is really, really bad at citing it. So, even if he managed to make several mistakes, across multiple articles without deliberate intent, it raises another really uncomfortable set of questions:

• How much negligence are we willing to accept from faculty, when we expect undergradaute students to get this right?

• At what point does repeated negligence itself become incompatible with the standards expected of a professional academic?

Summary

None of this means every accusation of plagiarism of academic misconduct is to be believed. We should see some evidence before we start looking further. As I wrote previously, reasonable suspicion should be what drives investigations, not wild unfounded accusations. In Arday’s case, it sounds like there was indeed reasonable suspicion.

And one more time, this time in bold letters, just in case my early statements are not clear enough... I think everybody should be treated fairly and equally, in terms of accusations, evaluations, investigations, and consequences should be applied fairly regardless of race, gender, politics, religion, prestige, sexuality, religion, institutional status, or any other identity- or ideology-related factors. If particular groups are being subjected to greater scrutiny than others, that disparity deserves examination itself.

Unequal scruinty should be an argument for MORE scrutiny in other groups… If Black scholars are being scrutinized for plagiarism more aggressively than otherwise comparable scholars from other racial groups, that would itself be a serious problem. The remedy, however, is to apply the same evidentiary standards consistently to everyone; not to lower the standard for the group receiving greater scrutiny.

Regardless, if the evidence establishes plagiarism, we should be comfortable calling it plagiarism. If we have reached a point where even that statement becomes politically polarizing, academia has a much bigger problem.

Likewise, addressing plagiarism isn’t as simple as going back and inserting some citations. “Correcting” the scholarly product does not address the underlying motivators and behaviors that contributed to it, and should initiate further investigation.

Plagiarism is unacceptable. That should be something we can all agree on.

Previously Published in Part 1: Why Is Lying Acceptable in Academia? How academia embraces a culture of prestige, which incentivises spin, stretching the truth, and sometimes beyond…

Previoulsy Published in Part 2: How Do Academics Actually Get Caught Cheating?

Hopefully coming in Part 4 (which was supposed to be Part 3): Solidarity Before Evidence — how reasonable suspicion should work and what happens when academics choose either solidarity or condemnation before the facts are mature.

If you’re interested in my other work on science, research integrity, sports, or longer-form essays, you can find links to those Substacks elsewhere. Always free!

• Beyond the Abstract is where I write about science and research integrity. It’s the main place I write.

• Human Limits is my section for sports science and related pieces… like this one.

• Academic Life is about, well… life in academia.

• Everyday Culture is about everything else… sometimes serious, sometimes funny.

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I have been following the Jason Arday case closely, and have written about it a few times now.

Why was anyone investigating him in the first place?

Some have argued that Arday was specifically targeted because of his race. Others have suggested that critics were motivated by politics, jealousy, or resentment of his success.

Those possibilities shouldn’t simply be dismissed. People really can be targeted for bad reasons, and that’s not okay.

But as someone who has spent years examining questionable research, I think there is another part of the process that is poorly understood:

How do people actually come to suspect plagiarism or research misconduct in the first place?

Sometimes investigators start with a person. Very often, though, they start with something much smaller: something doesn’t look right.

That observation itself is not proof of misconduct. But it can create reasonable suspicion, and reasonable suspicion is where investigation begins.

tl:dr:

People often imagine misconduct investigations as starting with a target. In reality, many start with an anomaly. Someone who knows the subject well sees something that does not make sense, checks it, and sometimes the evidence leads somewhere unexpected.

Here’s my detailed thoughts.

Reasonable Suspicion

Why did I become suspicous of Jason Arday?

Honestly, I didn’t know about Jason’s case until posted about Arday’s unbelievable running claims earlier in the week (August 3, 2026)

Magness knows running really well. As do I. As do many others who follow track and field.

When somebody makes an objectively measurable claim in an area you know well (in this case, running performance), you often have enough context to recognize immediately that something is unusual enough to warrant verification.

Let me give you an example…

Many years back, a woman I met (also in academia) told me that she was really fast. I asked about her times. She said she didn’t remember exactly, but knows she ran the 1500m under 4 minutes. I told her that would have made her a world-class 1500m runner (today, that would have put her in the top 200 all time list). She confidently responded “yeah, pretty much.”

What she didn’t know is that I was a track and field athlete myself, and understood the sport well. I said it was surprising to me that she ran such a fast time, yet I had never heard of her. She quickly downplayed it and stated that maybe she didn’t remember exactly because it was a long time ago, and changed the subject. I never did find out why she made this claim.

Someone unfamiliar with track might have heard “sub-four-minute 1500” and simply thought: Wow, she must have been really fast.

Someone who knows the sport hears something different: If that is true, this person should have been one of the best runners in the world. Why have I never heard of her?

That does not prove the person is lying… but it creates a legitimate reason to check.

I feel that is what happened with Jason. People that didn’t know about running trusted him. He said he ran 300 miles in 3 days, and 600 miles in 6 days, so people believed him.

But for those familiar with elite ultrarunning, his achievements sound much different. Those performances would place an otherwise little-known amateur athlete in extraordinarily rare company.

Now, that discrepancy alone does not prove dishonesty. But it absolutely creates reasonable grounds to ask whether the claims are accurate. It also must be realized that these were not obscure, one-off statements made privately years ago. Arday repeatedly incorporated extraordinary running accomplishments into his public biography and identity

Once someone chooses to make an objectively verifiable achievement part of their public story, verifying it is not “digging for dirt.” It’s basic fact-checking.

Scrutiny subsequently showed that at least some of those claims could not be sustained as originally presented. His 600 miles in six days became 600 miles across 12 elapsed days. The available evidence also raises serious questions about whether his planned 300-mile-in-three-days attempt was ever completed as later biographies claimed.

Why does that matter? Because once an objectively verifiable claim turns out to be materially inaccurate, it reasonably raises another question: are there other claims that should also be verified?

Prior behavior creates reasonable suspicion about a person

Back in my PhD, I worked with some people with big personalities. Very successful in research and medicine. And, one of their pathways to this was self-promotion - something that I mentioned a bit in an earlier essay.

As part of my PhD, I was assigned to doing golf research. It wasn’t my area of interest, but nonetheless, it was something I did.

Anyway, one of the prominent orthopedists (we’ll call him Dr. X) associated with the lab had a group of other orthopedists coming in to see the broader facilities, and he requested a weekened tour of our laboratory. I volunteered to do so. It was a typical tour, in which I had a few low-key demonstrations set up regarding our biomechanics equipment, such as 3D motion analysis. So, I showed the group an example of our 3D analysis of the golf swing.

One of the visiting orthopedists politely asked me and the host physician “Wow, this is cool. How much research on golf have you done?” or something to that effect. Before I could speak, Dr. X quickly answered “We publish 20 papers on golf every year.” The visitor replied “Wow, that’s impressive!”

And, indeed 20 papers on golf per year IS impressive.

But, it wasn’t reality.

In the lab’s entire history, guess how many papers it published on golf…

SIX.

Not 20 per year. Six total, across a decade.

At the time the visitor asked this question, they probably only had 3 published papers on golf.

Of course, the visitor didn’t know this. He walked away with the impression that we were some golf publishing powerhouse. And, he may have been so impressed that he told others about it. Who knows.

Was this an embellishment? An exaggeration? A lie? I don’t particularly care what we label it. The important point is that it was objectively untrue, and I knew it because I happened to possess information the visitor did not.

Fast forward 20+ years. Over the following years, I separately heard concerns from multiple people who had worked directly with Dr. X about behavior they considered unethical. And, I was already working in the field of research integrity, and had access to software that could detect image duplication.

So, I started looking into Dr. X’s work. And, indeed I found something highly suspicious in a paper he was on… but only one paper that he was on. So, I started looking into the coauthors on that paper… That’s where I found a pattern of blatant image manipulation.

I wrote that up in detail in June 2025. Here’s my full article:

Beyond the Abstract

The Fraud You Can See With Your Own Eyes

In 2003, I began my PhD and set out to understand the secrets behind elite running performance. I imagined uncovering the mechanics of greatness — what makes a champion. Two decades later, I’m still analyzing data. But now, it’s less about speed or endurance — it's about deception. Instead of chasing finish lines, I’m chasing fraud…

Read more

a year ago · 3 likes · 3 comments · James Smoliga, DVM, PhD

In other words, I had reasonable suspicion that Dr. X was not being truthful in how he presented his work, based on my own experience and then stories from other reputable sources that worked directly with him. So, I further examined it - and found evidence of data manipulation by an entirely different person.

This is an important feature of misconduct investigations.

The original suspicion and the eventual finding do not necessarily involve the same person, or even the same problem.

I began by looking more closely at Dr. X because my own experience, combined with information from people who had worked with him, gave me reason to question whether his professional presentation was always reliable.

I found one suspicious paper. Following that evidence led me to the coauthors. And there I found a much broader pattern of image manipulation involving someone else. That wasn’t the conclusion I set out to prove, but it iswhere the evidence led.

Sometimes, that is the way people stumble upon reseearch misconduct or plagiarism. Yes, the investigation starts with a target, based on a reason, but then finds something else entirely.

The data themselves trigger suspicion

Some readers may be familiar with my investigation into the Q-collar. In brief, that is a jugular compresion device which supposedly “protects the brain” from impact. In 2025, I published a full-blown investigation about this device in The BMJ, which was also covered by the Washington Post. There’s a long backstory to it, but we found that the FDA didn’t have confidence that it actually worked, yet authorized it anyway.

Oh, and also, we found numerous data anomalies in the peer-review research supporting it. I’m not talking simple typos, but stuff like entire data tables meant to represent different studies copied-and-pasted, and mathematically impossible values. Six of those papers are currently labelled with a formal Expression of Concern, as they are being [slowly] investigated by the publisher’s research integrity team.

But, why did I start looking into the Q-collar in the first place? Did I have a personal vendetta against somebody associated with it? Was I jealous of something? Did I have a competing product?

Nope.

Something just didn’t sound right.

Back in 2013, a colleague asked me if I had seen a new study claiming there was a reduced risk of concussion at higher altitudes. When I found out that the altitude in question was 600 feet above sea level, I knew it didn’t make physiological sense. My colleague told me he agreed. I got another physiologist’ opinion, and he thought it made no sense also.

That was what triggered further interest, and started the pathway to an investigation that has gone on for over a decade.

Long story short, that altitude hypothesis was part of the scientific rationale for the idea that mild cerebral swelling might reduce brain movement within the skull.. and therefore that jugular compression might reproduce the purported protective effect… one of the authors just happened to have a patent for such a device.

My colleagues and I took action and started publishing articles about it to counter their claims. I’ll spare the details here, but it’s a long story with other claims that we have challenged.

But my point is this - it all started because something didn’t sound right.

Accidental Recognition

One way that people stumble upon plagirism is simply recognizing it.

As academics, we read a lot. What are we reading? Stuff that is relevant to our field of expertise. As academics, we are not only trained to know the content that we read, but also the authors of it. We speak in terms of “Smith et al reported…” and “Chau and colleagues wrote…” and such. We connect names with ideas and results.

So, when a new paper comes out, we’re likely to read it… and if something seems overly familair, perhaps too familiar, we may recognize it. Perhaps that will be “Wait a minute, I’ve read this before! This is the work of Lopez et al!” or maybe it will be something less obvious… But regardless, that is one way people find out about plagiarism. They specifically recognize it.

No software needed. Just a human brain saying “I’ve seen this before.”

As a brief example, concussion expert Paul McCrory got caught this very way.

The New York Times describes it nicely in this screenshot below. Essentially, McCrory used professor Steve Haake’s work without attribution… And then Haake was reading McCrory’s work and recognized his own words!

I wrote about something similar back in January 2026. In brief, I was invited to serve as an external reviewer for a faculty member applying for promotion. And, in reviewing their documents, I immediately recognized that they were reusing somebody else’s course syllabus that I was very familiar with - right down to using the same assignments. And, they didn’t attribute where they got it from.

There’s more to the story than that, and I kept much of it anonymous, since the review itself was confidential (and I have done plenty of reviews), but you get the point - if we’ve seen something before, we can recognize it.

That is one way “re-use of material” originating elsewhere (without appropriate citation) can be found out - we recognize it.

Who First Raised Concerns About Arday’s Work?

Much of the current discussion around Jason Arday has focused on Nathan Cofnas - especially on whether Cofnas’s scrutiny was ideologically or racially motivated. He wrote an expose on the case on July 21, 2026. My link to his article is not an endorsement of any motivations of his statements, but provided for transparency and factual documentation that he has provided.

Motivations are a legitimate question about Cofnas. But it a completely different questions about how the concerns about Arday’s work first arose, and whether the claims were substantiated.

The earliest public concerns I have been able to document did not begin with Cofnas in 2026. Instead, they came from retired academic Dave Harris - who Cofnas does reference in his article. And how he found it was remarkably consistent with what I described earlier - he was reading Arday’s work with good intentions, and then found something that seemed amiss. That’s right, he stumbled upon them in the same manner that many cases like this begin.

This screenschot, timestamped from June 14, 2024 shows his concerns, and you can read them for yourself here.

Harris says he encountered what he called “oddities” while reading Arday’s work in the ordinary course of trying to understand and summarize it. In other words, there was no obvious microscope trained on Arday from the outset. Harris was not, by his own account, conducting a campaign to investigate him. He was reading the scholarship, noticed things that did not seem right, and started asking questions.

That is exactly the kind of process I have been describing throughout this article: Harris seemed to have followed standard procedures in reporting concerns over anomalies to the journal. Something looked odd, began looking further, and then took action.

Harris then tried to address what he found through normal academic channels. He contacted Arday. He contacted journal editors. And importantly, this was all underway before the current controversy erupted. One of Arday’s papers received a substantial correction in December 2023, well before Cofnas became the public figure most associated with the allegations.

It means the simplest version of the story:

Cofnas targeted Arday and then went looking for misconduct

does not explain the origins of the concerns. I’m not making excuses for Cofnas’s ideology. I’m simply pointing out that he was not the person who first discovered or raised concerns about Arday’s work.

The concerns were already there! They had already been raised. A journal had already “corrected” one of the papers in 2023. But that didn’t necessarily resolve the problems.

Harris says that Arday asked him not to contact him further, that senior colleagues at Cambridge were “not very helpful,” and that journal responses were mixed: two editors or publishers requested corrections, while two others apparently concluded that the issues did not violate their professional guidelines.

This was not a single forgotten citation quietly inserted into one sentence. One correction added or clarified citations across the abstract, introduction, methods, multiple substantive sections, discussion, and conclusion, while acknowledging previously omitted overlap with earlier publications.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether correction rather than retraction was the appropriate remedy. But it is also reasonable to ask whether adding citations after publication fully addresses the more important research-integrity question:

How did a published paper come to contain that much unattributed or insufficiently attributed overlap in the first place?

There are actually two different questions here.

1. Is the published paper now corrected?

   and

2. Why did the problem occur in the first place, and does the same problem appear elsewhere?

Those are not the same - a journal can successfully repair its own publication without determining whether the underlying problem was an isolated oversight, repeated carelessness, or part of a broader pattern.

In other words, a correction can repair the literature moving forward, but it does not necessarily explain the conduct that made the correction necessary or examine whether other issues remain unresolved. And, importantly, can provide reasonable cause to look into whether a broader pattern of such behaviour exists.

According to RetractionWatch, Times Higher Education was planning to publish a story on Arday, but it got pulled due to legal threats. One of the people involved was a research sleuth, David Sanders, who regulalry publishes about research misconduct. Sanders’s work regarding integrity has been publicly documented in many places previously - such as plagiarism and image manipulation in cancer studies, as documented in 2024 by UnDark.

Again, hiring a lawyer to defend oneself is not wrongdoing. People have every right to challenge reporting they believe is inaccurate or defamatory. But when legal pressure apparently contributes to a major news organization shelving an investigation based on a 63-page dossier, it is also reasonable to ask whether legitimate scrutiny is being chilled.

For people working in research integrity, this is an especially frustrating dynamic: evidence can exist, concerns can be legitimate, and yet the costs and risks of pursuing them can make the story effectively disappear.

It appears that it’s only in 2026 that Cofnas actually enters the story. Whatever one thinks of Cofnas’s motives, politics, or the racialized framing he later used in parts of his reporting, he was not creating the underlying concerns out of nothing. He was taking a set of existing concerns and broadening the scrutiny around them.

So we have four separate questions:

1. The origin of the ealiest concerns about Arday that I can document (Harris)

2. The adequacy of the initial response to allegations (publishers, university)

3. The motives of the person who later escalates it (Cofnas)

4. The truth behind the actual claims (Arday)

And this is one of the recurring dynamics in research integrity: problems often persist not because nobody notices them, but because the first attempt to resolve them does not fully settle the issue… and a broader pattern of issues then emerges.

So someone keeps looking, and then gets frustrated if the issues are not adequately addressed.

An unfair origin does not make accurate evidence disappear.

We’ve established the integrity of Arday’s work first came under question many years ago, and not by Cofnas.

But, let’s suppose, for argument’s sake, that the recent escalation of the investigation into Arday by Cofnas really did begin under reprehensible racist motives. That should matter, and the disciminatory treatment should be condemned.

But if the investigation nevertheless uncovers genuine plagiarism, misrepresented credentials, or other verifiable problems, we cannot simply discard that evidence because we dislike the motives of the person who found it.

Two things can be true at the same time:

• The scrutiny or escalation may have begun unfairly.

• The evidence uncovered may still be valid.

Confusing those questions creates a dangerous standard in both directions.

1. It can allow biased investigators to escape scrutiny for discriminatory behavior… and,

2. It can allow genuine misconduct to escape scrutiny because the wrong person discovered it.

Fairness requires more than choosing which side deserves sympathy - it requires us to examine both the process and the evidence.

Fairness should govern how we investigate. Evidence should govern what we conclude.

Previously Published in Part 1: Why Is Lying Acceptable in Academia? How academia embraces a culture of prestige, which incentivises spin, stretching the truth, and sometimes beyond…

Coming in Part 3: Solidarity Before Evidence — how reasonable suspicion should work and what happens when academics choose either solidarity or condemnation before the facts are mature.

If you’re interested in my other work on science, research integrity, sports, or longer-form essays, you can find links to those Substacks elsewhere. Always free!

• Beyond the Abstract is where I write about science and research integrity. It’s the main place I write.

• Human Limits is my section for sports science and related pieces… like this one.

• Academic Life is about, well… life in academia.

• Everyday Culture is about everything else… sometimes serious, sometimes funny.

  ---

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And I haven’t been able to look away from it.

As a professor, a runner, and someone whose career has increasingly involved investigating whether claims made in research are actually true, the story happens to sit at the intersection of several things that interest me.

As of this writing, August 5, 2026, new details about Arday seem to emerge almost daily. I am not going to attempt to summarize all of them here. Other writers and journalists are doing that.

Nor is this essay primarily about whether Jason Arday committed plagiarism, exaggerated athletic accomplishments, misstated professional positions, or accurately represented the other extraordinary events in his biography.

Those questions matter, and we’ll use his case as an example. But, they have prompted a different question that I find more interesting:

Why does academia have such a complicated relationship with lying?

Officially, of course, it doesn’t. But, the reality is that academia also tolerates an enormous amount of not-quite-truth. The muddier that becomes, the harder it is to identify something as an outright lie. While this is true in other areas of life, including politics and business, academia is supposed to be different - academia is supposedly organized around a quest for truth.

At some point, even seemingly clear-cut questions about dishonesty can be softened into questions of mere “moral imperfection.”

A Few Disclaimers to Start

First off, I write not to slander academia, but because I care deeply about it, and want it to do better.

I’ve seen a number of essays describing Arday’s case as one that demonstrates the problems with diversity-related initiatives. This essay is NOT that. I haven’t read most of those, I am not citing them here, and my arguments here do not address those perspectives. I am not writing an anti-DEI essay disguised as an academic-integrity essay.

This is also an article about culture, not about one person or one demographic group. The overwhelming majority of academics I have known are honest, hardworking people who care deeply about their students and scholarship. The relatively small number I have encountered who behaved dishonestly have come from all kinds of backgrounds.

The problem I am interested in is not who lies.

It is what happens when a system devoted to truth creates incentives to make ourselves, our work, and our accomplishments sound slightly better than they really are.

Academia is a prestige economy

There is a reason academics operate near this boundary - we are not merely producing knowledge, but also competing for prestige. And, prestige incentivizes some unfavorable behaviors.

That is not just my characterization. Blackmore and Kandiko used the term “prestige economy” in a 2011 paper examining motivation among academics. Their argument was that money alone cannot explain academic behavior because many of the activities academics value are poorly compensated (or not directly compensated at all). Reputation, professional recognition and status function as currencies of their own.

Prestige is built upon many pillars, including not only how many papers one has published, but also how prestigious the journals they publish in are (a separate issues). It’s not just the amount of the grant money earned, but where it came from (i.e., NIH and NSF money carries extra prestige for many). Invited lectures, media coverage, committee leadership - the list goes on and on.

Being perceived as somebody whose ideas are important matters in academia.

Academia is a Competition

And that’s a key issue. Most everyone in it has a PhD, and endured years of school to get it. Everybody is an expert in something. And there are lots of us… If there are more PhDs than there are jobs, it creates immense competition.

So it follows that career advancement (and even initiation, i.e., getting hired) requires repeatedly persuading other people that we are special and deserve their attention.

• We persuade universities that our accomplishments are sufficiently impressive to hire us.

  • So, when a faculty position opens up, there may be dozens or hundreds of candidates, all vying for that position. Not all can be interviewed, so there is an initial screening process to identify the strongest candidates.

• We persuade funding agencies that our proposed research matters more than the hundreds of other worthy projects competing for the same money.

  • When the likelihood of one receiving funding is less than 5%, and you are competing with a bunch of other accomplished experts, the odds are not in your favor.

• We persuade reviewers that our findings are novel, and editors that our paper is important enough to publish.

  • The most prestigious (there, I said it again) peer-review journals have high standards for acceptance. Some reject 70% of all articles submitted. Others reject 90% or more. So, our work has to be more compelling than every one else’s to get published.

• We persuade tenure and promotion committees that our scholarship is better than that of our peers.

  • Tenure and/or promotion is not a default pathway. You have to show why your work matters, and the university should want you. Being humble is not the goal here. Neither is being nice.

Prestige Compounds

Importantly, that prestige compounds with time. The person who already looks extraordinary becomes more likely to receive the next opportunity that makes them look even more extraordinary.

That’s right. Land a PhD with a prestigious researcher at a prestigious university? Your odds of getting a prestigious job increase.

Get a prestigious grant? Get published in a prestigious journal? That means a greater likelihood of getting more grants in the future, since you have a strong track record. And that, of course, leads to other prestigious people wanting to collaborate with you, more speaking engagements, and job offers.

Can you see where I’m going here?

Yes, setting yourself apart from the crowd matters a lot. Persuasion feels necessary in the competitive environment that defines academia.

For some, it’s so discouraging that they give up entirely in academia. But for others, they take extreme measures to get an edge on the competition. That may be becoming a workaholic. Or it may mean bending the rules… just a little. Or maybe a lot.

It may mean embellishing just a bit… Maybe exaggerating. Or just flat-out lying.

We Train People to Promote Themselves

Earlier this year, I responded to ’s New York Times op-ed about narcissitic leaders… More specifically, how academia rewards narcissism. Here’s my full letter:

My point was that academic success doesn’t merely happen to attract people who promote themselves aggressively. We train them to self-promote and reward those who do it best.

The prestige economy does not explicitly require blatant dishonesty… It just rewards being impressive. But that creates continual pressure to push presentation toward the most flattering end of reality… and sometimes beyond reality.

Eventually, the person who describes everything conservatively risks becoming the one that can’t get a grant. The person who refuses to embellish doesn’t get the grant… or the job.

Where exactly is the line?

Part of the problem with identifying and calling out lies is that dishonesty exists on a continuum.

It looks something like:

1. accurate description (complete truth)

2. selective framing

3. spin

4. embellishment

5. exaggeration

6. material misrepresentation

7. fabrication

We understand the ends of that continuum reasonably well. But everything in the middle of that list is where things get tricky. (And differentiating between something like embellishment vs. exaggeration is itself difficult to define).

The more serious the distortion (e.g. fabrication), the less common it probably is. I don’t think most academics fabricate data or engage in material misrepresentation (but some do!). The less serious the distortion (e.g., spin), the more culturally normalized it becomes - the milder behaviors are woven deeply into academic culture.

The problem is that repeated exposure to the minor forms can make the more serious forms easier to rationalize. Because we become accustomed to those smaller departures from full candor, the boundary between acceptable presentation and dishonesty can become surprisingly elastic.

A Research Example

Honesty is not binary in ordinary academic practice. A researcher can report real data, conduct a legitimate analysis, and still present the findings in a way that is more favorable than the complete evidentiary picture warrants.

Suppose a study examines 15 prespecified outcomes. Five produce statistically significant or otherwise interesting findings. The other ten do not. If we build the paper around the five favorable results while quietly omitting the ten that did not work, the reader receives a very different impression of the evidence. That is selective outcome reporting.

There’s all types of tricks researchers use to make their results look favorable. In my Beyond The Abstract newsletter, I’ve written about a bunch of them, here’s some examples:

• P-hacking

• Outcome switching

• Misusing averages

• Image manipulation (perhaps the most shocking)

Some of these practices remain in the gray zone. Others cross clearly into formal research misconduct. Either way, they are challenging to actually address.

Ambiguous Language

Another issue that happens within academia, though it is not unique to it, is ambiguous language.

It’s important not to be overly definitive when presenting research… But, it also essentially gives us a license to exaggerate.

“We may have found the cure for cancer” sounds really exciting. But, if the research was really poorly done, and it actually has no impact on cancer, we never lied. We simply said “MAY” have… This makes embellishment easy.

I wrote up more detail on this on my Beyond the Abstract newsletter:

Beyond the Abstract

Reading this Article May Make You Laugh

Bill Clinton may get a face tattoo of a walrus in the near future…

Read more

3 months ago · 6 likes · 5 comments · James Smoliga, DVM, PhD

We have measured academic exaggeration

This isn’t merely a cynical impression of academic culture.

It’s actually been quantified. That’s right, a 2014 The BMJ study by Sumner et al examined 462 university press releases about health-related research and compared them with the peer-reviewed papers they were supposed to describe.

The results were…… revealing.

40% of university press releases contained more direct or explicit advice than the underlying scientific paper. Among correlational studies, 33% of press releases made the claims sound more cause-and-effect than they really were. Among animal, cell or simulation studies, 36% exaggerated the degree to which the findings applied to humans. (I’ve provided an example of this in my Beyond The Abstract newsletter, including this misleading claim about a heart disease study).

Yes, we routinely complain that journalists exaggerate science. But, this The BMJ study shows signficiant exaggeration was exported by the university before a news organization touched it journalist ever touched it.

We tell people not to confuse correlation with causation, but then a university press release does exactly that. Sure, it’s dishonest, but it makes the research sound so much more meaningful. Perhaps world-changing. And that is prestigious.

Again, I am not arguing that every enthusiastic abstract or ambitious grant application is dishonest, or that people working in press offices are liars.

I am arguing that academic culture repeatedly teaches us a lesson:

Reality is good. Reality presented compellingly is better.

None of this is outright data fabrication… But it occupies the same continuum. Are we really okay with that?

Academia runs on trust

All of this matters because academia depends on trust to an extraordinary degree.

• I do not ask colleagues to show me their diplomas when they tell me where they earned their degrees.

• When I read a paper, I generally assume that the participants described in the Methods section actually existed.

• I assume the investigators collected the data they say they collected.

• I assume the analyses were performed roughly as described.

• I assume quotations attributed to interview participants were actually spoken by those participants.

Editors and peer-reviewers usually cannot independently verify most of those things. Nor can readers. We could not operate if every scientific claim required a forensic audit before anyone was permitted to believe it.

Academia functions because the overwhelming majority of scholars are, in fact, generally honest. They don’t lie about their achievements. They don’t fudge numbers to make them look better. They don’t fabricate datasets. From my personal experience and conversations with countless academics, including colleagues who I regularly work with, this is the bulk of academia.

Honest people trust that others will also play by the same rules and not engage in unethical behaviors. But this honesty and trust by the majority creates an unusual opportunity for the minority who are willing to exploit presumptive trust. And that is why repeated dishonesty is more than a private character flaw.

It damages infrastructure. If every unusual result eventually requires raw-data inspection because we no longer trust researchers to report honestly, science slows dramatically. Resources get wasted investigating questionable data. (And I and others have found ourselves devoting way too much time trying to identify problematic data, for the sake of improving science and public understanding).

If every CV needs independent verification over every line, academic hiring becomes absurdly cumbersome. If every personal statement must be treated as a fact-checking assignment rather than a biography, it loses its purpose.

Trust makes academia efficient. But trust only works if violating it carries consequences. And sometimes, there are none - which may make it tempting to push boundaries.

Nobody Gets Famous for Checking

Academia is much better at rewarding people for making claims than for checking them.

The replication crisis exposed this problem particularly clearly. Academia spent decades rewarding novelty. New finding. New mechanism. New treatment. New discovery.

But, replicating somebody else’s work? Much less exciting… And much less fundable… and much less publishable. When they get published, they may be cited less often. And, as we discussed earlier, publication is one of the currencies of academic prestige and career advancement.

Here’s an example from outside my field, in the area of management, by Block et al published in Management Review Quarterly:

In other words, there is little incentive to do replication studies, even though they are necessary for the integrity of science.

There are strong incentives to produce extraordinary claims and relatively weak incentives to verify them. That is a dangerous combination.

Why False Claims Survive

It’s Somebody Else’s Responsibility

So, we are left with this culture:

I’m not sure I believe this claim. Somebody should verify it… But not me. I have other important stuff to do.

I feel like this is the attitude that permeates cases like Arday - not just regarding his research, but his public claims about his extraordinary achievements.

Most people in academia are smart. They readily identify questionable claims, and recognize the need for further investigating. But, getting involved in investigating them is a huge time vacuum that often results in opportunity costs. So, they assume that somebody else will address the issue.

And eventually, somebody may - but that also takes significant time and effort. And, often it involves putting an investigation into the hands of others… Who may have their own incentives to avoid conclusions of wrongdoing and/or taking disciplinary action.

Sorry for some shameless self-promotion here, but I wrote a Nature World View last year, describing how academia needs to embrace scholars who do this broad type of verification work:

Asymmetric Time and Effort

The asymmetry in the amount of work required is one reason why false claims survive in academia.

It takes seconds to add an impressive, perhaps unbelievable, claim to a biography. Determining whether that claim is true may require tracking down archived webpages, locating old publications, contacting institutions, obtaining documents, comparing versions of CVs, submitting public-records requests, or reconstructing events from years earlier.

Making a false claim can take seconds. Demonstrating that it is false can take months. The person making the claim therefore begins with an enormous labor advantage.

Unreliable findings can gradually become treated as established facts simply through repetition. If fabricated or otherwise unreliable research produces a sufficiently interesting finding, it may be picked up by the media, circulated on social media, cited by other researchers, and gradually acquire the appearance of established fact.

A similar process can happen with personsal biographies - the credentials one provides get announced during introductions to interviews and conference talks. Eventually, they become established “facts” known to one’s colleagues and the public. They create new opportunities and leadership positions and awards, and create the impression a person has been thoroughly vetted. Eventually, a Google search turns up the same biography from what seems to be multiple different sources, and this internal consistency may falsely validate the claim. In other words, repetition creates the appearance of verification.

This can allow false or exaggerated claims to persist long enough to become incorporated into a person’s professional reputation. Once a claim or reputation, has been reinforced through years of institutional and media amplification, that reputation itself can become a form of protection when someone finally questions the underlying claims - we just assume that somebody along the way checked, and therefore accusations are baseless.

This prestige is not verification though, even if many feel it is.

If the apparently independent sources all originate from the same unverified claim, then identifying that common origin can cause the entire evidentiary structure to weaken very quickly. What looked like ten sources may really have been one claim repeated ten times.

Institutions Have Conflicting Incentives

Universities may also develop their own stake in the credibility of the people they employ.

Institutions don’t simply hire prominent faculty and put them to work. They advertise them - it’s part of that prestige economy. If you just hired an amazing, world-leading researcher, why wouldn’t you want to tell the world? Such attention helps recruit bright students and other noteworthy faculty. So, their accomplishments appear on university websites, in press releases, donor communications, recruitment materials and other institutional branding.

Once a university has spent years celebrating somebody as an extraordinary scholar, discovering that important elements of that person’s research or biography are unreliable creates a problem for the university too. The public can ask “how did they miss this?” And, the more promotion the university did, the more embarassing this issue becomes.

(And in fairness to universities, this is true of any organization that does both, approves actions and then polices itself - the FDA is sometimes cited as an example here… If I am not mistaken, I think Ben Goldacre covered this in Bad Pharma. Perhaps a separate topic for another time).

This does not mean institutions deliberately conceal serious misconduct (though it does happen)… But it does mean that the institution investigating a prominent employee is not always a completely neutral observer.

I’m not just talking about Jason Arday - this is a pattern that we continually see in research fraud and other disciplinary action. (I’ll talk more about that in Part 2 and Part 3 of this series).

My point is not that universities are uniquely corrupt. It is that institutions, like individuals, respond to incentives, and sometimes those incentives conflict. And I’ll say it again, my incentive for writing this is not to shame our institutions, but because of my desire for them to do better.

We should not be surprised, then, that suspicious claims (research or personal qualifications) can persist for years; not necessarily because nobody notices them, but because noticing something and assuming responsibility for investigating it are completely different things.

Regardless, if you’re looking for a takeaway here, it is this:

Academia has built much stronger incentives for creating impressive claims than for verifying, challenging, and correcting them.

Dishonesty also has victims

If two candidates compete for the same opportunity, and one describes their accomplishments conservatively while the other inflates theirs, the exaggeration can have distributive consequences.

Someone else loses.

I am not making a claim here about any particular Jason Arday appointment, or suggesting that a specific disputed claim caused a university to hire him. Establishing that would require evidence I do not have.

But, I am making a broader point.

Imagine two otherwise similar candidates, attempting to describe their service (and service is one of the three tenets by which academic careers are often judged).

One writes:

Participated in an international charitable initiative.

The other writes:

Raised millions of dollars for charity.

If we reward the maximal version and only later shrug when we discover it was overstated, we have created a system in which honesty can carry a competitive disadvantage. The honest candidate becomes the sucker.

It is a fairness problem, and a huge one. But, it’s more than that.

From cases like Arday’s, and countless ones of other academics who have cheated their way to prestige, many will conclude that we simply can’t trust academics. Or an entire discipline. Or, for some, entire groups of people. And that is a travesty.

So why is lying acceptable in academia?

Perhaps the title of this essay is unfair.

Lying is NOT officially acceptable in academia. Most academics do not overtly lie and most grants and papers do not contain brazen fabrications. Most biographies are basically accurate. But academia doesn't need a rule saying lying is acceptable to create conditions in which dishonesty can prosper.

Perhaps the problem is that academia has normalized so many small departures from literal accuracy that we have made the boundary increasingly difficult to see. We encourage researchers to describe incremental work as transformative. We have empirical evidence that universities themselves exaggerate scientific findings when promoting them to the public.

Every small exaggeration teaches us that presentation does not have to correspond perfectly with reality. It can be “mostly true.” Every rewarded embellishment nudges the boundary a little farther. Every euphemism for misconduct makes the boundary a little harder to identify (again, more on that in Part 3).

And throughout all of it, the system depends upon people giving one another the benefit of the doubt. None of these practices individually constitutes a culture that accepts lying, but together they create fertile ground for a problem.

But, when we do find something suspicious, the costs of investigating it can be too daunting to make it worthwhile. So, false claims persist.

So every time someone gains prestige from a claim that turns out to be less impressive than advertised, without meaningful consequence, the incentive becomes obvious. The lesson is not necessarily: “Lie!” It is subtler:

Make yourself sound as impressive as you can without crossing whatever invisible line that would raise enough suspicion for somebody to take action.

And that may be worse. Because a culture openly tolerant of lying would at least know what it was doing. But, a culture that endlessly renegotiates the boundary can convince itself that every individual departure is just an innocent exception.

Howver, somewhere along the way, academia has to be willing to ask what those exceptions become when they accumulate. Because eventually the distance between the narrative and the truth becomes large enough that we need a different word for it. And we already know what that word is.

Part 2 is now posted: How Do Academics Actually Get Caught Cheating?

Coming in Part 3: Solidarity Before Evidence — how reasonable suspicion should work and what happens when academics choose either solidarity or condemnation before the facts are mature.

If you’re interested in my other work on science, research integrity, sports, or longer-form essays, you can find links to those Substacks elsewhere. Always free!

• Beyond the Abstract is where I write about science and research integrity. It’s the main place I write.

• Human Limits is my section for sports science and related pieces… like this one.

• Academic Life is about, well… life in academia.

• Everyday Culture is about everything else… sometimes serious, sometimes funny.

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Zero research publications.

One single credit of teaching experience. That was a single semester where I led a self-taught medical terminology course. The students literally showed up for 5 in-person exams. My job was to score their scantron sheets and then give them their grades - nothing more.

My PhD program was set up to be a source for inexpensive labor, not to develop scholars, but I won’t get into that in this post.

As a budding academic, whose goal was to land a tenure-track faculty position, I was not set up to be competitive in the job market. Nobody wants to hire the candidate with no publications and no teaching record.

Graduate school usually provides teaching experience. Teaching experience makes you employable in academia. But if you don’t have teaching experience, you can’t get hired. And if you can’t get hired, you can’t get teaching experience. You can see the viscous cycle.

So, I had to figure out a plan to boost my resume. And I found it - adjuncting at community college.

Back in the the Spring and Summer of 2007, I taught two semesters as a part-time adjunct Anatomy & Physiology instructor within a community college system.

Teaching adjunct at a community college is nothing like that of teaching at a tenure-track university. I taught across three separate campuses, The closest to me was a 45 minute drive away. The furthest, about 75 minutes. During the summer, I taught a class in the morning, then had a 4+ hour break, and taught another class in the late afternoon. Thankfully, they had an office set up where I could work.

That was necessary, because I was still working on writing up my dissertation. That’s right, my data collection was complete, but I still hadn’t defended yet. More on that some other time.

Regardless, I was doing it all. Lecture preps, laboratory preps, creating quizzes and exams, and also grading them. Yes, there was a pre-selected textbook and it came with instructor ancillaries, but that was it. The rest of the class was up to me to create. I had no teaching experience, and no mentorship. There was one full-time faculty member who could answer my questions if I needed any guidance, but that was on an as-needed case by case basis.

So, I just jumped into it and just did my best.

Here’s what I learned. Teaching at community college was a truly fantastic experience. I really mean that, no sarcasm. It’s not what I wanted to do with my career, as I was interested in research also, but I’m still so thankful that I did it.

It was such an eclectic mix of students:

• The 18-year old high school graduate who had a clearly-defined career goal and knew they wanted to go to a 4-year university, but simply couldn’t afford it

• The 18-year old high school graduate who had no clue what to do with their life, so they started community college as a placeholder

• The 40-60 year old individual who always wanted to go to college, but due to life circumstances couldn’t. Many of these students had worked in low-paying jobs, and community college was their pathway to a new career and financial stability

• The rare second-career student. One guy in my class was a lawyer in his late 30’s, who decided he wanted to exit that profession to become a nurse

Even among the faculty, the career paths were anything but linear. The adjunct teaching chemistry laboratory next door was both a former priest and a podiatrist. We’d chat before class most weeks. He offered to make me custom orthotics at cost to help with a running injury. Every week he’d tell me he forgot to bring the mold. I never did get those orthotics.

But that was community college. Everyone had a backstory. Everyone had taken a detour.

I did my best to set the rigor of the exams appropriately, and in retrospect, I think I did. The leadership told me that I needed to ensure it really was rigorous, equivalent to an A&P class at a 4 year university. So I intentionally made the exams challenging (yet, fair).

What was fascinating to me was that there was a tri-modal distribution in the exam grades.

• The students who passed with an A (some of them with perfect 100’s)

• The students who failed with a 50-60

• The students who failed with a 20-30

Sure, there were a few B’s and C’s in there, but very few.

Those A students were legitimately GOOD. And interestingly, they included people from all 4 of the categories above. That clueless kid who was there just because they didn’t know what else to do in life was equally likely to get an A as the 50 year old woman looking to upgrade her resume with an associate’s degree. If they were at a 4 year university, I am confident they would have thrived.

But those students in the 20-30 range... I felt for them. After one of the exams, one of the students emailed me expressing her frustration for doing so poorly. It was a multiple choice exam, where she could have earned a 20% by chance alone, and she scored a 25%. She was not doing well… and this was actually her second time taking the course. She said that she really needed to get an A in the class to become a nurse. I reached out to some administrators and they provided me the contact information for tutoring and academic support. I referred her to them, and she wound up dropping out of the class.

Another student got into a car crash, and was dealing with classic vestibular symptoms. She told me about all of them, and all of her struggles, and how studying was really hard for her. I got the sense her healthcare provider wasn’t super competent, and she wasn’t getting the care she needed. Based on everything she told me, it sounded like she had otolith displacement. I recommended that she ask her provider about BPPV testing and might benefit an Epley maneuver. I’m not sure she did. But, she earned an A in the class.

One of the 18-year old students was a single mother who wanted to be a nurse. She felt super young, probably because she had braces on her teeth, complete with colored elastics. I parked next to her one time, and saw she left her pack of cigarettes on the car seat. She was one of my best students, I think she got a 100% on every single exam.

There was another guy in the class, probably in his mid-40’s, also aspiring to be a nurse. He asked lots of questions. I remember being pretty deep into a lecture about eye anatomy, and then him raising his hand to express confusion over which part of the eye was the iris and which was the pupil. I remember thinking I learned that in elementary school. But of course, not everyone’s educational pathway is identical. He struggled, but always asked questions to clarify his understanding.

My oldest student in the course was about 60 years old. Like the others, she wanted to be a nurse. The first day of cat dissection, she noted that she felt a bit off afterward, and then began having trouble breathing after class ended. Her classmates were concerned and drove her to the E.R. Apprently, she had an anaphylactic reaction to the latex gloves that the college supplied. But, it also sensitized her immune system. After that, she was no longer able to use any detergents with fragrances at home.

One of my students had a chihuahua that she went on 10 mile training runs with. I remember having some discussions with her about that. A few years later, when I actually had a tenure-track job at a 4-year university she showed up in one of my classes. It was cool to see her - she got what she wanted out of community college, transferred to a university, and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree.

When I talked the halls of the community college, I saw posters advertising opportunity. One of them had a picture of a girl with curly hair, who reminded me of a childhood friend. She was dressed in graduation cap and gown, and had a confident smile on her face. The sign had a caption to the effect of “A bachelor’s degree can be reality… not just a dream.”

For many of us in academic careers, we have been surrounded by others with PhD degrees for so long that college feels like the baseline, rather than the breakthrough. Perhaps we mentor grad students, or write recommendation letters for undergrads applying to professional programs.

It can be easy to think of a Bachelor’s degree as a starting point. But for many, it’s a dream. Or an achievement they never thought possible - for a variety of life circumstances.

That was what made it really fulfilling for teaching. I felt like I was making a real difference. For many, just passing the Anatomy and Physiology class wasn’t just a pre-requisite in some 8-year plan, but rather meant a new career trajectory in a higher income bracket, and a different sense of self.

For thsoe two semesters, I was part of a system that was different than a typical 4 year college. For these students, going to college wasn’t the default pathway, it was an intentional choice, sometimes later in life.

During my two semesters teaching at community college, I managed to get a tenure-track position, and was able to start that in the Fall 2007 semester. But, it’s unlikely I would have gotten that position if I didn’t have the teaching experience that I gained at community college.

Community college gives many the tools they need for the next step of their career. And, it did that for me, too - not as a student, but as an educator.

The experience taught me to confront something else: ability does not present itself in predictable packaging. The braces-and-cigarettes young mom student earned a 100. The lawyer sat next to an uncertain teenager, and both succeeded. The 60-year-old didn’t let a life-altering anaphylactic reaction stop her.

If we had judged academic potential by age or outward first impression, we likely would have guessed wrong more often than we guessed right.

There’s a song in the stage adaptation of Back to the Future called You Gotta Start Somewhere. The message is simple: no one begins at the finish line. Even the people who eventually change the world have awkward, uncertain, unimpressive starting points.

Community college is that starting point for many students. It was also that starting point for me.

Everyone in that classroom, including the instructor, was starting somewhere. We were all navigating career transitions. I was technically in charge, standing on the other side of the podium. But in reality, we were all in it together.

I took the adjunct job because I needed a line on my CV. I left with something more important: perspective. I saw that ambition doesn’t always arrive polished and that potential isn’t always packaged in prestige. That the distance between “not yet” and “not capable” is enormous.

If you’re looking for a full-time academic position, and have struggled in the job market, consider giving community college jobs a try. Yes, it may strengthen your CV. But more importantly, it may give you a different perspective on education… and reshape how you recognize potential, including your own.

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High Point University is an NCAA bracket buster.

For many people, this is the first time they’ve heard of it. Others recognize the name, but don’t know much about the place.

I worked there from 2012 through 2023, so I know it well.

I left as a tenured full professor to switch to a hybrid education model, where I now work mostly remotely. I had a good relationship with my colleagues and valued my time there.

This isn’t a hit piece, and it’s not a promotion piece. It’s also not a complete anthology of the university, its strengths, weaknesses or culture.. Instead, it’s a brief snapshot of what made High Point distinct during the time I was there—and why what’s happening in the NCAA tournament right now isn’t surprising.

My experience reflects that period (2012–2023), not necessarily the present.

But in many ways, what you’ve heard about High Point is probably true.

Nothing at High Point University is an accident or left to chance. So the fact that HPU has not only made the tournament, but also scored an upset, is no exception. This was an intentional pathway that has been developing for over a decade—and now it’s becoming visible to a much wider audience.

The President

Nido Qubein is the university president. He’s an incredibly effective communicator and a powerful leader. He’s unlike most university presidents—rather than being removed from daily campus life, he’s highly visible, and people know who he is.

• He speaks to parents and students at on-campus events

• He teaches a freshman seminar course

• He regularly goes to the cafeteria

• He speaks directly with faculty and staff

At the beginning of every semester, we had an evening dinner for faculty. I remember standing by the pool, talking with a new faculty member and Dr. Qubein for about 45 minutes. At one point, I jokingly offered to test his body fat in our lab—an offer he laughed at and declined.

Afterwards, the new faculty member said to me, “I just spent all that time talking with the president of the university? I didn’t even know who the president was at my previous institution.”

A few of us smiled and said, “Welcome to High Point.”

You would see him all over campus. And he didn’t just pass by—he engaged. He often knew something about the people he spoke with, and conversations with him tended to reveal how much thought had gone into different aspects of the university.

That level of visibility wasn’t accidental. It was part of how the place functioned.

I took a photo of him on Halloween in 2017, standing in the cafeteria handing out oversized candy bars to students.

Intentionality

EVERYTHING at HPU is intentional. Nothing was left to chance. Nothing was a brief conversation in a meeting, where somebody said “just do whatever.” Everything had a reason behind it, and probably lots of meetings, and a hierarchy of approvals.

I was walking through my academic building one day when I ran into Dr. Qubein on the stairs. He struck up a conversation, as he often did, and asked if I knew why there were large mirrors on every landing between floors. I had never thought about it.

He explained that he grew up in an unsafe environment, where being aware of your surroundings was essential. You needed to know not just what was in front of you, but what was behind you as well. His view was that students often move through campus absorbed in their own world, without that kind of awareness. The mirrors weren’t there for decoration—they were meant to reinforce that habit of paying attention to your surroundings.

Whether students consciously recognized that or not is hard to say. But the point is that those mirrors weren’t arbitrary. They reflected a broader philosophy.

Another example: every fall, we received a bonus check around Thanksgiving. Not a direct deposit—a physical check that we had to pick up and deposit ourselves. The explanation was that holding the check, seeing the amount, and taking an extra step to deposit it would make it feel more tangible—and more appreciated—than an automatic deposit.

Individually, these decisions are small. But they illustrate a pattern: the experience at HPU was designed, not improvised.

Every… single… decision… was… intentional.

The Walk Around Campus

One of the things HPU is known for is its water features. Fountains—lots of them.

After we returned to campus post-COVID in 2020, I often worked outside near the newly completed conservatory. Like much of campus, it had a clear focal point: a fountain. In fact, most places did.

The inside of the conservatory was pretty sweet also:

The campus was consistently—and deliberately—visually appealing. Carefully maintained landscaping. Statues of historical figures ranging from Galileo to Martin Luther King Jr. Classical music playing in the quad. Flags from around the world lining the walkways. It created an environment that felt calm, polished, and distinctly curated. And like everything else at HPU, that aesthetic wasn’t accidental.

In one of many casual conversations, Dr. Qubein once walked me outside and pointed to a nearby fountain. He explained why it was placed there, why it was tiered, even why it was built to that particular height. What seemed like a decorative feature had been thought through in detail.

I should also note that fountain was formerly a parking lot. Over my decade at the university, the central parking lots were gradually replaced with waterscapes and greenspace. Dr. Qubein explained that it not only made the campus look nicer as we walked through, but it was safer without a bunch of cars driving through. Everything made sense.

Individually, these choices might seem trivial. Collectively, they shape how the campus feels—and how people respond to it.

We used that intentionally when recruiting faculty. My department chair called it “the walk around campus.” We’d bring candidates through the grounds, letting them experience the environment firsthand. It was remarkably effective.

It worked on me.

When I interviewed in 2011, I was struck by how visually impressive the campus was. But I also saw substance behind it. I ultimately turned down a position at a Research 1 university because HPU offered something different—particularly in terms of teaching opportunities and research support. I was able to help design and build a sports science lab with substantial institutional investment, far beyond what I would have expected at that stage of my career.

Below is me in the result of the final product: the 15,000 square foot Human Biomechanics and Physiology Laboratory—a state of the art sports science center.

That combination—environment and resources—was compelling.

And if it’s effective for recruiting faculty, it’s even more powerful for prospective students. Especially when that experience begins the moment they arrive: a personalized parking spot, materials with their name on them, and a campus that feels designed for them.

Investing in Basketball

Back in 2013 or so, I remember interviewing a prospective faculty member for another department. They asked about the financial state of the university, and I said it was fiscally responsible. Then they asked what would matter most for increasing the university’s reputation.

I said: investing in basketball.

They didn’t love that answer. It seemed shortsighted, investing in athletics rather than academics.

But it was true.

The university had fantastic resources for students and facutly. Solid research laboratories were under development and new teaching facilities were already planned. The faculty I knew were thoughtful, engaged, and genuinely cared about students. People worked hard to provide what the university often described as an “extraordinary” experience.

But those things don’t generate attention outside the institution.

An NCAA tournament run does.

That wasn’t some hidden strategy. It came up often in conversations among faculty and staff; maybe not formally, but as a shared understanding. If the university wanted national visibility, men’s basketball was the fastest path.

And they invested accordingly.

They built a high-end arena and expanded the athletics infrastructure. They hired recognizable coaching talent. None of it was accidental.

I actually expected that investment to pay off sooner. I thought it might happen during the Tubby Smith era. Instead, it took longer. A first appearance in the tournament last year, and a first win this year.

But what’s happening now isn’t surprising, if you know High Point University.

And the key point is this: they don’t need to win a national championship.

They just need to be in the tournament and get at least one win. They’ve done that. If they get a second win, the attention will be exponential. And regardless, you'd better believe the marketing department is ready for this.

HPU know they need people talking about the university in March, when many high school seniors are making decisions and juniors are starting to look at colleges.

That kind of visibility is hard to manufacture any other way.

Get used to seeing HPU every March Madness.

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Curious about something at HPU? Ask away—I spent 11 years there. I’m not planning to get into controversies or take shots at the place, just to share how the system works, why it is so effective, and what it was like from the faculty side.

I take these requests seriously. External review is one of the few moments in academic life where someone outside the local ecosystem is asked to evaluate a career with fresh eyes. The stakes are high. The expectation, at least in theory, is honesty and external validation.

So, I gave it the most honest and thorough evaluation I could.

Teaching “Growth” Versus Teaching Quality

I was explicitly told to focus on this candidate’s teaching, as that was their primary responsibility and was the most heavily weighted component of their application.

The teaching evaluations told a familiar story: early struggles in the classroom, followed by improvement. Growth is good. We want faculty to get better at teaching over time. On paper, this looked like progress.

But when I looked more closely at the teaching materials themselves, something felt off.

Nearly all of the course content—the syllabus structure, the major assignments, even the overall pedagogical design—was material I immediately recognized. The material itself was not bad, but not anything original. I knew for a fact that it had been created by someone else years earlier and was now being reused by this individual. (Again, keeping this all anonymous, I won’t reveal the details behind my knowledge, but I was 100% certain of who created it and how it had been previously used).

Reuse itself is not a problem; academia runs on shared materials. But nowhere in the dossier was this acknowledged. There was no indication of adaptation, innovation, or even stewardship. The materials appeared to have been inherited and delivered, not developed.

Given the broader context (which I won’t detail here for anonymity’s sake), it didn’t read as collaboration or continuity. It read as minimal effort, a turn-key course this person was assigned to teach. In 5+ years of teaching the course, not a single change was made to the hand-me-down material.

The criteria asked me to evalute things like novelty, innovation, and creativity in the applicant’s profile. There was none.

When a Graduate Course Isn’t Graduate-Level

Their other primary course raised deeper concerns.

It was a graduate-level course. But the content, assessments, and expectations looked indistinguishable from an undergraduate offering—introductory material, low cognitive demand exams, and no meaningful progression beyond what students would have already encountered earlier in their undergrad pre-requisite coursework to get into this graduate program.

At first, I wondered whether this was my own bias showing. Maybe I was being overly strict. Maybe institutional norms differed.

So I did something intentionally simple: I anonymized the syllabus and exams and sent them to a trusted colleague who teaches both undergraduate and graduate versions of this subject. I gave no context. I didn’t say this was part of a promotion file. I didn’t say I had concerns.

I asked them one simple question: What level does this course appear to be?

Their assessment was unambiguous. This would be an excellent freshman- or sophomore-level course in that discipline.

I thanked them and moved on.

This candidate was going up for promotion, and was teaching grad level classes at the undergrad level.

Writing the Review

Since my task was to focus primarily on teaching rather than scholarship. That made these issues impossible to ignore. This individual had taught essentially the same small set of courses for five to six years, with little evidence of curricular development, increasing rigor, or pedagogical leadership.

In my report, I laid out my concerns carefully and professionally. I avoided inflammatory language. I documented what I observed. I acknowledged growth where it existed. I also made clear where I believed the candidate fell short of the stated criteria.

Initially, I stopped just short of a firm recommendation. I expressed reservations and concern rather than an explicit “no.” I explained the reasons behind my decision (i.e., those describe above regarding lack of indpendent development or novelty, and insufficient course rigor). I wanted to be kind and constructive, but honest. Here’s my actual text that I provided:

“Based on the materials provided in the dossier, I believe [Redacted] is an asset to [Redacted] and the [Redacted] and has demonstrated growth since joining the faculty, but does not yet qualify for promotion to [Redacted] based on the criteria provided by [Redacted] Handbook.”

I e-mailed the university representative that sent me the file, and they replied that I needed to make a definitive statement: “recommend” or “do not recommend.” After much thought, I chose the latter.

The administrator then asked for my availability to discuss my decision further. I provided it.

I never heard back.

And Then They Were Promoted

Several months later, I learned the faculty member had been promoted.

I don’t know what conversations happened internally. I don’t know what weight my review carried relative to others. I don’t know what institutional pressures or priorities shaped the final decision.

But I do know this: my honest, external assessment did not change the outcome.

What This Left Me Thinking About

This experience didn’t make me angry. It made me reflective—and a little disillusioned.

External review is often framed as a safeguard: a way to ensure standards don’t quietly drift, that internal incentives don’t overwhelm rigor, that promotion means something beyond survival and time served. It was supposed to help ensure that politics didn’t come into play, and that somebody with distance from the candidate could objectively evaluate them.

But when an external reviewer is asked to be honest, pressed to be definitive, and then effectively ignored, it raises uncomfortable questions:

• Is external review meant to inform decisions—or to legitimize decisions already made?

• Are we evaluating teaching quality, or merely documenting adequate performance over time?

• And what does “meeting criteria” mean if originality, rigor, and level appropriateness are negotiable?

I don’t regret serving as an external reviewer. I did what I was asked to do, as carefully and fairly as I could.

But I now see the role more clearly for what it often is: advisory, not determinative; symbolic as much as substantive. In many cases, the decision to promote (or not) has already been made, and external review functions less as an independent evaluation than as a procedural step that confers legitimacy. It’s a piece of data, not a determining verdict.

That realization matters—not because it makes the work meaningless, but because it changes how we should approach it.

Serving as an external reviewer is real labor. It requires judgment, care, and a willingness to say uncomfortable things in writing. It also carries moral weight, because our words can shape how standards are understood, even when they don’t alter outcomes.

If there is a lesson here, it’s not cynicism. It’s clarity. We should agree to this work with open eyes: knowing that honesty may not be rewarded, that rigor may be inconvenient, and that standards can drift quietly while procedures remain intact.

When that happens, the consequences extend far beyond a single promotion case. They shape departmental culture, signal expectations to junior faculty, and ultimately determine what kind of education students receive—often without anyone ever explicitly deciding to lower the bar.

External review won’t prevent that drift on its own. But naming its limits might.

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If this felt uncomfortably familiar, the Academic Life newsletter may be for you!

Subscriptions support honest reflections on academic work as it’s actually experienced—and sharing helps it reach the colleagues who already recognize these stories but rarely see them written down.

• Why are you so angry? (I’m not angry)

• Did you not get tenure? (I became a tenured full professor in 2018, then left that university in 2023 for my current position)

• Are you bitter? (Nope, I actually like it)

• Are you just trying to tear the system down? (Not quite… read on)

The assumption is that criticism must be rooted in resentment — that anyone who questions the culture of the academic system must be an outsider, a failed insider, or someone with an axe to grind.

But the truth is almost the opposite.

I critique academia because I care about it.
Because I was trained by it.
Because it shaped how I think.
Because I still believe in what it is supposed to be.
Because I see it’s value, and how effective the system can be when it functions well.

People are losing trust in academia — questioning the value of a college education, and the integrity of institutions and the people behind them. And, in my opinion, some of these questions are fair, and the academic system has, in mnay was self-inflected these wounds.

Watching something you highly value slowly degrade from the inside is more painful than watching something you never believed in at all.

That is why I sometimes write about academic dysfunction — because I care, and I want the system to do better.

Academia Was Supposed to Be Different

At its best, academia is one of humanity’s noblest institutions. It is supposed to be a place where curiosity is protected, where pursuit of truth matters more than status, and where knowledge advances not because it is profitable, but because it is valued.

That ideal still attracts deeply thoughtful, principled people. Many of my colleagues are brilliant, generous, and genuinely motivated by the desire to understand the world and make it better… and to teach students who are eager to learn and pave their own bright future. I’m truly fortunate to be surrounded by great people.

But the broader academic SYSTEM we all work within increasingly rewards something else.

It rewards output over insight (i.e., publish or perish culture).
Visibility over validity (i.e., constant self-promotion and social media presence)
Career advancement over intellectual honesty.

And slowly, subtly, that changes behavior and culture.

Not because people are evil.
But because incentives shape individual conduct and institutional norms.

[To be clear, when I refer to “we” here, I mean academic faculty collectively—not any individual, department, or institution. I respect and genuinely enjoy working with my colleagues, leadership, and university. The concerns I’m raising are about the broader academic system, which has been slowly eroding over time and deserves honest scrutiny.]

The Incentive Problem No One Wants to Admit

Academia now runs on metrics that were never meant to become ends in themselves: publication counts, teaching evaluation metrics, impact factors, grant dollars, h-indices, institutional rankings.

None of these are inherently evil. But when careers, salaries, and survival depend on them, they distort decision-making.

You start asking not “Is this accurate?” but “Can this be published?”
Not “Is this important research?” but “Will this get funded?”
Not “What’s the most rigorous approach?” but “What’s the fastest path to a positive result?”
Not “Did the students learn what they needed?” but “How were the teaching evaluations?”

That’s not corruption in the cinematic sense. It’s far more mundane — and far more dangerous.

It’s rational behavior in a misaligned system. It sometimes leads to a scientific literature that looks productive while quietly becoming less reliable. And, sometimes it leads to educators who choose to be popular rather than be rigorous.

To be clear, integrity and success are not opposites or mutually exclusive. Many academics embody both. But, the incentives are increasingly misaligned in ways that encourage people to prioritize what advances their careers over what best advances knowledge. That’s not a failure of character — it’s a predictable response to the system as it currently operates.

Why This Matters Beyond Academia

People often assume that these problems are “insider” issue. That they only matter to professors arguing in obscure journals.

But academic research doesn’t stay in academia.

It shapes medical guidelines.
It informs public policy.
It influences how billions of dollars are spent.
It shapes what journalists report and what the public believes.

When flawed incentives distort the production of knowledge, the consequences don’t stay on campus. They ripple outward — into clinics, courtrooms, classrooms, and living rooms.

Even if 95% of research is sound, and 95% of academic faculty act with political neutrality and high personal integrity, the remaining 5% can still inflict disproportionate reputational damage on the entire system. When even a small number of individuals are incentivized to stretch the truth, omit contradictory findings, or, at the extreme, fabricate data, trust erodes broadly. People begin to wonder not just what is unreliable, but what else might be.

That’s why this isn’t an ivory tower squabble. It’s a public issue.
And it’s why we need to talk about it — honestly, openly, and with the goal of fixing what’s broken rather than pretending it isn’t there.

If you’re interested in how these incentive problems show up in real research—how seemingly rigorous studies can go wrong, or how flawed incentives quietly shape published conclusions—I explore those questions in more depth in my other newsletter, Beyond the Abstract. That’s where I unpack specific case studies in health research, sports science, and research integrity, and trace how systemic pressures translate into real-world claims and consequences.

Countering Conformity

I am seeing more people from within the academic system (or perhaps, who were part of it, then left) critiquing academic culture. My goal isn’t just to join a pile-on, but rather to facilitate constructive crticism, that perhaps, just perhaps, may have a meanginful positive impact.

If academia — or any institution — only wants affirmation, then what it really wants is not truth, but comfort. And comfort, over time, is how good systems decay without ever noticing they’re sick. A culture full of yes-men doesn’t produce excellence; it produces fragility. When everyone nods along, problems don’t disappear — they metastasize. Bad ideas go unchallenged. Weak evidence hardens into “consensus.” Over time, the system stops self-correcting.

Likewise, complaining doesn’t do much either. I’m not here to vent, I’m here to identify the bigger-picture issues in the system in the hope that we can better recognize them and then improve upon them. I don’t expect the academic system will ever be perfect, but we can improve our reputation, internal culture, effectiveness, and integrity.

Healthy systems need friction. They need people who are willing to ask the uncomfortable question, to say “this doesn’t make sense,” or “this feels wrong,” or “are we sure we’re not fooling ourselves here?” Not contrarians for sport, but people who care enough to risk having an unpopular opinion.

Real care sometimes sounds like frustration.

This Isn’t About Tearing Down. It’s About Course Correction.

Critique is not nihilism.
Transparency is not betrayal.
Accountability is not hostility.

The goal is not to burn the institution down, but to remind it what it’s supposed to be for.

If academia wants public trust, it has to earn it. Or, perhaps earn it back.
If it wants authority, it must deserve it.
If it wants to claim moral high ground, it has to act like it.

That starts by being honest about where incentives have gone wrong — and by being willing to fix them.

I’m not writing from the outside throwing stones. I’m writing from the inside, saying: we can do better than this. And we should.

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What do you think? Is the academic system functioning well as a whole? Is it flawed but fixable? Or beyond repair? Share your thoughts!

To advance their own interests, they’re more willing to manipulate others, cut corners and even break laws.

That realization is what prompted me to write a letter-to-the-editor response, aimed at helping readers see how the narcissism Grant describes often manifests in academia. As mentioned in my first post, I received an overwhelming response from readers, many of whom expressed gratitude that someone had publicly articulated dynamics they had experienced but rarely saw acknowledged. This essay expands on that response by providing broader context for what I was describing.

Academia is Often Misundersood

One of the most persistent misunderstandings about academic power is the belief that outcomes reflect intent.

When people hear stories about unhealthy departments or difficult colleagues, the assumption is often that someone must be acting in bad faith—that administrators are careless, committees are malicious, cronies help each other out, or institutions are indifferent to harm. Sometimes that’s true. More often, it’s not.

More often, the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do—for better, or worse—by rewarding what is most easily measured and legally defensible.

The Criteria Are Not a Secret

Tenure and promotion guidelines are usually explicit. They have to be. Ambiguity invites lawsuits, grievances, and institutional risk.

At most universities, faculty are evaluated on three pillars:

• Scholarship

• Teaching

• Service

The relative weighting varies by institution, but the structure is consistent. (For example, research intensive universities may place more/most emphasis on scholarship, while teaching-focused universities place more… teaching).

These criteria exist to ensure that universities retain faculty who contribute meaningfully to research and education. On paper, this makes sense. And in many cases, it works.

But what’s striking—once you’ve served on enough committees—is not what these criteria include, but what they systematically leave out.

The Missing Category

There is no formal category for how someone treats others.

Not for mentorship quality.
Not for collegiality.
Not for whether a person consistently creates an environment others dread.

Occasionally, institutions gesture toward this with language about “professionalism” or “citizenship,” but these concepts are rarely defined clearly enough to carry evaluative weight. When they do appear, they tend to be subordinate to the main criteria—or invoked only when behavior becomes extreme.

Most of the time, they remain background noise.

When Academic Excellence and Cultural Harm Coexist

I’ve sat on tenure and promotion committees across multiple departments, in different roles, and reviewed countless dossiers. I’ve seen cases where the decision was easy—strong scholarship, effective teaching, genuine service.

And I’ve seen cases where the discomfort wasn’t about competence at all.

There was one faculty member—call them “Dr. Loud,”—who met every formal criterion convincingly. Their publication record was strong. Their teaching evaluations were solid. Their service contributions were real.

They were also widely described—quietly, privately—as a bully. Dr. Loud was consistently condescending and dismissive of colleagues. They used behavioral tactics to dominate conversations, advance their own interests, and ensure outcomes favored them—even when it meant someone else getting shafted. They regularly talked over others, made openly snide remarks about other faculty members in meetings while those colleagues were present, and justified their behavior by pointing to their metrics of success—publications, grants, and visibility—as evidence that they were “worth it.”

More than one person confided that working with them felt demoralizing and corrosive to the department’s climate.

During a formal review, Dr. Loud spoke down to committee members, criticized institutional leadership, and framed themselves as uniquely competent in a system holding them back. Dr. Loud openly described how their success across the three pillars was despite the institution’s structure and leadership, not becasue of it.

But, none of that was technically relevant. Dr. Loud also wasn’t doing anything illegal—no sexual harassment, no threats, no coercion. There were no specific policy violations to point to. They did not cross bright lines; they lived comfortably in the gray zone. Dr. Loud was not abusive in ways that triggered formal sanctions. They were simply obnoxious, domineering, and relentlessly self-advocating—often at the expense of others.

The committee was not tasked with evaluating whether Dr. Loud was pleasant, supportive, or constructive. It was charged with evaluating scholarship, teaching, and service—and by those criteria, the case for Dr. Loud was strong.

So Dr. Loud was promoted. After all, students were learning and knowledge was advancing—even if the department’s culture was quietly deteriorating.

This Wasn’t a Failure of Judgment

It’s tempting to read stories like this as moral failures—cowardice, indifference, or complicity.

But that framing misses something important.

The committee didn’t ignore the behavior. We noticed it. We discussed it. Many found it troubling. But the evaluative framework gave us little room to act on it without exposing the institution to claims of subjectivity, inconsistency, or retaliation. Legally, the university would not have a leg to stand on if it had not promoted Dr. Loud.

In other words, the system didn’t fail despite good intentions. It functioned exactly as designed.

The Reason for Objectivity

Dr. Loud was a poor cultural fit—but the very objectivity of promotion evaluation is meant to guard against assessing something as subjective as “cultural fit.” Imagine a different case: a scholar with eqaully strong academic credentials who clashes with leadership over politics, ideology, or institutional priorities. Without strict objectivity, that person could be denied advancement under the vague banner of “fit.”

That safeguard is necessary. It protects academic freedom and prevents ideological purges. But it also creates a loophole—one that allows individuals who consistently bully colleagues and degrade departmental culture to advance, as long as their behavior remains technically permissible and their outputs remain strong.

Promotion of the Loudest

I should add that Dr. Loud was not representative of the typical faculty member under review. They were memorable precisely because of their abrasive behavior; that level of hostility was not the norm.

The problem was that there was no clear mechanism to rein Dr. Loud in—or to exclude them from advancement. Their tactics were aggressive enough to confer a competitive advantage, yet subtle enough to avoid triggering formal complaints or findings of a hostile work environment.

The combination of being highly accomplished on paper, relentlessly self-promotional, and openly dismissive of others placed Dr. Loud in a strong position. By the very criteria used to evaluate success, they could credibly present themselves as superior candidates for future promotion and leadership roles.

The Incentive Problem

When advancement depends almost exclusively on visible outputs and objective metrics, people learn what matters.

They learn that being productive counts more than being constructive.
That confidence carries more weight than restraint.
That poor behavior is tolerated as long as it’s paired with measurable success.

They learn that bullying—if performed with plausible deniability—can be an effective strategy. That talking over others, belittling colleagues, and aggressively self-advocating are acceptable so long as they stop short of policy violations or legally protected categories.

This doesn’t require narcissism to begin with. It selects for it.

Over time, the system disproportionately rewards people who are comfortable asserting their own importance, dominating shared spaces, and interpreting pushback as obstruction. Those traits become adaptive—not because they are virtuous, but because they are effective.

Why This Is Hard to Fix

Institutions struggle to address this problem because the solution is not simple.

Evaluating culture is harder than counting publications. Assessing mentorship quality is messier than tallying grants. And introducing subjective criteria raises legitimate concerns about bias, inconsistency, and misuse.

So universities default to what is legible and defensible—even when it’s incomplete.

The result is a quiet tradeoff: institutional clarity at the expense of human cost.

What This Explains

This framework helps explain why certain patterns persist:

Why people with strong track records but corrosive behavior continue to advance… some to institutional leadership positions.
Why departments sometimes feel healthier despite the system, not because of it.
Why junior faculty and trainees learn quickly which behaviors are rewarded—and which concerns are best kept private.

It also explains why individuals who value collaboration and humility often self-select out of certain environments, leaving behind systems that gradually amplify the very traits they claim not to value.

To be clear, this is not universal. I’ve worked under many excellent leaders who are not only highly competent, but who consistently demonstrate humility, gratitude, generosity, and a genuine collaborative spirit. Those environments do exist, and they matter (and I am very fortunate to have found them throughout my career).

But for those who wonder how narcissistic or corrosive personalities sometimes advance—or why they can feel disproportionately visible in leadership roles—the framework described here offers a plausible explanation. It’s not that such behavior is universally rewarded, but that, in certain systems, it is rarely penalized—and that distinction matters.

Seeing the System Clearly

None of this means academia is irredeemable. It means it is human.

Institutions respond to incentives. People adapt to what is rewarded. Cultures emerge from repeated decisions made under constraint.

If we want better academic environments, we have to be honest about what our systems measure—and what they ignore. Not to assign blame, but to understand how outcomes are produced.

You can’t fix what you refuse to see.

And you can’t improve a system by pretending its results are accidental.

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If you’ve witnessed situations where formal excellence coexisted with cultural harm—or where incentives shaped behavior in unexpected ways—I’m interested in hearing how it played out.

I didn’t lack material. I lacked a place to say it out loud.

Academia is a strange environment in which to speak openly. It celebrates critical thinking and free speech in theory, but often rewards caution in practice. Many of the things people privately acknowledge—about incentives, power, silence, and culture—are rarely discussed publicly by those who remain inside the system.

A recent NY Times op-ed by about narcissistic leaders prompted me to reflect on how these dynamics play out in academia. I’d been thinking about these issues for years, but the essay provided an opportunity to respond publicly. I wrote a letter to the editor about how academic systems incentivize self-promotion—and how those incentives can cascade into problems ranging from egotistic leadership to compromised research integrity.

What I didn’t expect was the response.

I received e-mails and LinkedIn DM’s from senior faculty, graduate students, and readers entirely outside academia. Again and again, people said the same thing: this feels familiar. Not provocative. Not surprising. Familiar.

That response made something clear. These conversations aren’t new—but they are usually private.

So I’m starting Academic Life to continue them.

I’d already been planning to launch a newsletter focused on academic culture sometime later this year, as a complement to my science-focused Substack, Beyond the Abstract. But the interest sparked by the NY Times letter made the timing obvious. The need was already there.

What This Newsletter Is

Academic Life is a series of reflective essays about what it’s really like to work inside academia—its strengths, its failures, and the incentive structures that quietly shape behavior over time.

Some of what I’ll write will be analytical: how tenure decisions are made, what institutions actually reward, how risk aversion creeps in, and why certain patterns persist even when everyone agrees they’re suboptimal. I already discuss incentives that shape research integrity in Beyond the Abstract (as one example, this essay on p-hacking), but this will focus more on the cultural aspect than the research itself.

Some of it will be personal: stories from graduate school, the job market, committee rooms, and everyday academic life. Not every story will have a tidy lesson. Some exist simply to document experiences that many people recognize but rarely feel comfortable talking about—especially those navigating unhealthy or demoralizing environments.

And some stories will be neither analytical nor instructive, but human: awkward moments, absurd situations, or quietly revealing episodes that say something about academic culture without needing to be moralized.

Why Critique Academia?

I’ve experienced both unhealthy and genuinely supportive academic environments, and I don’t take the latter for granted. I’ve been fortunate to work in departments filled with thoughtful, collaborative colleagues, and you won’t hear me criticizing my past or present departmental coworkers here. They are excellent people, and I’m genuinely grateful to be where I am.

At the same time, my 20+ year career pathway has brought me into contact with the broader academic system—through graduate training, hiring processes, committees, reviews, and institutional interactions well beyond my own department. This also extends to conferences and publishing systems. In those settings, I’ve seen examples of deeply dysfunctional environments, poor leadership, and behavior that is corrosive but technically permissible. Those experiences aren’t reflections on the people I work with day to day; they are reflections on how the system operates more broadly.

The problem is not that academia is uniquely broken. It’s that certain incentive structures quietly reward behaviors that undermine its stated values—and pretending otherwise helps no one.

If academia wants public trust, it has to earn it (or earn it back). If it wants authority, it must deserve it. That begins with being honest about where incentives go wrong—and how those incentives shape the experiences of the people working within the system.

Who This Is For

This newsletter is for several kinds of readers:

• Graduate students and early-career academics who feel demoralized, uncertain, or stuck, and who need reassurance that what they’re experiencing is real—and survivable.

• Seasoned academics who value healthy cultures and are curious how others have navigated the system, made decisions, avoided bad environments, or helped shape better ones.

• Faculty and administrators who want to understand how institutional incentives actually land on people over time.

• Readers outside academia who are simply curious about how universities really function behind the scenes—and who recognize similar dynamics in their own professions.

You don’t need to work in academia to recognize these patterns. Universities are not morally unique institutions; they are human ones.

What This Is Not

This is not a how-to guide for climbing the academic ladder (though practical advice may appear along the way).

It is not a grievance blog.

And it is not a memoir.

I remove unnecessary identifying details, such as names and gender, to avoid gratuitous specificity. These essays do not describe illegal conduct, policy violations, or matters intended to damage anyone’s career.

In some cases, professional context is necessary for a story to be intelligible. While that context may be familiar to those already aware of it, the purpose is simply to describe experiences and environments as they were encountered—not to single out individuals.

These essays are about systems and cultures, not about outing, accusing, or adjudicating the behavior of specific people.

When I write about unhealthy or demoralizing environments that I have been exposed to, it’s not to relive them or to shame anyone involved. It’s to make those experiences easier to recognize—for people who may be encountering something similar—and to offer reassurance that such environments exist, that they are not inevitable, and that they do not have to define the rest of a career. When useful, these accounts may also prompt thoughtful discussion about how to navigate professionally challenging situations and toxic environments.

Accuracy matters to me. I’m not interested in embellishment or dramatic reconstruction. These essays aim to be honest rather than sensational.

A Final Note

Some of the stories I’ll tell are uncomfortable. Others are affirming. A few are simply strange or funny. Not all of them point to solutions, while others do.

But if you’re reading this while feeling trapped, discouraged, or questioning your future, I want you to know this: difficult environments do not define the rest of your career. Survival is possible. So is escape to other careers. So is finding places where integrity and collaboration actually matter.

Academic Life exists to make those realities visible—not to assign blame, but to understand the system well enough to make it better.

And if you’re trying to enter academia—applying for faculty positions, facing rejections, or struggling with opaque barriers—I’ve been there, and I’ve watched many others go through the same thing. I hope you’ll find something here that helps, even if it’s just perspective.

If that sounds like a conversation you want to be part of, you’re welcome here.

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Comments are open. If you have thoughts, questions, or experiences you’re willing to share, please do!