BY HANK REICHMAN

What might celebrated incidents of “academic misconduct,” specifically plagiarism and falsifications, tell us about the crisis of academia?  Recent events offer some suggestions.

Jason Arday, who days earlier had resigned as professor of sociology at Cambridge University in the wake of credible charges of plagiarism and fabrication, was found dead August 14.  When hired in 2023 he had been Cambridge’s youngest Black professor.  Although the evidence of Arday’s wrongdoing was persuasive (a good summary is here), much of the campaign against him was exaggerated, mean-spirited, and concerned less (if at all) with issues of scholarly integrity than with what the Cambridge chancellor would call “a racist feeding frenzy.”  Indeed, Arday’s initial public accuser, Nathan Cofnas, who was himself dismissed from Cambridge, is a self-described “race realist” who has argued that in a meritocracy, black people “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”  The insufferably “heterodox” Steven Pinker even managed to use the tragedy to promote his latest book.

Although he was undeniably a victim, the campaign against Arday was more about Cambridge than it was about him or his flawed scholarship.  The process that led to his appointment could easily be portrayed as a caricature of DEI gone wild, although that reading is complicated a bit by the fact that two finalists passed over for the position in favor of Arday were themselves women of color.  And while the university was far too slow to initiate the investigation that led to his resignation, it had also not done much to assist him in fending off the inevitable threats and harassment that come with campaigns of this sort.  It does appear that in its eagerness to hire a potential star and simultaneously demonstrate a commitment to diversity, Cambridge had been, at minimum, too careless and too readily deceived, leaving Arday, in the words of one scholar, “a pawn whose ambition made him vulnerable.”

Just three days before Arday’s death Ward Churchill died of natural causes at age 78.  Two decades ago Churchill was at the center of a controversy not dissimilar to that surrounding Arday.  As a tenured professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Churchill had, in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, published an essay online in which he referred to those who perished in the twin towers as “little Eichmanns.”  The piece attracted almost no attention until, two years later Churchill was invited to speak at Hamilton College and a conservative student activist unearthed it.  Soon calls for Churchill’s dismissal, including from Colorado’s governor, mushroomed.  The comments, while distasteful to most, were clearly protected by both academic freedom, bearing no relevance to Churchill’s fitness for his position, and by the First Amendment.  But a committee was empowered to investigate longstanding and hitherto ignored complaints that Churchill had plagiarized some of his writings and falsified some of his research on Native Americans.  In 2007, the committee found him guilty of misconduct and in a 3-2 vote recommended dismissal, which the university acted on.

The violations were relatively minor and certainly not worthy of dismissal.  Churchill charged that the committee had been stacked against him and that the action was simply a pretext for retaliation against his 9/11 essay.  A thorough investigation by the Colorado Conference of the AAUP agreed.*  Churchill then filed suit and a jury ruled that his political views had been a “substantial or motivating” factor in his dismissal, and that the university had not shown that he would have been dismissed for his academic misconduct had his extramural expression been void of controversy.  But because Churchill had only sought reinstatement and pressed no claim for financial damages, the jury granted just a symbolic one dollar award.  The judge, however, ruled that he could not order reinstatement as the jury had awarded because that would violate the university’s autonomy and institutional academic freedom.  The appellate court and Colorado Supreme Court agreed.  Churchill never again held a university position.

Now compare the Arday tragedy and the Churchill dismissal with the case of biologist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who was forced to resign as president of Stanford University in 2023 after an investigation found data manipulation in his past research labs and concluded that he failed to correct the scientific record adequately.  Tessier-Lavigne’s downfall was almost entirely a result of intrepid investigative reporting by a first-year student journalist at the Stanford Daily, Theo Baker, who has recounted the story in a best-selling page-turner of a book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University.  The book is about more than the Tessier-Lavigne case, serving as a powerful condemnation of the workings of what has been called “academic capitalism” (not Baker’s term, however) at one of the country’s premier research institutions.  (It is also an often charming coming-of-age story).**

Both Arday and Churchill were scholars of race and ethnicity accused of minor violations in works of at best modest importance in their fields.  Tessier-Lavigne was — and remains — a preeminent research scientist, who served as president of Rockefeller University before moving to Stanford.  In 2009 he had published a study on Alzheimer’s disease that was widely ballyhooed as a game-changing breakthrough and made its author wealthy.  Yet its results could not be replicated and there was growing evidence that images central to its findings had been improperly manipulated, even photoshopped.  As Baker writes, “with the number of visible issues, the inaccuracy of its findings, the false portrayal of reagents used, and the lack of any original data to back the study up, there was just too much against it.”  Still, it would not be until five months after Tessier-Lavigne’s ouster that “the study was formally purged from the scientific record.”

Ultimately, my reporting and the work of volunteer sleuths resulted in nearly a dozen studies receiving post-publication notices.  Tessier-Lavigne was forced to retract four papers on which he was senior author and pledged to correct a fifth.  This was a rare act for a researcher of his stature; across scientific publishing, just four studies are retracted for every ten thousand published.  Papers that had sat for years with unaddressed issues were finally cleaned up.  The process continues even now.  In January 2026, Nature appended an Editorial Expression of Concern to another study Tessier-Lavigne oversaw in 1999.

In short, for years, even decades, until a precocious, plucky and dogged student journalist took up the case the scientific and academic establishment dragged its feet and even consciously concealed evidence of fraud in critical scientific and medical research by a “scholar” of wide repute who had risen to the very apex of his field (and become wealthy in the process).

Writing in an op-ed for the New York Times about the Arday case after his resignation but before his death, the liberal but “heterodox” journalist Jesse Singal opined:

This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics.  The available evidence strongly suggests that, when faced with the allegations against Mr. Arday years ago, Cambridge and the other academic institutions connected to him responded not by genuinely investigating them with integrity and transparency, but by acting in ways that helped him avoid scrutiny.  Their decisions were both wrong and further damaged the reputation of higher education at a time when it has come under withering and sometimes unfair attack. . . .

In this case, perhaps what should be critically examined is how academia treats its stars — especially those who come to symbolize important new ideas or social-justice movements that bolster the reputations of their home universities.

Singal approvingly cites the April report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which claimed that “declining trust” in higher education “must be addressed,” and acknowledged that “those of us in higher education have too often resisted calls to critically examine our own institutions, professions, and modes of thought.”  But can’t something similar to Singal’s description be said about Stanford and Tessier-Lavigne?  And isn’t research fraud in the biological sciences at least as dangerous, if not much more so, as petty plagiarism and ridiculous fabrications in the humanities and social sciences?  Yet though the Tessier-Lavigne disclosures have led to increased attention to misconduct in scientific research, the attention paid to that problem remains minimal when compared to the sorts of scandals repeatedly uncovered, if not outright manufactured, in disciplines coded “left” and among scholars of color and women.

Consider too the differential consequences of such controversies.  Arday, sadly, is dead, possibly at his own hand.  Churchill never taught again.  Yet, according to Baker, here is where Tessier-Lavigne’s career now stands:

Four days after his resignation was announced, in mid-July 2023, Tessier-Lavigne closed on a 7,600-square-foot mansion in Atherton, the most expensive zip code in America.  “Tucked away in a private oasis, this Atherton estate offers a secure and quiet location,” a listing website proclaimed, advertising the estate now valued at roughly $10 million.  It came with a Dolby movie theater, nine bathrooms, and a sauna, and was purchased under an LLC created a few weeks before the resignation.

Nine months later, MTL announced that he was cofounding a new company, called Xaira, and that he would serve as CEO.

To get started, Tessier-Lavigne’s new company raised $1 billion.

Google tells me that Xaira Therapeutics is now valued at $2.7 billion.  And, yeah, Tessier-Lavigne also remains a member of the Stanford faculty.  His university website makes no mention of the scandal that led to his ouster.

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* The Churchill case was controversial in the AAUP.  The national office did not take up Churchill’s defense nor was an investigation initiated, according to the AAUP president at the time because the Colorado scholar did not request assistance, a contention that Churchill disputed.  In April 2009, the AAUP Council passed this resolution: “We believe the disputes over Ward Churchill’s publications should have been allowed to work themselves out in traditional scholarly venues, not referred to disciplinary hearings.  We believe Churchill should be reinstated to his faculty position at the University of Colorado.”  In 2010, a prominent AAUP member wrote a lengthy piece in the Journal of Academic Freedom on the case, to which Churchill himself responded in that journal the following year in an equally lengthy Introduction to the Colorado Conference report.

** Baker is the son of two prominent journalists at the New York Times, but he has denied that they provided any assistance to his work, a claim that seems accurate.  The book’s broader argument is that Stanford “has made a Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley, one that has enabled its meteoric ascent and allowed for its corruption. . . .   But too often the integration of the university and the tech world has proven exploitative and tolerant of misdeeds.  Stanford’s most singular attribute is also its gravest flaw.”

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March 2025.  He is a member of AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance and President of the At-Large Chapter.