Ozlam Fisek is an independent analyst in Florida, with an interest in documenting trends in academic publishing and an avid fan of PubPeer.
Federal agencies pay for research at colleges and universities. Those institutions also charge overhead—called Facilities and Administrative (F&A) or indirect costs—by billing the agency at a fixed rate applied to the direct costs. Arizona State University (ASU) charges 57 percent for F&A. When a professor spends $100,000 of grant money on direct costs, ASU collects […]
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I wrote an article for Minding the Campus a while back titled “Harvard’s Plagiarism Review Process is a Joke.” The article mentioned, in passing, that Harvard doesn’t have a faculty senate and doesn’t have a chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Without a senate, the faculty have no formal representation to approve […]
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Harvard recently submitted an obfuscated and unsigned summary of its plagiarism “review process” to Representative Virginia Foxx’s congressional committee, Committee for Education and the Workforce. The document is a mishmash of the terms: “investigation,” “inquiry,” and “assessment.” Harvard had previously circulated a draft of an interim policy on research misconduct. There is no indication of […]
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Colleges and K-12 schools penalize students for written work that copies from a source without quotation marks and citations. But many colleges provide wiggle room for faculty. Harvard allowed its former president, Claudine Gay, to correct the record by adding quotation marks and citations long after papers were published. Imagine a school being unwilling to […]
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