In a recent article, I described how Arizona State University (ASU) refused to investigate plagiarism by its administrator, Sethuraman Panchanathan, while he was serving as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Panchanathan later resigned unexpectedly and returned to ASU—just in time for the university to sue the NSF to preserve its high rate of […]
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On Wednesday, June 25, 2025, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced the relocation of HUD headquarters to Alexandria, Virginia, where National Science Foundation (NSF) staff are currently sited. As NBC4 Washington reported, NSF employees promptly staged a protest, filling the hallways in Alexandria, chanting, shaking their fists, and forcing HUD’s press announcement […]
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On April 9th, I reported that more than two dozen articles by National Science Foundation (NSF) director Sethuraman Panchanathan had been called out for verbatim copying without citing sources, some of which were copyrighted. Two weeks later, on April 24th, Panchanathan announced his departure from NSF, but did not provide a reason. He returned to […]
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I have previously reported through two Minding the Campus articles (here and here) that the National Science Foundation (NSF) director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, published a paper through the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) that copied an uncited source previously published through the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In addition to copying from IEEE for […]
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My recent article on Minding the Campus examined a paper by National Science Foundation (NSF) director Sethuraman Panchanathan, published by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). ACM refused to investigate Panchanathan’s uncited copying from a paper published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The PubPeer website reported that Panchanathan wrote an October […]
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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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The language and tone of the recent U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation report, “D.E.I. Division. Extremism. Ideology. How the Biden-Harris NSF Politicized Science,” is very partisan, which makes the report less persuasive than it otherwise might be. Still, the report identifies and criticizes a growing failure of objectivity by the National Science […]
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