One of the more disturbing outcomes of the late 2023 congressional investigation into the prevalence of antisemitism on America’s college and university campuses was the discovery of widespread plagiarism. No sooner was it clear that Harvard president Claudine Gay may have committed publishing piracy nearly 50 times over the course of her career when stories began breaking about the frequency of similar transgressions at Columbia, Brown, and elsewhere.
Yet as gravely as plagiarism is (or at least should be) treated within scholarly circles, its impact is typically limited to distorting a reader’s perception of who first expressed some important idea or observation, not the accuracy of the secretly copied material itself. It would be far more consequential if academics were either intentionally or unconsciously misrepresenting facts that could seriously mislead average citizens as well as compromise the usefulness of contemplated social programs. Unfortunately, this later intellectual sin is far more common than generally known.
Scientific Studies Are Not As Accurate As They Seem
In 2005, a Stanford University professor named John Ioannidis released the results of his investigation into what had previously been considered an unimportant technical problem known as “experimental irreproducibility” — the inability to reproduce the results of a published scientific study. Before then, it had been assumed that the reported outcome of any experiment or research project conducted by a credentialled academic using conventional scientific methods was true and therefore did not need independent verification. (READ MORE: Higher Ed Can’t Study Art Because It Drained the Brains)
What Ioannides documented was that the results of many well-known scientific and medical studies could not be replicated when study conditions were rerun. In other words, the research conclusions were either not true or wildly misleading, even though they had long been regarded as “settled science” both by the academic community and the larger public.
Ever since Ioannidis’ surprising revelation, other reviews of published scientific research by such respected organizations as the medical journal Lancet and the Federal Reserve indicate that as much as half of what we think we know from modern science is likely false. In 2015, for example, Science magazine tried to replicate the findings of 100 articles published in three prominent psychological journals and found that only 36 of their reruns could reproduce the predicted results. Even more astonishingly, when the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to rerun 53 “landmark” studies in hematology and oncology, the firm’s scientists could confirm only six of the reported findings.
This inability to verify reported research outcomes is especially common in the social sciences, where the difficulty of making precise measurements allows both experimenter bias and bad study design to have a greater influence than they would in a physics or chemistry laboratory. In other words, much of what people now think they know about economics, mental health, welfare, education, criminology, race relations, and other subjects relevant to their everyday lives is likely untrue.
Among today’s widely held “truths,” supposedly proven by social science but which cannot be documented, include the assumptions that women do poorly in math because they fear being seen as nerdy (“stereotype threat”), that people can be influenced by unconscious stimuli (“social priming”), and that hugging others makes them more trusting and cooperative (“oxytocin effect”). Manhattan Institute fellow Heather MacDonald laments the “multimillion-dollar consulting industry” which has been built around helping potential work hires, students, police, and others overcome their lifetime accumulation of unfairly discriminatory attitudes — even though the psychology experiments establishing the existence (let alone prevalence) of this problem have yet to be validated.
Leftist Media Ignores Inaccuracies For Good Reason
Although news stories about experimental irreproducibility have occasionally surfaced in the mainstream media, it is not hard to understand why a generally left-leaning press has largely ignored both the extent of the problem and, even more importantly, its policy implications. While some inaccurate studies are a result of efforts to boost a flagging academic career with the publication of a seemingly significant discovery, the misleading information contained in today’s research literature is not random. It’s slanted in support of progressive causes. (READ MORE: Religious Instruction During School Day Is Protected for Oklahoma Students)
This left-wing bias stems in part from the progressive political atmosphere at major universities and non-profit organizations where most scientific studies are conducted. More than 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Plato promoted the utility of what he called the “noble lie,” a myth designed to persuade skeptical populations that they should follow the wisdom of their better-educated leaders. Today, as Princeton’s Emeritus Professor of Physics William Happer has argued, too many research institutions are contaminated by their own version of Plato’s noble lie — the belief that the social values of Ph.Ds. are “far superior to those in the basket of deplorables.”
But a much bigger reason for so much misleading science, as the late social critic Irving Kristol first noted, is that most academic research is funded by federal and state agencies with a constant need to demonstrate the value of the liberal social programs they administer. At the same time, the scientists these bureaucracies subsidize have a vested economic interest in telling their sponsors what they want to hear. The result is the research equivalent of what President Eisenhower talked about when he warned of a military-industrial complex — or, in this case, an “academic-bureaucratic complex.”
As National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood likes to put it: while “not all irreproducible research is progressive advocacy [and] not all progressive advocacy is irreproducible, the intersection between the two is very large … [and] a map of much that is wrong with modern science.”
Indeed, it is only the mutual backscratching of government and academia that can explain how, by 2014, Washington had spent more than $22 trillion — over half the current national debt — on President Johnson’s largely unsuccessful Great Society programs. Or how decades of education research could produce an American K-12 school system that consistently underperforms relative to other industrial countries. Or why public services in states like New York and California, which rely heavily on social science research to justify how they operate, are viewed by residents as vastly inferior to those in “less enlightened” states.
The Problem May Be Willful Ignorance
The interesting question, of course, is why so many failed applications of progressively slanted research have not inspired more academics to question their left-wing convictions. Are America’s intellectual elite really so corrupt as to care only about landing the next lucrative government contract? Or, as Thomas Kuhn suggests in his classic sociology of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, do impressive credentials obscure the fact that most professors are not very open-minded? Or even very smart.
Perhaps the best answer was suggested by the muckraking social reformer Upton Sinclair more than a century ago when he famously observed that, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Sinclair was not implying that the willful ignorance of truth stems from greed as much as from some group becoming too comfortable with an intellectually biasing economic arrangement — in the case of today’s researchers, with their dependence on government subsidies.
Whatever the explanation, correcting for politically biased research will not be easy, for the solution lies not in rejecting science but in overcoming the academic community’s resistance to more rigorous study procedures, such as making both raw data and protocols publicly available. Certainly requiring more rigorous statistical methods and even encouraging the independent verification of study outcomes before publication, not after. (READ MORE: Universities Must End DEI and Implement DEI)
One indication of how difficult this will be occurred in February 2020, when the Independent Institute organized a conference on ways to tighten up social science experiments. Two graduate students who had been set to speak on the subject had to withdraw after threats of career sabotage from other academics, and many of the commonsense recommendations that came out of the gathering were widely attacked as everything from white supremacy to climate change denialism.
Hopefully, the public’s growing displeasure with intellectual narrowness and antisemitic behavior on America’s campuses will soften such opposition to needed study reforms. If nothing else, it sends a message that citizens are increasingly suspicious of what the academy declares to be true, and that it is time for researchers to get back to the job of discovering reality, not trying to control it.
