The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research -- The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research -- The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

I've often heard about Ike warning of the "military-industrial complex," but never knew that he warned about federal money corrupting science in the same speech. Edward Archer writes:

"...in his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the pursuit of government grants would have a corrupting influence on the scientific community. He feared that while American universities were 'historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,' the pursuit of taxpayer monies would become "a substitute for intellectual curiosity' and lead to 'domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment...and the power of money.' ...

"Nowhere is the intellectual and moral decline more evident than in public health research. From 1970 to 2010, as taxpayer funding for public health research increased 700 percent, the number of retractions of biomedical research articles increased more than 900 percent, with most due to misconduct. Fraud and retractions increased so precipitously from 2010 to 2015 that private foundations created the Center for Scientific Integrity and "Retraction Watch" to alert the public. ...

"Harvard is the wealthiest university in the world and, despite being a private institution, received almost $600 million in public funds from the NIH and other agencies in 2018. In fact, some faculty received more NIH funding than many states, and these funds are sufficient to pay for tuition, room, board, and books of every undergrad at Harvard. Nevertheless, Harvard's faculty has an ever-increasing number of retractions due to misconduct or incompetence. In one case, Harvard's teaching hospital was forced to pay $10 million because its faculty had fraudulently obtained NIH funding. The penalty was only a fraction of the NIH funds acquired by the guilty faculty. ...

"The widespread inability of publicly funded researchers to generate valid, reproducible findings is a testament to the failure of universities to properly train scientists and instill intellectual and methodologic rigor. That failure means taxpayers are being misled by results that are non-reproducible or demonstrably false.

"A number of critics, including John Ioannidis of Stanford University, contend that academic research is often 'conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure.' In other words, taxpayers fund studies that are conducted for non-scientific reasons such as career advancement and 'policy-based evidence-making.'

"Incompetence in concert with a lack of accountability and political or personal agendas has grave consequences: The Economist stated that from 2000 to 2010, nearly 80,000 patients were involved in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted."