My perception of “experts” and data took a precipitous turn soon after COVID lockdowns forced us to wear masks and hold six feet of distance between each other. Cops were chasing down surfers for riding the waves without a mask. Open-air parks were shut down. We were told that “data” was behind the “six-foot” distance narrative. That, however, was just a myth. It was created by a teenager who made it up for a high school science project. “Experts” at the CDC adopted that myth, repeated and it became a “fact” without a foundation. Data that sounds “too good to be true” is usually just nonsense with footnotes to the footnotes.  

Twenty years ago, a UCLA study on opiate addicts used falsified data. The UCLA researcher stole grant money and claimed he interviewed people he had never met. Not to be outdone, 10 years ago, another UCLA researcher falsified data on gay marriages. Michael LaCour was a political science graduate student and claimed that he had conducted surveys and canvassed 10,000 people, paying the canvassers $100 per interview. The study was published in Science Magazine. Apparently no one at Science Mag or any reviewers had bothered to put pen to paper and calculate the cost of the study. Simple math: $100 x 10,000 is one million dollars. Grad students never have that kind of money to spend. Ever. And there was the result of the study. The results flew in the face of every previous study to date.   

LaCour had made it up. But his made-up study made it into Science Magazine. 

Liars and data cheats are not new. In 2022 the estimate of data fraud was about two percent to 46 percent on submitted papers pre-publication. That’s a lot of cheats cheating.

Harvard had a reputation for integrity. At least, that is what I was told to believe. Harvard’s past president seems to have falsified her PhD dissertation, and it cost her her job. RedState's Jennifer Van Laar wrote: 

[Claudine] Gay has already had a rough tenure, as investigative journalist Chris Rufo writes: 

As dean and then president, Gay has been accused of bullying colleagues, suppressing free speech, overseeing a racist admissions program, and, following the Hamas terror campaign against Israel, failing to stand up to rampant anti-Semitism on campus. 

Now Rufo has presented documentation indicating that Gay might have plagiarized parts of her Ph.D. dissertation, which violates Harvard's policies on academic integrity.  

Harvard is back in the “integrity news.” Its "Honesty" Professor was apparently dishonest. According to the New York Post:  

A renowned Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an investigation found she fabricated data on multiple studies focused on dishonesty.  

Francesca Gino, a celebrated behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, was let go after the school’s top governing board determined she tweaked observations in four studies so that their findings boosted her hypotheses, GHB reported. 

Gino was renowned for producing studies on dishonesty. However, data bloggers at “Data Colada” reviewed her studies and found that data had been clearly manipulated. Harvard put Gino on “administrative leave.” She responded by filing a lawsuit: 

In response, Gino denied the allegations and filed a $25 million lawsuit against the school, Data Colada bloggers, and Datar. She alleged invasion of privacy, gender discrimination, and defamation in her suit, and that the accusations had irreparably damaged her career and reputation.  

Last September, Gino's defamation suit against Data Colada and Harvard was dismissed. Gino has also claimed Title IX discrimination.  

Gino pointed fingers at research assistants and "outside tampering" by someone with “malicious intentions.” However, in 2023 Harvard’s investigations didn’t find any evidence to back up her claims. There was no data to back her bad data.  

Nonetheless Gino claims she is blameless: 

“There is one thing I know for sure: I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result.” 

Gino’s tenure was withdrawn, and she was terminated by Harvard. Have honesty and integrity been restored at the Ivy League institution?

Nah. Claudine Gay is no longer the president of Harvard, but they still employ her. Gay is the "Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies." It seems Harvard has levels of dishonesty tolerance.

The nation’s elite academic institutions have lost the plot and become full-on indoctrination centers. 

Trump is fighting back.

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