Taking the credit: Can universities tackle academic fraud?

With supervisors pressed to publish more research, one result has been a rise in exploitation of the work of postgraduates.

In July 2017, Allison Harbin, an art history PhD graduate from New Jersey’s Rutgers University, uploaded several posts to her blog, titled “Why I left Academia.” In them, Harbin claimed that an academic supervisor had used parts of her work, without acknowledgment, in their own paper.

Harbin raised the case with the university, which rejected her claims, calling them “unfounded” and defending the supervisor, who was not identified in the blog. But in her posts, Harbin said the response was “Orwellian”, claiming that some professors urged her not to say anything, and when she did, clubbed together to cover up what she said was academic fraud.

While the dispute continued, Harbin’s blogs went viral. Within hours she was inundated with hundreds of emails from people sharing allegations about academic exploitation by their superiors, the institutional structures which make this behaviour permissible and a lack of support for those subjected to it.

To date, Harbin has received over 400 testimonies from current and former graduate students at 300 different universities around the world, revealing what she calls a “systemic crisis in academia” which “can best be described as an abuse of power.”

Over the past two decades, many universities have adopted a more commercial business model, where employment is offered to academics on a temporary basis and where the pressure to raise new funds leads to a “publish or perish” research culture. Some observers believe that this way of running universities will lead to even more exploitation of graduate students.

“There is a pressure on the secure academic to publish or be damned, because of the level of performance management and the focus on research money,” says Jane Thompson, an official at the UK’s university and college union.

In the UK critics highlight the Research Excellence Framework introduced in 2014, whereby academics are ranked by and awarded funding according to their published output.

“There is also the inability of people on insecure contracts, whether PhD or early career researchers, to actually challenge inappropriate or unethical behaviour because of the precariousness of their employment,” Ms Thompson says. “When people at the top are being squeezed it’s the people at the bottom who get the dregs of that.”

Harbin says the situation is the same in the US, where universities and departments are also ranked by their published research. Institutions have also cut back on tenured positions and the jobs available for younger academics tend to have much weaker employment protections.

“There’s fewer professorships, there’s less money; those left have an incredible pressure to publish,” she says. “Even in the best of circumstances, even if you’re a decent person, you’re incentivised to steal from your graduate students.”

One of the most common forms of exploitation occurs in the “co-authoring” of research papers, says Joshua Krook, a visiting law researcher at Oxford university. “The best professors in the academic system have too many publications (under their name) to have feasibly written them themselves,” he says. “When you talk to them in private, or their students, you find that what’s going on is the students they supervise are actually writing the articles, and then the professor will put their name on it as if they’ve contributed.”

The problem is so endemic, Krook says, that “the entire system of academia” is built on taking advantage of students. Krook, who has investigated the topic at 15 universities across the UK and Australia, says he has “not yet come across a university that doesn’t have the problem”.

One student at a London university pointed to his supervisor’s staff webpage as an illustration of this. The academic, who works in the sciences, has more than 450 papers listed there; the supervisor’s name appears as lead author on less than 70.

Another student from Sydney recalls how her supervisor demanded she “hand over” a 10,000-word paper she had written. He would put his by-line on it first, and hers could come second. When she refused, the supervisor resorted to threats. The student, who asked to remain anonymous and left academia because of her experience, described the exploitation of graduates as “another form of abuse in society”.

Claiming credit for another person’s work is clearly seen as unethical and in violation of universities’ policies.

But some believe that by-lines reflect more than just authorship and research. “There are those that uphold the idea that someone deserves to be a co-author simply because they brought in money or are high status,” says Brian Martin, a social scientist and emeritus professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Others see co-authoring as a deferential sign of respect to the supervisor. “But,” Prof Martin says, “that clashes with scientific journals’ ideas, that only people who have contributed to the research should be named.”

The differing views and lack of clear guidelines is exacerbated, Krook says, by the nature of supervisor-student relationships. One-to-one relationships with little oversight or accountability can result in inspirational mentoring. But they can also create large power and information imbalances that are easy to exploit.

“The professor is an authority figure, they introduce you to what’s normal in the field,” Krook says. “They can say what’s normal and what happens all the time, and because it’s coming from an authority figure you believe them.”

On occasions, the issue of who really owns the intellectual property associated with academic research can have profound financial consequences. Sunil Purushothaman, a PhD graduate from Imperial College London, says he was a victim of exploitation while studying under the supervision of Christofer Toumazou in the early 2000s.

DNA Electronics, a company he co-founded with Toumazou at Imperial, was first registered in 2003 under the name of Suniseq — a play on Purushothaman’s first name, Sunil, and “sequencing”.

In 2016, DNAe was awarded a contract worth up to $51.9 million by a US government agency, and Toumazou won a European Inventors Award in 2014. DNAe is now a key player in a global market worth about $4 billion in 2018 and growing by 15 to 20 percent annually. However, Purushothaman is unknown and penniless.