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The Behrend Beacon
Ivory towers shaken as professors are
accused of faking research
by Ron Grossman
Chicago Tribune
This is a tale of two professors.
It is a cautionary tale, for in the heady
days before their respective pedestals in
the ivory tower crumbled, their careers
were on superstar trajectory.
The University of Texas recently lured
the more junior of the two, Karen
Ruggiero, away from Harvard, part of the
bait being $ 100,000 to set up her own psy
chology lab. The other, Michael
Bellesiles, won the coveted Bancroft
Prize, the most prestigious honor in the
field of American history. His employer,
Emory University, was anticipating a bid
ding war to keep him on its Atlanta cam
pus.
Both belonged to a rare professorial
species, scholars whose work promised
relevance beyond the groves of academe.
For those committed to making
America a more just society, Ruggiero’s
research seemed to solve a thorny puzzle:
Why, when women and minorities are
asked if they’ve been discriminated
against, do they consistently answer “yes”
in numbers that fall far short of the vic
timization level claimed by their advo
cates?
Such underreporting, tcuggiero s re
search seemed to say, reflects the fact that
what she called lower status groups, i.e.
women and minorities, tend to blame
themselves for failure, not to attribute it
to discrimination, as people of higher sta
tus do.
Bellesiles. meanwhile, offered an in-
genious new argument for proponents of
gun control. While Charlton Heston and
the National Rifle Association say guns
are like apple pie and mother, so linked
to our past that restricting the right to own
them would be a violation of the Ameri
can experience. Bellesiles countered with
data purporting to show that America's
love affair with guns is an acquired tasted;
gun ownership was rare in the age of the
Founding Fathers, he claimed. Even be
fore his award-winning book “Arming
America: The Origins of a National Gun
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widely hailed by newspapers and maga
zines here and abroad.
Now. Ruggiero and Bellesiles each
stand accused of faking their research.
On the scale of professorial failings,
publishing fraudulent data is a far more
deadly sin than plagiarism, the charge re
cently brought against the popular histo
rian Stephen Ambrose. Accusations of
plagiarism can be parried by contritely ad
mitting you inadvertently forgot to put
quotation marks around someone else’s
words or to footnote vour indebtedness
to other scholars.
But making up data is absolutely un
forgivable. That is especially so in the
social sciences, where professors are pain
fully aware of being considered not quite
real scientists by colleagues in physics,
chemistry and the other so-called hard
sciences.
The two cases come at a particularly
sensitive moment in the development of
the social sciences. Increasingly, psy
chologists and others are being asked to
render professional opinions on a range
of social issues, from school shootings to
the effects of watching violent television
shows. Public confidence in their exper
tise depends upon the assumption that it
is founded on honesty and the relentless
pursuit of accuracy.
Chris Pascal, director of the U.S. Ot
fice of Research Integrity, which is man
dated to see that the government gets hon
est work for its research dollars, says his
department is concerned enough about the
problem of faked data that it recently com
missioned the first large-scale study ol the
issue. Pascal’s office receives about 200
allegations of fraud yearly, finding cul
pability in about 20 to 30 cases. But he
thinks the actually incidence of cheating
is much larger. As part ol the forthcom
ing study, academics will be surveyed
and, under cloak of anonymity, asked if
they, or professors they know, have ever
cheated in their research.
"Ruggiero was an up-and-coming
star,” he said. "Why do some professors
cheat? Maybe they think: ’l’m too smart.
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I don’t need to collect data.’”
If so, Ruggiero won’t be subjected to
the same temptation any time soon. The
33-year-old native of Canada has ac
knowledged the sin of scientific miscon
duct in letters to the scholarly journals that
published her work, and resigned her po
sition at the University of Texas. In late
November, Ruggiero, whose research was
supported by government grants, entered
into an agreement with Pascal’s office that
bars her front working on federally
funded projects for five years.
“It’s hard to imagine another univer
sity hiring her," said Michael Domjan, the
department chair to whom she confessed.
“She was highly remorseful, very dis
turbed by the sequence of events.”
Bellesiles’ career is on life support.
Though he has maintained his innocence,
Emory has given him notice that it’s time
for show and tell. Dean Robert Paul put
it in writing, saying that “because of the
seriousness of the allegations” the univer
sity expects Bellesiles to prepare “a de
tailed, point-by-point response to these al
legations.”
Bellesiles chose to present his defense
in the next issue of the William and Mary
Quarterly, a prestigious scholarly journal
scheduled to go into the mail in about a
week. Upon getting theircopy, Emory of
ficials say. the university will decide what,
if any, disciplinary action will be taken
against the embattled professor.
Bellesiles’ and Ruggiero's careers were
each sent into tailspin by a failure to ex
tend the most ordinary of academic cour
tesies. Scholarship functions on a colle
gial ethic. One researcher builds on the
work of his or her predecessors, and to
speed up the process, scholars are ex
pected to freely share their data upon re
quest. So a junior associate in Ruggiero’s
research projects, who followed her from
Harvard to Texas, was shocked when she
refused him that courtesy. Reportedly, the
student, David Marx, complained to
Harvard, where the two of them had done
their work in 1999, and Harvard is said
to have conducted an inquiry-though the
university declines to discuss the matter.
nch
Soon after that, the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services, and its Of
fice of Research Integrity, were alerted.
Jerry Suls, a professor of psychology
at the University of lowa and editor of
the Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, which published some of
Ruggiero’s research in October 2000, says
her confession cleared up a mystery.
Other psychologists had tried reproduc
ing her experiments, a basic procedure in
science where one investigator double
checks the work of another.
“Now they understand why they
couldn’t replicate her findings,” says Suls,
whose journal recently ran Ruggiero’s re
traction of her research.
In her scientific papers, Ruggiero
claimed to have put a total of6oo test sub
jects through a series of experimental situ
ations. For instance, a group of under
graduate women were given a supposed
test of creativity and told they were be
ing graded by male evaluators.
A hint was dropped that the evaluators
might not be objective. Yet those women
who got low grades were quicker to blame
themselves than to attribute them to preju
dice on the part of their judges.
Men, she claimed, do just the reverse:
Enjoying the psychological protection of
belonging to a high-status group, they
were quick to ascribe their failures to dis
crimination
“On the other hand, because the psy
chological consequences are so much
more costly for low-status group mem
bers, they may not acknowledge discrimi
nation even when it confronts them,”
Ruggiero wrote in “Less Pain and More
to Gain: Why High-Status Group Mem
bers Blame Their Failure on Discrimina
tion,” a paper she published in the Jour
nal of Personality and Social Psychology
and which she has now repudiated.
Bellesiles said he examined more than
10,000 court records from 40 counties
spread across the United States. He said
he had focused on criminal cases, look
ing to see how often guns were involved,
and pored over probate records to see how
frequently guns were part of someone's
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“Contrary to the popular perception
that imagines all settlers as hunters as well
as farmers,” he wrote in “Arming
America,” “the vast majority of those liv
ing in the British North American colo
nies had no use for firearms, which were
costly, difficult to locate and maintain, and
expensive to use.”
Bellesiles first came under scrutiny
from a non-academic quarter: the gun
lobby and right-wingers. His findings
were attacked in the National Review and
other conservative publications, where he
was accused of making up the data to fit
an anti-gun bias.
Liberal publications were equally
strong in praise of his book. Garry Wills,
writing in the New York Times, said:
“Bellesiles has dispersed the darkness that
covered the gun’s early history in
America.” The New York Review ol
Books gushed: “Bellesiles will have done
us all a service if his book reduces the
credibility of the fanatics who endow the
Founding Fathers with posthumous mem
bership in what has become a cult of the
gun.”
Eventually, both sides - Bellesiles and
his detractors - asked Randolph Roth, an
Ohio State University professor, to en
dorse their side of the argument. Roth's
specialty is the history of Vermont, and
Bellesiles said he had acquired part of his
data by examining Vermont’s probate
records to see how frequently guns show
up in inventories of estates.
"I offered Bellesiles to go to Vermont
and check his data,” said Roth, adding that
he got a thanks-but-no-thanks response.
His interest piqued, Roth decided to check
those records anyway, and he compared
what Bellesiles’ book claimed was in
those archives with what he himsell found
in the documents.
“I came to the conclusion." Roth said,
“that the number and scope of his errors
were extraordinary "
Bellesiles said that guns were present
in only 14 percent of estates. Roth found
them in 40 percent.
The Boston Globe checked out another
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thesis advanced by Hellesiles, who says
that not only were guns scarce in early
America, many of those that did exist
weren't serviceable. For instance, in
Bellesilcs' version of the story, a certain
Vermonter. Cotton Fletcher, had a “bro
ken gun." But when a reporter looked at
the tecords, that gentleman was only listed
as having “a gun." There were other dis
crepancies of a similar kind.
James Lindgren. a Northwestern Uni
versity law professor, was drawn to a note
in Bellesiles’ book reporting that he had
used records from 19th century San Fran
cisco. Thinking to have his own students
analyze those documents, he asked
Bellesiles where they were. Bellesiles said
he found them in the archives of the San
Francisco Superior Court.
"I called the San Francisco Superior
Courthouse," Lindgren said, “and discov
ered that the complete runs of invento
ries he claims to have read there were de
stroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire”
Confronted with the discrepancy,
Bellesiles (who didn't respond to a re
quest for an interview for this story) told
supporters and critics that he must have
seen those records someplace else, though
he couldn't remember where.
Bellesiles e-mailed colleagues that he
finally remembers drawing his data, not
from records in San Francisco but from
those in the entirely different county of
Contra Costa, records housed in the Con
tra Costa County Historical Society.
Kathleen Mem, a longtime archivist there,
says she and other staff members are quite
familiar with the controversy surround
ing Bellesiles' book. She says she doesn't
remember Bellesiles doing research at the
group's storefront archives.
"If he had examined our records,"
Mero said, “he would have found guns
all over the place."
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