Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education analyzes how President William Powers maneuvered around his call for dismissal by the chancellor of the University of Texas (UT) system who many believed was acting under the orders of Governor Rick Perry. Powers is described in the article as:

“…a steely campus chief with powerful connections.

It was those connections that surely bore down on the chancellor as he mulled over six agonizing days whether to grant Mr. Powers a stay of execution. In that time, lawmakers, donors, alumni, faculty members, students, and the head of the nation’s most prominent group of research universities all decried what came to be called the “July 4 coup.”

“We had a lot of support,” Mr. Powers said in an interview after Wednesday’s agreement. “I think that had a big influence.”

The roots of Mr. Powers’s untidy success story go back as far as 2008, when public higher education became the biggest political news in the famously politicized state of Texas.

At that time, Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, implicitly endorsed a conservative think tank’s prescription for the sector, which critics described as wasteful, expensive, and out of touch. The “seven breakthrough solutions” would change all of that, advocates argued, by treating students more like customers and ensuring that professors were as devoted to teaching as they were to doing research into often-esoteric topics.

Mr. Powers looked across that political landscape and drew one conclusion: The think tank’s proposals would weaken an elite research university, and he needed friends as powerful as Mr. Perry’s to stop them.

The president went straight to the University Development Board, a collection of wealthy and politically connected Texans, many of whom had given money to the governor’s campaigns. Mr. Powers’s message was simple, one of his advisers recalled: “We’re in trouble, and I need your help.”

“It really destabilized the governor’s political base,” said the adviser, who asked to remain anonymous so he could speak candidly amid a leadership crisis. “Many of those same people were people the governor needed.”

We are happy that Powers is able to leave the presidency on his own terms and even happier that he was able to stand up to the ideological witch hunt of Governor Perry.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an op-ed piece today on scientific fraud specifically on scientists who fake results on experiments to receive government grant funds. Written by Adam Marcus, and Ivan Oransky, co-founders of Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks scientific errors, the op-ed raises critical issues especially related to the light penalties assigned to those who are caught committing fraud. The piece comments:

“Criminal charges against scientists who commit fraud are uncommon. In fact, according to a study published last year, “most investigators who engage in wrongdoing, even serious wrongdoing, continue to conduct research at their institutions.” As part of our reporting, we’ve written about multiple academic researchers who have been found guilty of misconduct and then have gone on to work at pharmaceutical giants…

In the vast majority of cases, in fact, funding is not repaid. And just a few of the hundreds of American scientists found to have committed misconduct have served prison time. In 2006, Eric T. Poehlman was sentenced to a year in prison — the first scientist to be imprisoned for falsifying a grant application — and also had to pay about $200,000 in restitution for whistle-blower lawsuits and lawyers’ fees. But the millions awarded to the University of Vermont for his work were never repaid.

Scott S. Reuben, an anesthesiologist, spent six months in federal prison starting in 2010 for faking data in many of his studies. Dr. Reuben was also forced to pay back more than $360,000 to Pfizer as restitution for misusing the drugmaker’s grant money.

But these are the rare cases.”

Those of us in research universities know the importance of federal grants and contracts to our work.  However, we need to be vigilant about fraud.    Marcus and Oransky are right to raise an alarm.

Tony