The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): "You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?" I've gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. 
When I read Thomas Sowell’s column (March 13, 2012) about an African American graduate student in mathematics at a prestigious university who had his dissertation written for him, I was shocked. Not because after spending more than three decades in academia I didn’t know such things existed. I just didn’t know they existed in mathematics and, perhaps, the real sciences. I thought that kind of intellectual corruption was confined to the social sciences and humanities. -Abraham H. Miller
When Churchill referred in a book to the Americans killed in the World Trade Center Buildings on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns,” he spawned a wave of outraged people looking for any excuse to see him canned from his professorship at the University of Colorado. Churchill obliged them by engaging in “gross, gross misconduct.” In 2006, the school found him guilty of seven instances of fabricating, falsifying, and plagiarizing and axed him. Churchill seems to be no stranger to shady dealings. The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians publically disavowed his varying claims of one-sixteenth and three-sixteenth Cherokee ancestry.
Character, Fraud, Academia, Jobs
North Carolina's flagship public university says it's firing a professor who once headed the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her role in the academic fraud scandal that's rocked the school. University Chancellor Carol Folt said in a letter Wednesday that philosophy professor Jeanette Boxill was notified of her termination on the same day last October a scathing report was released. She is appealing.
Character, Academia, Theft
A University of Arizona professor recently lauded as a top new teaching talent in her field has been reprimanded for plagiarizing the work of a former student. Susannah Dickinson, an assistant professor in the UA’s school of architecture since 2009, recently received a “formal admonishment” from the university’s provost after the student accused Dickinson of poaching material from his master’s thesis and presenting it as her own.
Character, Racism, Fraud, Academia
A historically black university in North Carolina routinely changed students’ grades, awarding them higher marks in order to improve the school’s reputation, according to a college news publication. This accusation against Winston-Salem State University was made by a former administrator and two anonymous professors. Only the grades of black students were raised, said Shira Hedgepeth, former director of academic technology, in an interview with the conservative Campus Reform. “None of the Caucasian or non-African American students… none of their grades were changed,” she said.
Character, Fraud, Academia
A three-month investigation into academic fraud at the University of North Carolina revealed that not only student-athletes were given added academic benefits within the school's African and Afro-American Studies department. Rather, students at large benefited from anomalies specific to the department, such as unauthorized grade changes, forged faculty signatures on grade rolls and limited or no class time. "This was not an athletic scandal," former North Carolina Governor Jim Martin told UNC's board of trustees. "It was an academic scandal, which is worse."
Sex, Financial, Academia
Sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh has come under fire for improperly documenting his research expenses, the New York Times reported Saturday. But his accounting discrepancies are not the first concerns raised about his ethics, which had been questioned in a legal complaint filed by a sex workers advocacy group last year. The Sex Workers Outreach Project of New York City lodged the complaint with the University’s Institutional Review Board in October 2011, claiming that Venkatesh’s research about sex workers in New York City was exploitative.
Democrat, Fraud, Science, Oops, Academia
The famed law school first offered Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren a professorship in 1992 and granted her tenure in 1995. And charges leveled in a 1990 academic law journal raised serious questions about her qualifications to teach at Harvard at all. In 1991, Rutgers Professor Phillip Schuchman reviewed Warren’s co-authored 1989 book “As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America” in the pages of the Rutgers Law Review, a publication Warren once edited. Schuchman found “serious errors” which result in “grossly mistaken functions and comparisons.” Warren and her co-authors had drawn improper conclusions from “even their flawed findings,” and “made their raw data unavailable” to check, he wrote. “In my opinion, the authors have engaged in repeated instances of scientific misconduct.”
Character, Fraud, Academia
Marc Hauser, a prolific scientist and popular psychology professor who last summer resigned from Harvard University, had fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and described how studies were conducted in factually incorrect ways, according to the findings of a federal research oversight agency posted online Wednesday. The report provides the greatest insight yet into the problems that triggered a three-year internal university investigation that concluded in 2010 that Hauser, a star professor and public intellectual, had committed eight instances of scientific misconduct.
Character, Fraud, Academia
Harvard College’s disciplinary board is investigating nearly half of the 279 students who enrolled in Government 1310: "Introduction to Congress" last spring for allegedly plagiarizing answers or inappropriately collaborating on the class’ final take-home exam. Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris said the magnitude of the case was “unprecedented in anyone’s living memory.”
Character, Fraud, Academia
Cases of academic misconduct hit a record high in academic year 2011-2012, and academic integrity officials are predicting that number will spike this year. There were 379 reported cases of academic misconduct in 2011-2012, up from 292 cases reported in 2010-2011.
Union, Character, Fraud, Academia
PARAMUS — The longtime president of Bergen Community College's faculty union has been suspended following the third investigation into allegations he tampered with his granddaughter's grades in 2010. The school's board of trustees unanimously moved to suspend Helff, a math professor and outspoken union leader, following a report by Superior Court Judge Ross Anzaldi, whom the board hired to conduct an investigation.
The 10-page report said the findings are a blow to the university’s academic integrity. The findings were so serious that the university consulted with the district attorney and the SBI about investigating forgery allegations, as some professors said their signatures were forged in documents certifying that they had taught some of the classes in question. Professors also said they had not authorized grade changes for students that the department submitted to the registrar’s office.
Character, Academia, Corruption
An internal investigation into UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies has found evidence of academic fraud involving more than 50 classes that range from no-show professors to unauthorized grade changes for students. One of the no-show classes is the Swahili course taken by former football player Michael McAdoo that prompted NCAA findings of impermissible tutoring, and drew more controversy when the final paper he submitted was found to have been heavily plagiarized.
Character, Fraud, Academia
Student workers and other employees at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College committed "gross academic fraud" by misusing the institutions' Blackboard course-management system to steal test answers, The Brownsville Herald reported on Saturday, citing a university police report from an investigation last year. Former student employees of the Office of Distance Education, which manages Blackboard, confessed to a police investigator that they had used the online system to obtain test answers for themselves or to give or sell to other students, the newspaper reported.
Character, Fraud, Academia
Rice has charged 20 current or former students from a cluster of well-to-do, high-achieving suburbs on Long Island with participating in a scheme in which teenagers hired other people for as much as $3,500 each to take the exam for them. The five alleged ringers arrested in the case were accused of flashing phony IDs when they showed up for the tests. All 20 have pleaded not guilty.
In 2005, the school looked into Parijs’ work at the Center for Cancer Research after workers in his lab couldn’t verify some of his data. Officials discovered he had faked research data and fired him. The feds got involved once it came out Parijs had lied on federal grant applications. He pled guilty, and in June 2011, a judge sentenced him to one year of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $61,000 to be paid to MIT.
Character, Academia
Harvard researcher Marc Hauser committed research misconduct in his studies of primate behavior, the university said Friday.
Liberal, Racism, Fraud, Academia, Lie, Stereotyping
An investigative committee concluded that Stapel had falsified data in at least “several dozen” of the nearly 150 papers he had published in his extremely prolific career.
BOSTON (AP) -- A Harvard University fellow who was studying ethics was charged with hacking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles.
Scandal, Fraud, Science, Academia
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – A Harvard University psychology professor has resigned, saying he wants to pursue other opportunities more than ten months after a faculty investigation found him "solely responsible" for eight instances of scientific misconduct at the Ivy League school.
Environmentalist, Warming, Fraud, Academia
The University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group decided in May to add 0.3 millimeters -- or about the thickness of a fingernail -- every year to its actual measurements of sea levels, sparking criticism from experts who called it an attempt to exaggerate the effects of global warming. "Gatekeepers of our sea level data are manufacturing a fictitious sea level rise that is not occurring," said James M. Taylor, a lawyer who focuses on environmental issues for the Heartland Institute.
Liberal, Guns, Oops, Academia
Columbia University's Trustees have voted to rescind the Bancroft Prize awarded last year to Michael Bellesiles for his book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.
Liberal, Guns, Fraud, Narrative, Oops, Academia
Emory University announced on Friday afternoon that it had accepted the resignationof history professor Michael Bellesiles, the author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. The award-winning book stirred up controversybecause it appeared to confirm what many scholars already believed: that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right to bear arms and that individual gun rights were unimportant to America's Founders. The facts, however, were not there to back up Bellesiles's contention. Emory also released a 40-page indictment of the author's research composed by an investigative committee of three distinguished historians, as well as Bellesiles's seven-page response.