Sadly, this is nothing new and not limited to Harvard.
The title of this thread is misleading. The article is about Dana Farber, one of the top cancer centers in the world. Yes it is a Harvard teaching hospital, but has nothing to do with undergrad Harvard College. I have read several articles on this and none had Harvard in the title. So far, no misconduct has been identified.
Ethics is part of it, but I think a bigger part is the reward system. There are many motivations to falsify results. Successful studies can lead to career advancement, tenure track, increased income, etc. It can also lead to obtaining positions at desirable institutions like Harvard, so I would not be surprised if there is a higher rate of having previously falsified results among persons who currently work at Harvard (or similar) than elsewhere. In contrast, lack of successful studies can lead to career failure, including being forced to leave the field altogether. The overwhelming majority are not caught, so the motivations are worth the risk to many.
Harvard is more than just an undergraduate institution. Harvard teaching hospitals employ doctors who are also professors at the medical school and/or conduct research under the Harvard umbrella. They are employees of the University. As far as mentioning Harvard, I’ve read quite a few articles that include Harvard in the title. Here’s another one.
I live in Cambridge and have also been a patient at Dana Farber, so am well aware. But linking Dana Farber to the issues with President Gray is a stretch and I think it is misleading and kind of piling it on. We can agree to disagree.
ps “Another Scandal: Are Ethics dead at Harvard” is quite different from “Harvard cancer researchers accuse of scientific fraud.” In fact, the inclusion of “cancer” in the latter title signals patients like me that the article might be useful to read.
Pretty much every MD in metro Boston has some affiliation with Harvard (I am exaggerating, but not by nearly as much as you think). Often it means they pay a fee every year and offer to be on a list of people willing to advise students…that is about the connection.
Saying problems at DFCI have to do with Harvard is a stretch.
They all have separate IRBs, grants offices, etc, too, if you want to get in weeds of it. DFCI is a legally separate entity.
And I will add, I think there are some real issues at Harvard!
I largely agree with @L_NewEngland. Harvard is a sprawling entity that is managed differently than a lot of universities. There is a statement something like “Every tub on its own bottom.” That means each school is largely responsible for fund-raising and most major decisions. It is much less centrally run than most universities.
I know quite a number of docs who are affiliated with Harvard. A few teach and/or sit on committees admitting interns/residents or fellows, but a lot seem to have the mentoring/training responsibilities that @L_NewEngland described.
That said, I know the institution reasonably well and agree that there are bigger issues at Harvard. The political orthodoxy epitomized by Harvard’s DEI apparatus was/is stifling. Several non-politically correct faculty members (in economics, psychology, etc.) have essentially been derailed. I was talking to one doc who does sit on the committee admitting fellows (I think). He told me that DEI concerns have a major impact on who they select. Not a minor effect (e.g., choosing between two equally qualified candidates) but major (e.g., we must have this many BIPOC people). Another prof has an absolutely brilliant son who received early offers of undergraduate admission from Harvard and I think Yale, Stanford and Princeton), had a stellar undergraduate career, a really strong graduate career (first offer on key papers) and Rhodes or Gates. Planning to couple PhD with MD. When he left for the UK (I think), his undergraduate advisor told him, “Just tell me whether you want to go to Harvard or Stanford and you should have no problem.” More recently, despite an equally stellar graduate career thus far, the same advisor said, “With your demographic, it may be much harder than I thought. I will have to work on it”
I am also familiar with the medical community in Boston. I have a large number of family members who are physicians in the city as well as two who are physicians, run research labs and are full professors at Harvard medical school. My father was also a physician, full med school professor and ran a research lab at different Ivy League school. I knew many of his colleagues who were also doctors, researchers and professors at the same school. So while Harvard may cast a long shadow in Boston I’m not willing to decouple teaching hospitals from the university itself that quickly. When you take the affiliation for the prestige you also take it for the criticism.
Clearly we have very different views to these institutions. I won’t give too much about my job or personal relationship to HMS and a couple of their teaching hospitals, but I will leave it that I personally engage at multiple levels, in multiple ways with them and have for many years.
Harvard has an agenda and if you don’t go along with that agenda you may suffer the consequences. Apparently targeted because he dared to publish research that didn’t support a repeated assertion regarding police interactions.
All in all he seems like a brilliant individual that pulled himself up from nothing and has spent his life researching ways to help some of the most unfortunate. His conclusions many times do buck long standing thoughts about the solutions to these issues. His ideas have been shown to work in improving many of these complex societal issues. It’s a shame he’s being basically silenced by Harvard and relegated to mostly inconsequential work.
Since George Floyd was killed, and protests expanded, DEI has been a priority in many contexts. Not just academia, and not just Harvard. My kid has a PhD in a field where post docs, fellowships, residencies, awards, jobs have recently, sometimes, gone disproportionately to people of color in the last few years, but they are fully supportive. The concern they have is that this is window dressing, that the compensatory efforts will last for a few years and then- exactly what is happening- backlash. It would be better if this compensatory focus was less extreme and more integrated into the fabric of society rather than slapped on to the surface, but that takes decades. At this point I think diversity statements for jobs will go the way of affirmative action in college admissions, and perhaps quotas too. The conservatives are making this a very visible issue.
It is unfair to continue to single Harvard out for this DEI focus. The media is falling for it to get ratings in my view, because any news segment, article (or CC thread!) with “Harvard” in it gets attention.
@MarylandJOE, I don’t think this is Harvard only – I think this permeates lots of universities and companies. You are just not allowed to say certain thing. It is an example of the implementation of DEI run amok – and my sense from reading a couple of articles (no firsthand knowledge) is that Claudine Gay was the ultimate decision-maker on derailing Fryer’s career. But, I think the same could have happened at a lot of other universities.
Some places may actually be worse. See this article on DEI and anti-semitism at Stanford..
I believe that head of DEI at Uber, an Asian woman, was fired for not adhering to the received wisdom. From CNN News, “Lee oversaw a series of sessions called “Moving Forward” at Uber that focused on issues around race, gender identity and class. One of the more recent sessions was titled, “Don’t Call Me Karen,” and focused on the experiences of a handful of women leaders, a person familiar with the matter told CNN. “Karen” is a slang term that usually refers to a middle-aged white woman with a strong sense of entitlement, often at the expense of people of color.”
Although the earlier sessions were well-received, she received a lot of criticism that the sessions were about the stereotyping of older white women as Karens rather than on the harm caused by these women to blacks and Hispanics. She was forced resign.
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