The scandal involving Harvard Psychology professor Marc Hauser is back in the news. The latest is that he's resigning, after a year on leave. (There is no new information about the misconduct itself.)
Hauser has been found guilty of eight counts of misconduct in his research (inappropriate procedures or even outright fabrication of data), and there is no reason to believe that this is the extent of the problem. The best we can conclude about the rest of Hauser's work is "unproven."
I'm interested in the reactions of different people in the field. These range from Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth (his former advisors), who, though diplomatic in their wording, hung him out to dry, to Steve Pinker, who has vigorously defended Hauser (though interestingly, only on grounds of personal admiration, with no comment on whether he believes the misconduct to be real, or wrong if real).
One can't help wondering (and I get to say this because my blog is anonymous) about the personal world-view that underlies that latter reaction. I think there is a kind of gun-slinging cowboy mentality that says that all's fair in love and war . . . and in building a reputation. Even if such a person hasn't actually engaged in misconduct themselves, they might secretly think, It's not so awfully bad, is it? We could all see ourselves doing something like that, couldn't we?
This is part of a larger complaint of mine, which is that a lot of academics don't get it that building a reputation isn't the main goal. Reputation is, or should be, a by-product of a genuine commitment to furthering science.
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