Making sense of academic misconduct

Stories of fraud and corruption among professionals surfaced with increasing frequency in the later part of the past century, and the pace remained unchanged during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, we find the misbehavior of professionals at the forefront of our minds and the subject of many discussions. Corporate and government corruption often seem most salient, but misconduct is a concern across all professions. In recent years, the misconduct of academics-individuals working as teachers and researchers at institutions of higher education-has received a great deal of attention. A number of high-profile cases exposing egregious behavior among academics and scientists account for this increased attention, at least in part. In one such case, South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-Suk fabricated data and results from human stem-cell cloning experiments and published his fraudulent findings in top scientific journals (Cyranoski, 2006). This incident derailed progress in stem cell research and wasted untold sums of money. In another case, American researcher Eric Poehlman declared the therapeutic effects of hormone replacement for menopausal women, a statement based entirely on falsified data (Dalton, 2005). This incident led to millions of wasted research dollars and landed Poehlman in prison, serving a one-year sentence for reporting fraudulent information in federal grant proposals.