They all go into the fraud,
The double dippers, the conflicted, the bogus guest speakers,
The whorish expert witnesses, the whorish corporate board sitters,
The twisters of research results to benefit their corporate masters,
The creators of bogus companies into which to deposit federal grant money,
They all go into the fraud…

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot. And as we enter a new decade, it’s good to remind ourselves just how rampant these and other forms of academic fraud are, especially in our medical, law, engineering, and business schools.

How rampant? So rampant that ProPublica has just released a helpful “reporting recipe,” a lengthy checklist of types of professorial corruption, and how you can discover/report them.

Double dipper Akhilesh Reddy, to take the latest instance, simply “did not notice” that two different universities were simultaneously paying him large salaries. And who can deny that overlooking large sources of funds from large institutions is something of which all of us are capable?

Sensing that this claim might not convince everyone, Reddy moved on to the what a tangled web we weave phase of his explanation.

The neurologist and researcher gave inconsistent statements about the money, claiming he only noticed the salary issue when he checked his account in February 2016, five months after starting at UCL, the tribunal heard… He said he thought the universities were “sharing his salary”, that there was an “overlap” in his salaries and also that he thought the large sum was just his salary from UCL... Prof Reddy said he thought “all necessary people were fully aware of the position.”

Before he could add that his dog ate his homework, the tribunal suspended him from medical practice. He has left England and moved to Pennsylvania, cuz there’s always another sucker.