As the host basks in the glory of yesterday’s DJT interview there are other things happening. Notably, yesterday, was a piece from the Wall Street Journal, widely syndicated, reporting that Wiley, the largest publisher of science journals, was taking 19 journals out of production due to widespread fraud. That is truly disturbing news and worthy of some serious analysis.

The piece focuses primarily on two issues, one the financial hit Wiley has taken through all this fraud and how the fraudulent articles make it into these lower-bar journals. It is a good piece on those questions. But there are far wider concerns. The article notes the retraction of tens of thousands of articles. Now, just like the retraction of a front-page, above-the-fold story appears at the end of the first section, these retractions hardly go noticed. This is particularly true as the pieces appear on the internet and are cached somewhere other than the original publisher and therefore remain accessible even after retraction. So, in the age of “follow the science” these articles do damage, retractions and journal closures notwithstanding.

There is an honor system here. The journals rely on the honor of the writers, those that summarize and make the pieces publicly available rely on the honor of the journal publishers, the information consumer relies on the honor of those middlepersons. There are breakdowns on every level. These fraudulent papers are produced by mills that exist because profs that need publications pay them to get their names out there. There is no honor. The journals and the middle folk make money because people are always looking for “science” to give their insane idea credence and the internet makes it easy to find. No honor there either. Imagine how bad this will get when so-called “AI” really takes hold. Even if this particular avenue for scientific fraud gets shutdown, others will arise as the so-called “AI” makes it that much easier to search the internet. The easier it becomes, the more foolish notions will seek credence, thus creating a market. If there is a market, there is always a supplier. How do we fix this mess?

Regular readers will know my reflexive answer – we need to restore character and therefore restore honor to the honor system. That’s very true.

But there is more to think about. Tuesday, I wrote about how nowadays we build entire bureaucracies to do the impossible, or more practically to spin their wheels and do nothing. Academia is full of people that study things that just do not need to be studied. But they have to produce papers and those papers have to be published to justify their jobs studying things that do not need to be studied. I do not want to get into examples or suggestions as it would get way too esoteric way too fast, but anybody that monitors what goes on in the university would see it. But there are some general comments that can be made.

Academia needs to change its goals to some extent. At this point it is focused almost exclusively on the advancement of knowledge. That’s why profs get their jobs and benefits based on publications; publications are supposed to indicate new knowledge. But the university also exists to preserve and transmit existing knowledge, purposes that most universities pay little attention to, relegating it to graduate students that are more focused on their own studies than doing the job of teaching undergrads. Right now, the best education you can get if you are graduating high school is not at the prestigious, research-focused university, but at the smaller, private schools dedicated to teaching undergrads, where the profs may publish occasionally when it is convenient.

Right now, academia produces more academics. At some point academia ought to be producing smarter people that go out into the wider world and use what they have learned well. This should particularly be true for the highly prestigious schools where their endowments mean they do not need the research grants to pay the bills, but instead it is just the opposite. Imagine a school where salary and benefits are based on the quality of the students coming out of the class rather than the publications of the prof on the record who is punting the class to his research assistants. It’s a whole new world that would likely result in a lot less fraudulent papers having to be filtered out of the system.

The post When The Honor System Is Broken appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.