Also: "will resign effective August 31"??? Shouldn't this guy be locked out of his office, have his laptop confiscated, and be banned from campus immediately?
It depends on the nature of the fraud.
I'm no fan of academia (see my post history), but this has to be close to the bottom of my list of priorities. The last car salesman I interacted with probably deserves more jail time than even the most unscrupulous academic (and the car salesman actually did commit a crime, but prosecution would be highly surprising). Medical and drug insurance is another case where there is systematic, intentional, and legal fraud literally killing people every day. The insurance case in particular is pernicious and full of literally deadly Catch-22 "tricks". See also all the obviously criminal web3 stuff that will definitely hit statute of limitations before any LE/prosecutor finds the time to investigate and prosecute.
Most fraudsters don't see any legal punishment because LE and prosecutor time is so limited relative to the amount of fraud. And in the worst cases because the fraudsters have so much money and power that even obvious bullshit is at least de facto not criminal (see insurance).
So, anyways. Should it be criminal? Yes. Is it criminal? IDK. Probably somehow. Is it where finite resources should be spent? Not usually; IMO there are far worse types of fraud where the people's LE+legal+legislative resources should be spent.
> Also: "will resign effective August 31"??? Shouldn't this guy be locked out of his office, have his laptop confiscated, and be banned from campus immediately?
Conjecture: there is probably a lot of "hand-off" work to be done. Excluding my first two jobs, where I was a junior/mid-level IC, I have always been asked to stay a least a month longer than the typical 2 weeks to handle hand-offs.
I guess the best we can hope for is that the last month of employment is living hell as he has to attend a bunch of hand-off meetings as a totally disgraced academic/leader.
Theres no accountability.
The grant money literally pays their salary.
That aside... the amount of ways to commit corruption are endless...
The amount of conferences they had in Italy and Malibu and places like that...
The hot research assistant that never showed up to the lab but got paid.
The endless tech project that took a decade and millions of dollars to write a simple LMS because their buddy ran the LMS company.
The showing up at 10Am and leaving at 3 with a long lunch and working 20 hour work weeks.
The university creating a team devoted to hacking the grant process.
The elite university people in charge of the funding giving their other elite university alumni preferential treatment.
Zero diversity labs because scientists hire their buddies. You can literally walk through university research buildings and see all Indian Labs, all Chinese labs, etc.
The waste is massive and insane with our tax dollars. Its literally white collar welfare. And it happens everywhere and theres no accountability.
Its a giant scam wrapped in the virtue signaling of altruistic science.
It needs to end.
Mostly this.
The conferences honestly aren't that much of a perk, relative to the pay differential, at least in STEM fields.
The "hot research asst" thing was common in the past but died down significantly with #MeToo (still a lot of egotistical creeps ofc).
But the amount of general laziness dressed up as busyness in academia is astounding. Most professors retire in place some time in their early to mid 30s.
The solution is to end higher ed carve-outs in federal grant awards. Let anyone qualified apply for and receive NSF funds. Stop tying tax dollars to university affiliation.
I think this is infinitely better than the current system of just giving money to scientists.
And it's a step in the right direction towards eliminating government funding for science altogether.
It should but it probably wont.
Again, the optimal amount of research misconduct isn't zero!
This is literally white collar crime.
Like most white collar crime, it's not reported in "crime statistics", and it may not be prosecuted for any number of reasons, but it's literally the definition of white collar crime.