The Real Culture of Corruption

Conservatives have wonderful ideas—for education, for health care, and for income security. But you do not get elected on great ideas. Americans aren’t that interested in ideas. You get elected when the other guys screw up.

Conservative reform of education and Social Security will not happen through a free and fair discussion of the issues. It will happen because Americans get sick of pervasive liberal corruption in the public sector.

Last week we saw the institutional corruption reported at an ordinary community college in California.

Now here’s a story of corruption in a research university, reported in The New York Times. Reported by Jeneen Interlandi, it’s a story about a professor at the University of Vermont, convicted in federal court of

lying on a federal grant application and admitted to fabricating more than a decade’s worth of scientific data on obesity, menopause and aging.

What had Eric Poehlman done? Well, according to graduate student Walter DeNino, the whistleblower who had turned him in, Poelman had routinely altered data on clinical studies to make it support his hypotheses. So in a study of the change in fat levels in the blood over time, Poehlman just changed the data in a spreadsheet on which DeNino was working.

In the initial spreadsheet, many patients showed an increase in HDL from the first visit to the second. In the revised sheet, all patients showed a decrease. Astonished, DeNino read through the data again. Sure enough, the only numbers that hadn’t been changed were the ones that supported his hypothesis.

In this high-stakes research business where money, power and the roar of the crowd depend on a continuing flow of government research dollars we can assume that there is a lot of this kind of stuff going on.

Everyone agrees that the private sector is hopelessly compromised by its selfish pursuit of profit. Whereas university professors professors and government civil servants are all good guys.

But the Poehlman case shows how a committed cheater can elude detection for years by playing on the trust — and the self-interest — of his or her junior colleagues.

Before we can change the culture we have to discredit the incumbents. The American people have to grow to understand that “our” teachers, professors, doctors feeding in the public trough are all crooks and liars. You know, just like businessmen.

Then we can start to talk to them about reform.

Meanwhile former professor Eric Poehlman will be spending a year in jail.