Christopher Chow

From 1995 to 2000, Karen Ruggiero built a career at Harvard to become one of the nation's foremost experts on the psychological effects of race and sex discrimination. She has now admitted that much of her federally funded research was fraudulent.

Ruggiero's 1995 paper "Coping With Discrimination: How Disadvantaged Group Members Perceive the Discrimination That Confronts Them," has been cited in more than fifty psychology studies. Her studies have also been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The research was first exposed as fraudulent when one of her assistants, David M. Marx, became suspicious after Ruggiero refused to show him her raw research data. When Marx asked Harvard to investigate further, she admitted to using "invalid data" in her research studies at Harvard. Much of her field research with women and people of color never took place. Her data was simply made up.

Marx won an award from Harvard for his work with Ruggiero on a dissertation that "Examines how minority students can succeed academically despite negative stereotypes that suggest otherwise." Marx now teaches psychology at the University of Colorado.

"Less Pain and More to Gain: Why High-Status Group Members Blame Their Failure on Discrimination," published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and "Why Did I get a D? The Effects of Social Comparisons on Women's Attributions to Discrimination," published in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, were both funded by federal grants. Ruggiero has admitted to falsifying data in both studies and has asked the publications to print retractions.

In a letter to Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin editor Jerry M. Suls, Ruggiero accepted full responsibility for her actions. She stated that it was she alone who cheated the federal grant system. She says her assistants' only "role was to edit multiple drafts." They knew nothing about the fraudulent research figures.

These deceptive studies also became the basis of her grant application with the National Science Foundation, and her entry into the National Institutes of Health's National Service Award.

As for the professor's punishment, Ruggiero has entered into a "voluntary exclusion agreement" with the U.S. Public Health Service and Harvard. The agreement bars her from applying for any federal research grants for the next five years. Harvard spokesman Andrea Shen stated the sanctions were "appropriate." Ruggiero's lies "underscored the commitment all researchers must make to meeting the highest standards of integrity in their work." There has been no mention of any criminal charges for defrauding the U.S. government.

The Office of Research Integrity at the Heath and Human services department is currently putting together a comprehensive study on why university professors plagiarize or invent research. One reason could simply be money.

After building her reputation at Harvard, Ruggiero was recruited by the University of Texas at Austin with a starting salary of $100,000 for "trying to determine when people of low status groups will claim discrimination." She has resigned following the exposure of her academic fraud.

"She was an excellent teacher," says psychology department chairman Michael Domjan. "Her students gave her superlative ratings."

The Austin American-Statesman described Ruggiero as "one of the most promising young psychology professors in the country."

As an assistant professor in Harvard's psychology department, Ruggiero taught several courses including "Social Stigma," "Research in Inter-group Relations and Social Cognition," and the seminar, "The Social Psychology of Being a Victim of Discrimination." All of her classes focused on the topics of race and sex discrimination, and affirmative action.

Ruggiero's main thesis is that discrimination on the basis of race and sex is more dominant than most people realize. In fact, it is more dominant than even those being discriminated against realize, concludes Ruggiero. "Native peoples, visible minorities, women's groups and the gay community constitute only a partial list of disadvantaged groups who are struggling to overcome [discrimination]."

Psychology classes and papers concentrated on "the personal group discrimination discrepancy." This is the theory that when women and ethic minorities are discriminated against they will not raise the issue and will prefer to blame themselves. "When making explicit self-report rating, members of status and racial minority groups report less personal experience with discrimination than that encountered by their group."

According to Ruggiero's now debunked research, people will even become physically ill trying to avoid dealing with how they've been discriminated against. She concludes, people of color will rarely play the race card because the truth is they are in denial of their discrimination. "Minority group members perceive more discrimination directed at their group than at themselves…. Indeed, the fact that the discrepancy has surfaced among such diverse minority group members rules out the possibility that researchers may have inadvertently biased their sample selection toward the more privileged members of these minority groups."

Her goal is to get people to come to terms with how they are discriminated against. "Women are reluctant to claim discrimination because it's socially undesirable. People don't like complainers."

Ruggiero is not alone in the doghouse of academic fraud. Recently other well known university professors have had the basis of their careers exposed. Harvard's Michael Bellesiles' research for his best selling Arming America: The Origins of the National Gun Culture claiming a low number of gun owners in colonial America has been exposed as simply fabricated. Historian Joseph Ellis built his career preaching to Amherst students with how the horrors he witnessed in Vietnam led him to become an anti-war activist. This summer it was discovered that Ellis never served a day in Vietnam.

"If you look at Harvard, it has a lot of reported cases, but that's not necessarily bad. Harvard takes this stuff very seriously, and has put a lot of resources into investigating misconduct," commented Chris Pascal of the Office of Research Integrity. "Her career is probably gone, or it certainly is for a number of years."

Also gone is the University's and taxpayers' money.