Refracted Input

Corporate culture has no place in academia says Olof Hallonsten in his report for Nature on the medical scandal at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. This involved allegations of fraud against Paolo Macchiarini which may have resulted in patient deaths  .

It appears that university leaders chose to overturn established procedures and overlook external evaluations of Professor Macchiarini’s work, preferring to prioritise reputation and avoidance of scandal. As Hallonsten points out, this sort of behaviour by senior managers of universities, although tiresomely familiar, conflicts strongly with academic values of peer review and close scrutiny of claims which are designed to protect those hard-won personal and institutional reputations for research integrity. Unfortunately, too many university managers have confused university reputation with accumulated capital, not with solid scholarship and ethics.

The episode at Karolinska has led the president of the Supreme Administrative Court in Sweden to conclude that: “There is now an…