One of the world’s foremost conservation biologists is being accused of plagiarism and bullying by a former PhD student, Retraction Watch has learned.
The biologist, Stuart Pimm of Duke University, strongly denies the charges, but he and his colleagues have acknowledged the existence of “closely related” work following an internal investigation by Duke.
The allegations surfaced late last month on X, formerly known as Twitter, in a thread that quickly went viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of views and drawing comments from a broad swath of scientists.
In the thread, Ruben Dario Palacio claimed his former academic advisor “threatened to kick me out of Duke” to make him work faster. Palacio decided to change labs due to the alleged “bullying and harassment,” he said, and three months later, in April 2020, published his research as a preprint. The article appeared in the journal Diversity and Distributions in October 2021.
But in November 2021, Pimm’s group published a paper in PLOS ONE describing work that was “remarkably similar to mine, and I was not cited. It’s plagiarism,” Palacio wrote on X.
In an interview with Retraction Watch, he said he believes Pimm’s actions were meant as retribution.
“He wanted to retaliate against me for … having the balls to leave his lab because no one else had done it before, to my knowledge,” Palacio said.
In support of his accusations, he has shared several emails with Retraction Watch, as well as a secret recording of a conversation he had with Pimm before they parted ways.
Pimm, a professor at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said Palacio’s allegations had “no merit” and that internal investigations at Duke had cleared him of the harassment charge and had not found research misconduct on his part.
“For Ruben to claim that ideas that have been developed for well over a decade in my lab and with many of our co-authors were his is patently silly,” Pimm told Retraction Watch.
He also denied threatening to fire Palacio: “That’s not a decision that individual professors make in the U.S.”
The secretly taped conversation, however, reveals Pimm did repeatedly threaten to terminate his then-student and take away the research Palacio had been leading — promises he appears to have made good on.
Palacio first met Pimm in 2015, the year after he graduated from Icesi University in Cali, Colombia, with a bachelor’s in biology. He had helped organize a conference that Pimm attended as “one of the VIPs,” Palacio recalled. On field trips, Palacio volunteered as a bird guide, and the two biologists talked over several days. Eventually, Pimm suggested Palacio join him as a PhD student at Duke.
Palacio was impressed. The following year he traveled to Durham, North Carolina, with a Fulbright scholarship under his belt.
“I was just thrilled to be his student,” Palacio wrote on X.
At Duke, Palacio set to work on a project mapping the distribution of bird species. The research was meant to help the organization American Bird Conservancy do conservation work in Ecuador, Palacio said, and Pimm wanted him to use a method Pimm had published in 2008, known as a geospatial workflow. Essentially, this is a series of steps to follow to find out where a species lives.
Pimm’s method relied on expert-drawn maps and had been criticized by other scientists. Palacio wasn’t happy with it. He suggested improving the protocol by creating a new workflow based instead on data of bird sightings. It took a long time to convince his then-advisor his idea was sound, he said.
“I wanted to tell Stuart like, hey, we can do better, we can do something much nicer than your old protocol,” Palacio said. “That took a lot of finesse, because, you know, his ego is like, over the sky.”
He added: “I have all the emails, very detailed, showing how I came up with the idea, and how [Pimm] wasn’t even aware we could do this.”
But the work on the new method dragged out, and they were running behind schedule, Palacio said. The delays created tension between the student and his professor. As Palacio explained to the assistant director of the school’s PhD programs in an email from October 2019, he felt “very anxious and stressed” by the pressure he alleged Pimm was putting on him.
One day, Palacio said, Pimm had invited him for lunch at the cafeteria where the school’s faculty eat.
“I started walking with him and then he goes, ‘Ruben, you will never graduate with a PhD from Duke,’” Palacio recalled Pimm saying. “He’s like, ‘You don’t work hard enough. You need to put in 16, 18 hours a day of work.’”
When they sat down to eat, Palacio said, “I couldn’t even swallow. And he was like, ‘Just remember that just with one email I send to Fulbright, I can terminate your scholarship.'”
After Palacio confronted Pimm about the high levels of stress he was experiencing, his advisor wrote in an email on January 5, 2020, that Palacio had “played a ‘health card’ … which very strongly limits my options. Duke very clearly prohibits me from stressing you. So, were you to wish to remain in my programme, you would need to assert categorically that the progress I expect from you will not stress you.”
That progress “would likely involve very long days, seven days a week for at least the next three weeks,” Pimm wrote in the email. (This passage is part of a longer email that was pasted into in a harassment complaint Palacio filed with Duke. Palacio said he no longer has the full email after his Duke account was closed.)
Pimm declined to “make specific comments about Ruben” to Retraction Watch, but pointed out that, “I alone am not empowered to make the decision as to whether a student remains within Duke or retains a scholarship.” He added that he had “found the quality of [Palacio’s] work lacking.”
After the lunch with Pimm, Palacio decided he needed to change labs. He received help from university counselors to navigate the situation, which he said had left his mental health in tatters. He also complained about Pimm to Duke, but the school found no fault with the professor’s behavior, according to both Palacio and Pimm.
Pimm attracted controversy in the past for using misogynistic language in a book review, as we reported in 2014.
Duke did not respond to phone calls or repeated emails requesting comments.
On January 7, 2020, Palacio met with his advisor to follow up on the email and discuss how to move forward. In a recording of the conversation that Palacio made without Pimm’s knowledge and later shared with Duke, Pimm can be heard calling his student’s writing “inexcusably incompetent” and complaining that Palacio was two months behind on his work.
Pimm repeatedly threatened to terminate Palacio if he did not promptly deliver a number of updates on the project.
“If you can’t handle that and turn around some results by this time tomorrow, then I will fire you,” he told his student. “If I fire you, I promise you it will look bad on you. Right? So I don’t want any more bloody excuses from you. If you can’t do that stuff on that kind of schedule, you need to resign.”
After Palacio explained that he already found a new advisor, the conversation returned to Palacio’s research. Pimm told his student that if he sent updated results within “a couple of days,” he would “get senior authorship” of the ensuing manuscript.
“Should you choose not to do that, I can promise you that I have the firepower with your former colleagues to recreate that stuff in a matter of a few days. And we will produce that work and we will publish it and you won’t have any say in that whatsoever,” Pimm said, continuing:
“So the other decision you need to make … is what you propose to do with that [research]. If you move that work forward at a pace that I find acceptable, then I will continue to let you lead it. If you don’t, I will simply take all of that stuff away and you’ll have to use the other ideas that you have in the community.”
Asked about his threats to take away the research Palacio had been leading and publishing it without his former student, Pimm said: “It wasn’t his work. He was offered a project. He didn’t complete it. His work on that project was inadequate.”
Palacio was crying and shaking when he finally left Pimm’s office, he recalled.
“It was probably one of the toughest times in my life,” he said. “That’s the thing with the PhDs. Like, your advisor has so much power over you and you feel helpless at the beginning.”
Responding to Palacio’s thread on X, a number of scientists expressed sympathy.
“This sounds like a massive power abuse situation rather than “just” plagiarism. What’s the University doing now?” one data scientist asked, while an ecologist argued:
“This type of bullying & unethical behaviour is far too common in academia; we need to hear more stories like this. I too looked up to Pimm but later realised how lucky I was that I ended up at a different lab for my PhD.”
On X, Palacio also posted screenshots of an exchange he had with one of Pimm’s coauthors, who told him: “I’m not proud of this, of the way ‘we’ kicked you out and took your idea, and also because I never really said anything to the others involved.”
The coauthor, whose name Palacio redacted, said they had “alerted people about your [preprint], and Stuart Pimm explained that the methods were sufficiently different to still go ahead. I did not know at that time that you had left his group, that this was your project and that you were not involved in it.” (The identity of the coauthor is known to Retraction Watch, but they asked not to be named as they did not have full knowledge of the case, they said.)
Ryan Huang, a researcher in Pimm’s lab and first author of the PLOS ONE paper, also contested the plagiarism accusations.
“Ruben did not make any contribution to our paper,” he told Retraction Watch. “The shared intellectual history of ideas accounts for the similarities Ruben uses as evidence for his claims.”
Huang said that while he had been aware of Palacio’s preprint, he had not read it “for the explicit purpose that I did not want to cross-contaminate ideas, but I also told Ruben that we would not cite a pre-print as it was not peer-reviewed.”
In the acknowledgments of his papers, Palacio thanked Pimm and Huang “for suggestions during the initial development of the geospatial workflow.” But he stood by his claim that the new method was his creation and said his preprint created “scientific precedence” and should have been cited.
Pimm and his coauthors, Palacio argued, “could have said, OK, we developed this workflow based on Palacio and colleagues, or we looked into Palacio and colleagues and we think their protocol is shit, so we came up with another one. That’s what you do in the sciences.”
Palacio said Duke investigated his research-misconduct complaint against Pimm, but that the school would not share its findings.
Duke has drawn criticism in the past for not responding adequately to cases involving potential research misconduct. Following several incidents at the university, in 2019 the U.S. National Institutes of Health suspended a number of grants to the institution due to concerns about “clinical research irregularities” that could affect patient safety. The same year, the university settled a lawsuit with the U.S. federal government for a record $112.5 million after researchers were accused of using fake data in grant applications.
In an email concerning its investigation of Pimm, Duke told Palacio:
We are not able to provide you with a report due to the confidentiality requirements of our policies; we can only provide the outcome, which was the comment added to the PlosOne [sic] publication noted below.
The comment to which the statement refers was posted in April by Huang and Pimm under “Reader Comments” on the PLOS ONE paper website. It has since disappeared, but Palacio posted a screenshot of it on X.
Titled “Similar Work,” it read, in part:
On behalf of the authors, we want to inform the readership and research community about a closely related journal article published shortly before ours.
The comment also provided links to Palacio’s journal paper and the preprint. According to Pimm:
Ruben’s paper appeared three weeks before ours appeared and well after the final version of our paper had been accepted. As a courtesy, we agreed to notice his paper having been published and the university was happy with our doing that.
“I’ve never really seen anything like that before,” Palacio said about the “Similar Work” comment. He added that he has asked PLOS ONE to retract the paper and that the journal told him it would investigate his allegations.
A spokesperson for the publisher declined to comment on the specific case, but said:
In principle, comments may be used to inform readers of related work that has not been cited in a PLOS article. Whether a comment would be a suitable [sic] for this purpose depends on case-specific details such as the relative publication date(s), the relationship of the related work to the PLOS publication, and whether the related work introduces editorial or ethics concerns that need to be addressed by a different means.
As for the missing comment, the spokesperson said:
Based on PLOS records, the comment appears to have been removed in error due to a technical issue with the commenting system.
After leaving Pimm’s group, Palacio said, he completed his doctorate in 2022 at another lab at Duke that he described as a “much better environment.” He is now back in Colombia heading the conservation non-profit Fundación Ecotonos and is about to publish a “great paper” in a top ecology journal with his second advisor.
It was “sort of a happy ending for me,” he said.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
Pimm’s charitable organization (http://www.savingnature.org) appears to be a carbon offset ruse: take something being done anyway and sell it to frequent flyers to assuage their guilt. The site even includes a tool where one can feel good about the 2.5 metric tons of carbon from a transatlantic 10 hour flight for only $12.
Anyone paying attention to the climate crisis will be aware that such indulgence forgiveness tokens are really no better than the ones sold by the Catholic church for centuries… https://climateadproject.com/offsets/
Pimm has long marketed his charity as being a service to provide “indulgences” for “climate sinners”– a flawed approach to sell a fundamentally flawed idea.
The main goal of the organization is not to mitigate climate change, but to “save species”, as stated in the organizations’ name. The projects focuses on reforesting key areas in hiperdiverse and highly threatened regions in the Tropics. Cabon is just how the organization sells the projects to rich donors
Is “bullying students” news? At least, 90% of professors I’ve ever known have bullied some students at some point; especially when they put their friends’ names on the student’s article or thesis! Not that students are themselves saints; many students are terrible to work with. Some even bully or insult or disrespect their professors, once they graduate. Many are lazy or dishonest. Many fabricate data. And the list of misconduct on both ends goes on.
It isn’t “news” in the sense that we don’t already know that academic misconduct and mobbing (let’s not trivialize it by calling it “bullying”, as this is a collective behavior of institutions that stems from the organizational culture and group psychology of these institutions) of students (Ph.D., Master’s, and undergraduate students), is at endemic levels within the fields of conservation biology and ecology (probably just as prevalent as it is in other fields, such as law or nursing, and perhaps even higher).
However, these situations will always be newsworthy due to all the cover-ups, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), and the prevailing “code of silence” surrounding the topic of mobbing of students by academics (and this doesn’t just happen to Ph.D.’s like Palacios but also students lower in the pecking order at Master’s, and undergraduate level) within academia which ensures that most cases never reach the public eye.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, these institutions will protect the perpetrator at all costs (whether they be financial or reputational) and will do everything in their power to silence the target (reputational aggression and damage through smear campaigns, ostracism, blacklisting / blackballing). Lawsuits in mobbing cases will also favor the institution, so given these imbalanced power dynamics, the only viable option for a target who refuses to be a coward to address these asymmetries of power is to engage with the media and publicly bring attention to the institution’s actions.
These issues are endemic and entrenched within conservation and ecology, as exemplified by Palacios’s case involving influential figures across the spectrum, from academia to the intersection of major NGOs (such as Stuart Butchart at Birdlife) and zoos, which paints a really troubling picture of the current state of this field (which is being funded largely by the taxpayer).
The only way things are ever actually going to improve in this field is when these cases get more sunlight and more whistleblowers such as Palacios and others begin to come forward and speak publicly and openly about what they’ve endured.
As to your comment on “problem students,” and “upwards bullying” there are undoubtedly cases of this, but mobbing is a phenomenon that usually involves there being stark power differentials between perpetrator and target.
In that sense, perpetrators are typically either from the professoriate, well on their way to being tenured professors, or a couple of rungs up the ladder of the academic hierarchy from the target (for example, a Ph.D. student targeting a master’s or undergraduate student). Mobbing in academia is overwhelmingly a “top-down” or “punching down” problem.
Incidentally, the term “upward bullying” is often used cynically by the perpetrators of mobbing in academia and enabled by toothless DEI “anti-bullying” policies in universities. This is especially true when the perpetrators’ actions face scrutiny due to target lower down the academic pecking order fighting back.
The targets’ objections to their treatment are labeled as “vexatious” or “abuse of reporting systems.” Any mention of filing a report or taking legal action is branded as “threatening and bullying behavior.” If they experience feelings of depression or distress, they will be labeled as “mentally ill, unstable, and unpredictable.” Should they confide in someone about suicidal thoughts, their statements are categorized as “self-harm threats.” Any display of anger resulting from mistreatment (as anyone would be feeling under such circumstances and as mobbing behavior is calculated to invoke) is twisted to serve as “evidence” of their “aggressiveness,” and they are deemed a “bully” or a “danger.” This is well-documented in the literature on mobbing, and all it serves to do is to tie the targets’ hands behind their backs and enable those engaged in mobbing to attack even further.
Janice Harper, an ex-academic, anthropologist, and target of mobbing, has written about this troubling phenomenon in her paper “The Gentle Genocide.” I would consider it essential reading for those seeking to comprehend how perpetrators and institutions complicit in mobbing manage to evade accountability (https://www.academicwomenforjustice.org/downloads/gentle-genocide.pdf).
Considering how extensive the literature on mobbing in academia is and how well it documents all the tactics and strategies employed by the perpetrators and the institutions that enable them I honestly find it hard to believe that people continue to fall for these tricks …
An academic mentor must get the student to get the work done. It’s not always easy – some students work hard but in an incorrect manner, some are clueless about the “holes” in a project, etc.
This student seems to be resentful.
Plus, there is the cultural difference. I know that we are not supposed to say this, but some cultures view corrections in a different way than do persons from other cultures.
Bullying or mobbing (when it is a collective institutional campaign against an individual) does not and never will equate to “mentoring.” The fact that the two are being equated in your comment speaks of a systemic problem of the normalization of these incredibly toxic behaviors in leadership (or actually a total lack of it) within academia and the sciences.
I notice that your area of expertise is in medicine and medical research. I’d suggest that you read what Philip Darbyshire and David Thompson have written over the years about the impact of the kind of “mentoring” that you seem to condone in the field of medicine, medical research, and nursing in the UK.
Needless to say, relational aggression designed to sabotage a career through gossip, blacklisting, ostracism, etc. (which I’d imagine Palacios is already encountering or will do soon) also has absolutely nothing to do with “mentoring.” As we all know, it has everything to do with eliminating someone who has become a whistleblower or challenged someone in a position of authority who wants to see them gone and their career in tatters.
I’d also suggest that any resentment and cynicism felt by Palacios toward his advisor, due to both the way he was treated and the plagiarism of his work, are fully justified. As with anyone who has dealt with mobbing, I’d hope that it would lead to him having greater empathy and that he would never become a bystander if he saw someone else being treated in a similar manner.
The “cultural differences” you describe in students’ reactions to “corrections” are not particularly compelling arguments in defense of Pimm’s conduct either; in fact, they come across as rather lazy. In fact, the only cultural issue I see at play here in this story are the norms embedded within the work culture of the global north of zero-sum cutthroat competition, high-stress work environments, and mobbing.
Moreover, Palacios is Latin American, has a background in working in conservation on the ground, and was working on a project relating to the conservation of bird species from his region of the world (albeit in Ecuador rather than Colombia). The undertones of neocolonialism in this story are just too obvious to ignore here, and though shocking and worth mentioning, are ultimately similar to bullying and mobbing in the sense that these things are deeply embedded in the current culture of conservation as norms and an open secret that no one really wants to discuss.
Bullshit.
Failures of research integrity lie at the institutional level and the responsibility. Blaming students as equal culprits is just a way to unburden institutions of their responsibility to produce honest research. No, “bullying students” isn’t news, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. Students don’t need to prove themselves to be “saints” to prevent their own abuse at the hands of their advisors. And most importantly, when we are talking about an advisor-student dynamic, the student is NEVER at fault when the advisor turns to bullying.
I agree with the points the other anonymous poster makes, but I’d argue that in ANY case of bullying or mobbing in academia, the student is NEVER deserving of that kind of treatment, and it can never be justified.
Furthermore, I’d also suggest that focusing solely on this being an issue limited to Ph.D. students and postdocs (sometimes they are actually the perpetrators and exploit power differentials of their own) at the hands of their advisors is myopic at best and actually quite elitist too.
Such an approach fails to consider the broader reality that this is happening at ALL levels, including at the undergraduate and master levels, as evidenced by the comment left by Vivian. Because this is a problem that is so pervasive at all levels, it must be addressed at all levels.
That said, I have very little faith that the system will actually go beyond empty “DEI” platitudes and make any meaningful changes. To do otherwise would be to really rock the boat too much by demanding institutional accountability, and the status quo won’t allow anything like that.
A comment on a minor point: “…we would not cite a pre-print as it was not peer-reviewed.”
I have heard this said before and I disagree. If a preprint has an idea that is useful, then you can cite the preprint as the source of the idea. You cite work that is the source of an idea. If it’s not the source of an idea, then no need to cite, but this should not depend on peer-review status.
I completely agree about preprints, but even when it comes to the journal version of Palacio’s paper, Pimms claim that
“Ruben’s paper appeared three weeks before ours appeared and well after the final version of our paper had been accepted. As a courtesy, we agreed to notice his paper having been published and the university was happy with our doing that.”
doesn’t seem to hold water. The paper by Pimm’s group has these dates:
Original Submission July 23, 2021
Decision (asking for a minor revision) 28 Sep 2021
Author Response 14 Oct 2021
Decision (recommending acceptance) 18 Oct 2021
Formal acceptance 3 Nov 2021
Palacio’s paper:
Manuscript received 19 April 2021
Manuscript revised 21 September 2021
Manuscript accepted 23 September 2021
Version of Record online 05 October 2021
Issue Online 26 November 2021
(The bioRxiv paper was posted April 28 2020)
So Palacio’s paper was accepted and available on the journal web page (under “Early View” I believe) before Pimm’s group had even sent in the revised version of their article.
Nice sleuthing. I hope Retraction Watch is able to quiz Dr. Pimm on this damning discrepancy (alliteration intended).
I’m truly glad that Pimm has been exposed. However, the involvement of the other “authors” of the paper, particularly those in leadership positions within influential NGOs, like Stuart Butchart of Birdlife International, was not mentioned.
It’s interesting to note that back in May of this year Butchart openly criticized Walter Jetz’s conduct at Yale on Twitter following the exposé of his more than a decade of misconduct by investigative journalist Michael Balter, which in light of this scandal might be seen as a form of strategic virtue signaling and deflection.
I’m curious about the roles that these other “authors” played in this situation. Perpetrators like Pimm seldom operate in isolation, and the other individuals involved in this plagiarism occupy top positions within the conservation community and wield a lot of power.
Apologies, my mistake—it was in early April.
Here is his tweet: https://twitter.com/stubutchart/status/1646433817983418369
A comment from Butchart, Birdlife International, and other “authors” to clarify their roles in and awareness of this misconduct (which strikes me as having shades of neocolonialism despite the organization’s platitudes about “decolonizing science”) would be much appreciated.
I appreciate everyone’s comments, particularly those of Anon, witch added much to an already interesting Retraction watch story. Insightful comments and related to sleuthing add much to this blog.
I jus wanted to thank Ruben and retraction watch for this story. I personally went through something eerily similar during my master degree and I am glad some students out there are willing to stand to this mistreatment and fight it. I was a coward and didn’t do that but I lost first authorship on work mostly done by me and that level of corruption truly killed my passion for academia. Glad this came out to light and glad some students are actually speaking
When I was a PhD student, more than half of my fellow PhD students in the same department talked about how their advisors mistreated them. One professor I know directly cut off his student’s financial support because he felt his student’s progress was slow, now that professor is a kinda high-profile professor making big dollars.
Nobody really cares about grad students, especially if you are an international student living on a visa!
Cutting funding if a student doesn’t make sufficient progress isn’t misconduct if there is due process. Performance reviews should be as normal in academia as outside of it. I know quite a few former students, who received funding until the very end but never delivered publications and never finished the PhD project.
The main issue is that too often there isn’t due process and advisors don’t offer enough support or even set students up to fail.
That’s exactly what I meant. That professor cut off the financial support out of blue
It’s not like this issue hasn’t been known about for many decades now.”The Ph.D. Trap,” by Wilfred Cude was written way back in the late 1980s, and it’s still relevant today, perhaps even more so than it was back then
Sadly, all of the warnings out there tend to go unheard by prospective students who walk straight into this presumably because of ambition and cognitive dissonance of ‘Oh, but that will never happen to me; I’m different, I’ll be able to make it.’
I’d strongly recommend that anyone who is currently doing a Ph.D. (or in fact at any level of study) and experiencing problems or contemplating doing one in the future give themselves a wake-up call by reading Cude’s book. It might just save you from a world of pain, lost time, and disillusionment.
I was once a Ph.D. student under Stuart Pimm’s guidance: a female “foreign student on a visa”, as mentioned here. The expectations were very high, and I worked a lot. I also had a lot of fun enjoying travels and quality time with friends, as the work was not so hard that I could not have a life. The relationship with my advisor had its ups and downs but was never abusive, and I always felt supported. In my third year at Duke, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer back home. I approached Stuart, seeking a leave of absence to take care of my father, as I was his only child. He explained that taking a leave would mean losing my stipend, which would make things even harder for me, and proposed that I go back home with my stipend. I asked how long could I be in that situation: “For as long as you need” was his answer. Several months passed as I cared for my father, and mourned his passing. I slowly got back to work and returned to the United States when I felt emotionally ready. During that time Stuart never once pressured me to hurry back. Interestingly, upon my return, it was some fellow male American Ph.D. students within our research group who subjected me to unpleasant comments about my leave.
I finished my Ph.D. successfully and on schedule. Today, I am an accomplished researcher and a full professor in my home country. I had a great time at Duke, and my PhD experience had a profound influence on my career. In my efforts to be a good mentor, I try to replicate the positive aspects I experienced while avoiding the negative ones. I can’t pass judgment on Dr. Palacio’s experience, and I sincerely regret that he felt so profoundly unhappy under Pimm’s mentorship. He was not the first to have “the balls to leave his lab”. Others have done so before. Sometimes, mentorship dynamics or research interests just don’t align, and it’s perfectly fine to seek a change in advisors. It is not a rare thing in academia. I merely wanted to share my personal experiences within that research group. I’ll never forget the compassion my advisor showed me during one of the most challenging chapters of my life. Throughout my long years in academia, I have come to realize that very few advisors would have been as understanding and humane as he was.
@Mariana, Thank you for sharing your experience with your advisor at Duke. We all need to hear both sides.
Interesting comment, Mariana. It certainly adds nuance to the discussion. I’m sorry to hear about your father, and Pimm’s conduct towards you at that time does seem to have been very humane and empathetic.
I’ve been following cases like this for some time and in situations where an advisor, academic, or even an institution is publicly accused of misconduct or mistreatment of a student through bullying or mobbing, it’s not uncommon for individuals to come forward to offer a spirited defense of the accused person’s ‘good character.’ They usually claim to not have personally witnessed this behavior or been on the receiving end of the abuse, and they often express surprise and disbelief.
Sometimes, these comments are sincere and made in good faith (and to be clear I genuinely believe that yours is) and offer a nuanced perspective on the issue. However, there are also cases where they are clearly made by individuals who have been bystanders and are fully or partially aware of what’s going on behind closed doors and who have either cognitive dissonance or a vested interest in defending the reputation of the individual or institution.
When done in bad faith, this behavior typically appears motivated by either cronyism fueled by personal friendships or career considerations or else may be rooted in a mindless tribalistic loyalty to an academic, lab, or institution, that stems from group psychology.
General cynicism aside, it’s entirely plausible (and especially within academic settings) for someone to behave decently towards one person under a given scenario while behaving like a monster towards somebody else in another; the two are not mutually exclusive.
Interesting perspective!
There is another factor–sometimes someone who is abusive to others isn’t abusive to everyone. As Christina Ricci so recently reminded us, just because “I didn’t see it” doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The details of this case are that the student challenged the professor’s approach to the problem and shattered his ego. What happened next may very well have been retaliation for an ego injury and not a habitual pattern of behavior. But just because a person doesn’t do it all the time doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.
Nomen nescio, great comment !
I think it’s virtually unheard of in cases of academic bullying for the perpetrator to have been targeting everybody. If that’s the criteria that people are looking for to identify a likely perpetrator, then it starts from the false premise that this is a problem limited to problematic individuals. While it may be a convenient narrative for institutions to engage in (again, it always pays to be wary of the “personality clash” narrative in these kinds of cases), it just doesn’t reflect the reality.
This is ultimately a problem of organizational culture, with problematic individuals (who may not be seen as such by institutions as long as they have “played the game” of office politics and keep bringing in the all-important prestige from publications and funding), whose conduct, stemming from either learned behaviors or underlying personality disorders, is selected, rewarded, and incentivized by the system. There is an ecology of sorts to bullying and mobbing in academia, that is best seen from a systems perspective.
The typical perpetrator of academic bullying is not a stupid or unsociable person by any means; in fact, they are probably well above average in both academic and Machiavellian intelligence. It’s all about politics and their position within the hierarchy, and that always entails being part of a group and knowing everybody. When they target an individual, they will usually have chosen this target carefully with a mind to the power differentials, and if it escalates to mobbing, they will turn the group against this individual very effectively.
Also, very important to mention that in cases where you get an institutional narrative of ‘this person is a problem for everyone,’ there could also be another issue at play. Yes, sometimes there are people who may be, but as Twain said, ‘Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.’
Reflection is really key here because it’s extremely common to see cases where the individual being labeled as the ‘trouble maker’ and on the receiving end of collective vitriol within an institution is actually just the target of mobbing and may be reacting to being in that position in ways that are ‘problematic’ for those engaging in it or the institution. People enduring a mobbing are essentially dealing with inordinate amounts of psychosocial stress, and typically are not going to be on their ‘best behavior,’ and under those circumstances, who would?
This ‘problematic behavior’ is then typically taken and spun into a convenient narrative by the perpetrator and the institution, which enables and protects them, as ‘proof’ that the target is the problem. It’s very Orwellian, and its terrifyingly common within universities. Janice Harper has mentioned this over and over again in her work, and this is actually one of the big problems with the Anti-bullying / DEI-type movements that are trying to address this problem in academia. The mobbed individual can easily be transformed into the “bully” by the perpetrator and the institution (as I’ve already mentioned, it pays to be very wary of the label “upward bullying”), especially when universities, in particular, are adept at flipping the narrative.
Sorry for the lengthy reply; these things are not discussed enough in the world of conservation and ecology and I just wanted to add a few thoughts.
Kudos to Ruben for his courage in speaking out. I want to clarify that while I would fully support him if there were a clear case of plagiarism, I hold the opinion, which may be biased, that the plagiarism claim appears to be an unsubstantiated allegation. Therefore, I felt temped to present an alternative perspective.
In my assessment, I find no substantial evidence to support the plagiarism accusation. This viewpoint is consistent with the assessments of several journal editors who have engaged with Ruben’s original Twitter post. For example, one editor pointed out:
“But your problem is this: it cannot be both the case that the work you did was (a) not significant enough that you had to acknowledge your old lab & (b) significant enough that your old lab had to acknowledge you. It isn’t nice, but as an editor, I don’t think it’s plagiarism.”
Here are a few more voices from other commenters:
“If someone helped to conceptualize a project, then normally that is justification for co-authorship. Did you bother to get their permission to list them in your acknowledges?🤞 Yikes: Good example of failed collabrn: tit for tat pissing match, shade casting, & no winners. 🙁”
“It looks to me like you published something coming out of you working out of your former supervisor’s group without the decency of asking him to co-author. If you indeed “exchanged ideas” on this, then it cuts both ways. It looks a damaged relationship, this is more of an outcome”
“I agree with Mark. Your claim of plagiarism is also problematic because your preprint was release in April 2020, so the idea was made public then. There’s no hold on an idea. The Pimm article was published in November 2021, a year and a half later. The methodologies and data points between the two papers seem distinct. (While ICW and alpha hull refinements are similar, they are not the same.) Pimm has the same rights as you do to refine his maps. While it sucks to not be cited, I don’t think this is plagiarism.”.
“Unfortunately, both of you rejected each other’s contributions. Ofc a matured professor would have handled it better! But imo this unfortunate situation is more like a broken relationship between a former supervisor and his lab member. Probably, a sad reality for some other ppl.”
As an editor or EiC for several top journals in ecology and environmental sciences, I view this allegation as more of a reaction to a strained relationship than a genuine case of plagiarism. If this were indeed a clear-cut case of plagiarism, I doubt that PLOS ONE or Duke University would have allowed it to remain unresolved.
Did his advisor bully, offend, stress, or mistreat Ruben? It is clearly a YES because that is what Ruben felt. On the other hand, did Ruben bully, offend, stress, or mistreat his advisor? I also see it likely as a yes because that might well be his advisor’s feeling. Clearly, the relationship appears to have been strained on both sides, as Ruben’s actions may have also caused stress and frustration. The end result is that Ruben fired his advisor, not the other way.
To set the tone, here is an interesting observation from the text take almost verbatim from this post: Ruben Dario Palacio claimed his former academic advisor “threatened to kick me out of Duke”, and His advisor denied threatening to fire Palacio and said “That’s not a decision that individual professors make in the U.S.”.
My feeling is that there is a confusion about the wordings that can mislead the audience into believing that “the professor was lying because he explicitly yelled out to fire his student in the secret recording.
“Kicking out of Duke” and “firing a student” are not synonymous. The professor did not lie because professors have no right or authority to expel a student out of the university or a graduate program in the US. Even if the professor wants, she/he is not granted such power because there are specifically program guidelines and it is the job of an independent committee.
Can professors fire a lab member? Of course, they can do it, especially if the lab member fails to follow the lab rules or meet the advisor’s expectation. Can a student fire a professor? Of course, they can do it too, anytime they want (sometimes even for no reason). In this case, it was not Dr. Pimm that fired Ruben, but it was Ruben who fired his advisor. Even worse, he fired his advisor on the spot. That was definitely not a good feeling on Dr Pimm’s side, no wonder that he yelled “get out of my office …”.
To put it bluntly, what I perceive is an immature professional, seemingly motivated by a desire for retaliation. On his public bio, Ruben says “ … After being granted a Fulbright-Colciencias Ph.D. Scholarship, he started his doctoral studies in 2016 at Duke University under renowned conservationist Stuart L. Pimm (former advisor). Ruben changed advisors to National Academy member James S. Clark in early 2020 …. I value freedom of speech and I am a privacy advocate.” What strikes me is that, on one hand, he appears to be actively tarnishing the reputation of his former advisor, while, on the other hand, he seems to be capitalizing on that same advisor’s reputation for self-promotion. Additionally, the use of terms like ” renowned conservationist” or ” National Academy member ” in a biography to describe past training strikes me as quite unusual. In my culture, many would consider this behavior highly unprofessional, if not outright narcissistic.
In his initial post, a commenter by the name of Jorge Lizarazo expressed a sentiment that could be characterized as cautious and somewhat critical: “ so ssuspicious to be honest. egos and misbehaving both @rdpalacio and the advisor. How on earth ya publish on your own sothing collaborated and well paid by and advisor. I must highlight that the advisor at the end was dreadful, and yet both behaviors are rather questionable…” Jorge’s comment offered a different perspective but maintained a reasonable tone. However, Ruben chose to respond at length and, in my view, made a threat towards Jorge: “ … Because you also took credit for my work when I was an undergrad, under the “new” wikibirds of Colombia. And so your whole replies are ill-motivated. But I will expose this too.” To me, that is a straight threat in response to a different opinion (Although he explicitly mentioned he values freedom of speech in his bio). Essentially, this response appears to be another instance of questionable behavior, akin to the previous allegations of plagiarism involving his undergraduate work.
What greatly concerns me is Ruben’s apparent disregard for privacy and potential misuse of copyrighted materials, despite his assertion in his bio that he is a privacy advocate. In his original Twitter post, he chose to use a portrait photo of Dr. Pimm that many would consider unflattering, a choice that appears to be deliberate and manipulative. Regardless of the specific photo chosen, it is essential to note that Ruben should have sought permission from the copyright holder before using it, especially given the potentially harmful intent associated with its use.
From my understanding, the only photo he would have had the right to use freely would be the one available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Pimm, as all other photos are likely copyrighted materials. It’s important to recognize that if the copyright holder chooses to take legal action, Ruben may face potential consequences.
Furthermore, Ruben also shared a photo of a conference presentation slide, which raises ethical concerns. Regardless of how he obtained the content on the slide, it is considered proprietary, and Ruben had no authority to share it publicly without permission. This action raises questions about his respect for intellectual property and professional ethics.
It’s unfortunate that this situation has arisen, and it appears that both parties have been adversely affected. The plagiarism allegation lacks substantial evidence, and the dispute seems to be rooted in a strained relationship rather than academic misconduct. As a bystander, I see no winners in this case, and it may have lasting consequences for both Ruben and Dr. Pimm in terms of their professional relationships and reputations.
Very interesting comment, Jon. I don’t have your experience as an editor or an academic, so I can’t speak much about the issue of plagiarism. However, I found a couple of the things you said about the bullying dynamics of this situation thought-provoking and thought I’d leave a comment.
“Can a student fire a professor? Of course, they can do it too, anytime they want (sometimes even for no reason). In this case, it was not Dr. Pimm that fired, no Ruben, but it was Ruben who fired his advisor. Even worse, he fired his advisor on the spot. That was definitely not a good feeling on Dr Pimm’s side, no wonder that he yelled “get out of my office …”.”
I’m sure Pimm’s feelings and pride were wounded by Palacios, and obviously, that is quite unfortunate but, in some ways, unavoidable given the power differentials between the two. I’m showing my own bias here, but I strongly believe that cases like this, where students (at any level, not just PhDs) have been subjected to bullying or mobbing and have the courage to be assertive with advisors (or other higher-ups, or even institutions and their HR) regarding their boundaries, rights, and expectations, ultimately represent positive and healthy developments for science, academia, and universities as a whole.
As we all know, there is a fierce and unhealthily feudalistic quality to much of academia (unsurprisingly really, as it’s one of the last remnants of the medieval guild), with stark power differentials between professors and students (of all levels) that stand in direct contrast to the egalitarian and democratic platitudes espoused by institutions and the fact that we are living in the 21st century. As far as I can tell, the more we can enable and normalize healthy horizontal communication within organizational cultures, the better these institutions can begin to enact their espoused values, rather than mere platitudes. Idealistic, I know, but I honestly can’t see these sorts of problems ever being improved otherwise,
“Did his advisor bully, offend, stress, or mistreat Ruben? It is clearly a YES because that is what Ruben felt. On the other hand, did Ruben bully, offend, stress, or mistreat his advisor? I also see it likely as a yes because that might well be his advisor’s feeling. Clearly, the relationship appears to have been strained on both sides, as Ruben’s actions may have also caused stress and frustration.”
I’d say that if the bullying behavior originated with Pimm, then while Palacios’s response of fighting back may be considered ‘problematic’ by some, it is, at the very least, a very understandable and human reaction. As I’ve mentioned in a previous comment, allegations of ‘upwards bullying’ warrant some scrutiny because this label is often conveniently assigned by institutions to individuals whom they wish to eliminate and who are simply standing their ground against a powerful perpetrator of bullying or mobbing.
“It’s unfortunate that this situation has arisen, and it appears that both parties have been adversely affected. The plagiarism allegation lacks substantial evidence, and the dispute seems to be rooted in a strained relationship rather than academic misconduct.”
At first glance, this case could seem like a clash of personalities. However, I’m not entirely convinced by this interpretation; I tend to view it with suspicion because it often serves as a convenient narrative for institutions to deflect further scrutiny. In reality, in most cases of mobbing and bullying in academia, this issue arises and is perpetuated by the norms and organizational cultures that are deeply rooted within these institutions. Ultimately, there is never bullying of students by a Walter Jetz or Stuart Pimms without an awful lot of people within an institution (and even outside of it) being bystanders and privy to what is going on but who remain silent, or, in the case of a mobbing, being active and enthusiastic participants.
“What greatly concerns me is Ruben’s apparent disregard for privacy and potential misuse of copyrighted materials, despite his assertion in his bio that he is a privacy advocate. In his original Twitter post, he chose to use a portrait photo of Dr. Pimm that many would consider unflattering, a choice that appears to be deliberate and manipulative. Regardless of the specific photo chosen, it is essential to note that Ruben should have sought permission from the copyright holder before using it, especially given the potentially harmful intent associated with its use.”
If your assertion is correct, and Palacios did this then how can we be certain that this wasn’t a response to a violation of his own privacy, either by those mistreating him or even by the institution itself?
It’s worth noting that perpetrators of bullying and mobbing within institutions such as universities habitually engage in systematic privacy violations with harmful intent toward targets. They often mask their actions under the guise of “concern for a student” or “management” which are of course euphemisms for something more sinister. This is virtually permitted when enabled by the top-heavy administrations of today’s neoliberal managerial universities.
Emails or private information from university databases can be accessed, hacked, or subjected to “surveillance” by a powerful perpetrator or even an institution. “Intelligence” about an individual’s private life can also be gathered through informal conversations with friends or colleagues, who typically will turn against the person during a mobbing because of fear or cowardice, group psychology, or career advancements. Even seemingly innocuous information can be manipulated and spun into a malicious narrative aimed at dehumanizing the target and causing reputational damage (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10911359.2017.1421111).
Furthermore, these institutions do this for the very same motives you allude Palacios may harbour towards Pimm. The aim is always to discredit, dehumanize, and construct and spin convenient and false narratives around a person being “problematic” in some way which of course is intended to justify their elimination, mistreatment, and ostracism (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00401-6/fulltext?ref=ecrlife).
Again, this tactic is a garden variety strategy used against targets by perpetrators and their enablers when bullying and mobbing take place within academia. While it might sound “conspiratorial,” this phenomenon is so extensively documented in the literature that it’s almost absurd for people to still accept institutional narratives in such cases (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4170397).
I’ll stop supporting Palacio’s and defending any potential hitting below the belt that he did, once it’s crystal clear that the institution, Pimm’s, or others involved were not doing exactly the same to him and kicking a man when he was down. I’d encourage others to take a similar stance in this case or indeed any other where there is an allegation of bullying by a perpetrator with power against someone without any.