In 2018, a newly minted PhD made an uncomfortable discovery.
At a conference, he saw other researchers presenting the results of their attempt to replicate the work of one of his fellow students at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who had found a relationship between heavy rainfall and the number of prisoners in Nigeria in the first half of the 20th century.
But they couldn’t replicate the findings.
After the presentation, the researchers discussed the discrepancy, and found that while both projects had used the same colonial records as the basis for their work, the numbers the PhD student at Wageningen University had used differed dramatically.
The discovery sparked an investigation that led to the revocation of the student’s degree in 2019.
The student challenged the withdrawal of his degree in court, but the Dutch Court of Gelderland sided with the university in a decision issued last month.
“I think it is very important that we now have a court ruling showing a university can revoke a doctorate that was granted under false pretenses,” Arthur Mol, rector magnificus of Wageningen University, said in an interview with the university’s magazine. Dutch law does not say explicitly that universities can revoke degrees, Mol said, but this case was the first time anyone had challenged their ability to do so in court.
In a similar ruling issued last month thousands of miles away, the Texas Supreme Court also decided that two state universities could revoke degrees for misconduct. In one of the cases involved in the ruling, which we have previously covered, Suvi Orr, now director of chemistry for the gastroenterology drug discovery unit at Takeda, sued the University of Texas at Austin after the university revoked her PhD in 2014.
The Dutch court ruling and the university’s announcement of the decision do not name the student whose degree was revoked, but sleuth Elisabeth Bik and one of her Twitter followers identified a retracted thesis with the same issue date and research topic mentioned in the court’s decision.
An archived version of the thesis, “‘Force of Nature’ : climate shocks, food crises and conflict in Colonial Africa and Asia, 1880-1960,” by Kostadis J. Papaioannou, has three chapters that correspond to published articles:
- “Climate shocks and conflict: Evidence from colonial Nigeria,” published in Political Geography in 2016.
- “Weather Shocks and Agricultural Commercialization in Colonial Tropical Africa: Did Cash Crops Alleviate Social Distress?” published in World Development in 2017.
- “‘Hunger makes a thief of any man’: Poverty and crime in British colonial Asia,” published in European Review of Economic History in 2017.
Wageningen University’s press release stated that “the editors of the scientific journals will be asked to withdraw the associated articles.” The articles have been cited a few dozen times altogether, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
In 2018, the World Development article received an extensive corrigendum that began:
The authors regret that in the original published version of the study, there were several errors in the description of the effect sizes, measured in standard deviations. These errors were purely textual, and did not bear any relation to the study’s empirical results, which are (correctly) summarized in Table 2 (page 355) and Table 3 (page 356) of the paper.
The same work had received an award at the European Social Science History Conference in 2016.
When we contacted Wageningen University for comment, a spokesperson referred us to Mol’s magazine interview. We have not been able to reach Papaioannou for comment.
The court decision notes that
Plaintiff disputes that he manipulated data for his dissertation and misrepresented quotes. There is no question of (deliberate) manipulation of data and misrepresentation of quotes, according to the claimant. He also disputes that there are substantial errors in the thesis and/or errors that influenced the conclusions drawn in the thesis with regard to his data.
However, the decision continued
The court is of the opinion that the Board has made it sufficiently plausible that the plaintiff manipulated quantitative and qualitative data in chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 of his dissertation to the extent stated by the Board.
Later, the judges wrote:
The Court agrees with the Board in its considerations that the interests of (the reputation of) WU and the trust in science in general, given the nature, seriousness and extent of the manipulations found, outweigh plaintiff’s interest in retaining his doctoral degree.
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