EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Report Shows Harvard Professor Fabricated Data

Karlstack has obtained a leaked document that shows a professor of political science at Harvard allegedly fabricated data in order to prove that white people feel threatened by minorities.

This leaked report was brought forward as a complaint in 2018 against Harvard professor Ryan Enos by an anonymous complainant whose identity is  is protected by The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

A Harvard spokesperson has confirmed that this report sparked an internal and non-public  investigation by Harvard's Committee on Professional Conduct over "research integrity concerns" relating to Enos' 2016 paper "What the demolition of public housing teaches us about the impact of racial threat on political behavior"  published in the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS).

Harvard says that their Committee on Professional Conduct "readily dismissed" this document after reviewing it. They refuse to elaborate on why it was dismissed. "No comment," said the Harvard spokesperson.

Here are all the emails between me and AJPS. At the time of this writing, AJPS is refusing to accept a complaint from me. Read the emails to see why.

Here are all the emails between me and Harvard.

This previously suppressed document concludes that Enos' data was "mathematically impossible" and manipulated "beyond any reasonable doubt … in favor of author’s preferred theory and hypotheses." Enos' preferred theory in this instance is "racial threat theory," which is closely related to "critical race theory," and attempts to quantify the degree to which white people feel threatened by minorities. To study this, Enos examined the demolition of public housing project in Chicago in the early 2000's and concludes that it resulted in white people voting less conservatively.

The main problem with his analysis — among several problems — is that  800+ precincts in Chicago are missing from the data, with no justification given. It is possible/probable that Enos deleted this data by hand.  Many of these deleted precincts are in Republican leaning areas, meaning Enos' conclusions about voting patterns would likely would not hold if they had they not been deleted.

All versions of Enos’ working paper can be found online. All versions… except for his PhD dissertation which is based on this data. This dissertation has been scrubbed from the internet.  "At the request of the author, this graduate work is not available to view or purchase," says ProQuest, the website which hosted Enos' dissertation.

I spoke with Kathleen Dolan, who is  co-editor in chief of the AJPS and a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She says that "at no time has anyone brought allegations of misconduct about Dr. Enos’ 2016 article to us. Neither of us was aware of the document you provided, nor were we aware of the internal Harvard investigation."

Again, AJPS is refusing to investigate now that it has been brought to their attention.

Harvard, therefore, was aware of these allegations in 2018 and AJPS was not. It is unclear if Harvard had any ethical obligation to inform the AJPS that they were aware of formal and credible reports of research misconduct at the journal. A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on any such ethical obligation. “No comment,” said the spokesperson.

"There are very strong incentives to fudge data in the field of political science," says Jacob Shapiro, a political science professor at Princeton. "Data fabrication is theft: its money, its career advancement, its life satisfaction, it's bad. It's bad. I believe there need to be sanctions, the harshest possible sanctions, for scholars who are proven to engage in data fabrication. There should be no scholars who engage in data fabrication at our top institutions or any institutions."

Michael Smith was the Harvard Dean in charge of disciplining Enos in 2018. He also chaired the committee on appointments and promotions which granted Enos tenure in 2018 as well. It would have been VERY embarrassing for Smith to grant a professor tenure and then immediately find him guilty of fabricating data. Hence, this was suppressed. The person promoted to replace Smith was Claudine Gay. Sources tell me that she is heavily involved in suppressing this as well.

A Second Data Quirk Emerges. Where does it end?

Upon investigating the first Enos dataset, it quickly came apparent that a second Enos dataset was possibly flawed. In 2014, Enos conducted another study that shows white people are afraid of minorities. To do this, he studied the views of commuters on trains in Boston in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The Washington Post covered this story at the time. I have reached out to PNAS. They are currently investigating.

Enos uses survey data that contains IP addresses.

• Very few of the IP addresses are in Boston/Cambridge.

• Multiple IPs in Cambridge used among respondents were on different trains nowhere near Cambridge. The commutes do not make sense.

• There are also plenty of infants and toddlers in the dataset, which is weird, considering 1-year-olds typically don’t have strong opinions on immigration.

• The raw data is missing. This data has been processed.

There are several more weird things about this trains data. It needs to be investigated further. The whole dataset/paper stinks. Unfortunately, upon being notified of potential data issues, Enos deleted the data in an attempt to scrub it from the internet.

It should be noted that this PNAS paper had already been “corrected” once already (see Retraction Watch) and debunked (see van Hoorn (2014)).

Enos' book  (The space between us) published by Cambridge University press (CUP)  is reprinting both the AJPS and the PNAS article, as two chapters. The rest of the book is based on the results in these studies. So the entire book also potentially relies on fabricated data and may need to be retracted along with the articles. 

It's now possible/likely that a full professor at Harvard's 3 most influential and highly cited works (AJPS, PNAS, CUP) — plus his PhD dissertation! — are fabricated.

Is this enough to retract the articles? Is this enough to revoke tenure? Probably. I think Enos’ fate is a foregone conclusion. The wheels are already in motion. I am more interested in what will happen to the Harvard Deans (Smith + Gay) who helped cover this up. (read more)