A little over a month into his term, far-right President Abelardo de la Espriella continues to advance a security agenda that often conflicts with certain rights historically won by Colombians.

This time, De la Espriella has signed a decree allowing police access to university campuses. In several Latin American countries, the prohibition of police access to universities has been established through student struggle to prevent abuses by authorities against student movements.

Thus, universities have historically become places where students seek refuge from repression, arrest, and regroup during times of intense social mobilization.

This was evident during the 2021 protests, known as the “National Strike,” in which students, workers, left-wing political parties, young people, and others took to the streets to protest against the right-wing government of Iván Duque. The mobilization, which lasted several months, was considered a true “social upheaval,” and many experts have seen in it the consolidation of a democratic alternative (the government of Gustavo Petro) to decades and decades of right-wing rule.

During these protests, universities became hubs of popular mobilization, driven primarily by the youngest members of society. On university campuses, protesters were able to regroup, defend themselves against police repression, and coordinate new demonstrations – among other things – always protected by the fact that police are barred from entering university grounds.

De la Espriella calls popular protests “terrorism”

Clearly, De la Espriella seeks to nip this possibility in the bud – that is, to prevent universities from once again becoming coordination centers for the protests. Many have speculated that the president is signing this decree precisely because he knows that his radical neoliberal agenda could spark major protests, and in this way, he hopes to proactively undermine the protest movement.

Read more: One month of De la Espriella’s administration in Colombia

Whether or not this is De la Espriella’s primary intention, only time will tell. What is certain is that the president views university autonomy as an obstacle to the implementation of his security agenda, which also includes curtailing the ability of informal opposition political groups to participate in public life.

“Under no circumstances will I allow public universities to continue to be sanctuaries of violence. I respect and guarantee peaceful protest, but I will not allow universities to continue to be used as sanctuaries of vandalism and crime,” said De la Espriella on X.

Furthermore, true to his combative rhetoric, he compared social protests to terrorism – a common trope in the historical discourse of the Colombian right: “University autonomy is not a blank check for impunity: I have issued precise instructions for a national protocol of action that allows us to distinguish between the legitimate exercise of protest and acts of violence, flagrant offenses, danger, or extraordinary disturbances of public order that require intervention by the authorities. The university is for knowledge and ideas, not to serve as a refuge for violence and terrorism.”

A violation of the Constitution

However, the opposition has viewed this decision as a serious attack on university autonomy. Ana Erazo, a member of the House of Representatives from Valle del Cauca, wrote: “It is an ATTACK ON UNIVERSITY AUTONOMY and a direct threat to the young people at the country’s public universities. With this, Mr. Abelardo de la Espriella is beginning to reveal what could become a BRUTAL RETALIATION against the student movement, against its ability to organize and mobilize, and against thousands of young people who historically have not supported his political agenda.”

Some universities have joined in this criticism. One of them is the National Pedagogical University, whose academic council stated that in the past, “the serious consequences of resolving conflicts within public universities through militarization have been demonstrated on repeated occasions.” Furthermore, the council stated that university autonomy is one of the pillars of Colombian democracy, along with freedom of thought and research, among other things. Losing autonomy means jeopardizing these values of the republic, it stated.

For his part, former presidential candidate Iván Cepeda said that De la Espriella’s measure contradicts Article 69 of the Constitution, which guarantees university autonomy. Regarding the announcement, Cepeda also said: “Such an announcement is not only an affront to university autonomy. It also demonstrates, once again, the authoritarian and despotic nature of De la Espriella, who seeks to stigmatize, persecute, and violate the rights of Colombian youth and the university community. Colombia has not forgotten the victims of police abuse during the National Strike, nor the history of security forces intervening on university campuses, resulting in student deaths. Young people cannot once again be persecuted or treated as an internal enemy and an enemy of the state.”

Since the start of the full-scale war, Russian science has lost key ties with Western universities and research centers. Yet four years of sanctions have not led to a collapse. Instead, Russia rapidly reoriented toward China, other parts of Asia, and the Middle East, while the Kremlin firmly integrated higher education into its system of military priorities. These are the conclusions reached by Olga Orlova, head of T-invariant, in her report Transformation of Science and Education in Russia under Sanctions 2022–2026, which examines changes in Russian academia over the past four years.

The author stresses that what is happening is not simply isolation, but a transition to a dangerous new model. The report examines not only the initial shock of sanctions but also a profound systemic restructuring: total control over international contacts, an accelerated push for “technological sovereignty,” and the subordination of science to the needs of the war economy.

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The break with the West has affected different fields unevenly. The exact and natural sciences, as well as military technologies, have received strong state support and found an alternative partner in China. By contrast, the social sciences and humanities have been devastated. Cut off from the global academic community and international mobility, they have faced enforced isolation and systematic ideological purges.

The result is what the report calls “selective internationalization.” Russia now develops international ties only where they serve the state’s military and strategic interests. The long-term consequences of this pivot are far more dangerous than the sanctions themselves: the country is replacing Western partnerships with near-total dependence on a handful of eastern allies, while the entire academic system is being transformed into an instrument of state security.

You can read the report Transformation of Science and Education in Russia under Sanctions 2022–2026 here.

The post Science After the Break with the West: How War and International Sanctions Reshaped Russian Universities appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Our interviewee today is not allowed to give interviews — under the terms of her employment contract. The senior position she holds at an American university obliges her not to make her political views public and to exercise the utmost caution in public statements. But the changes now taking place at American universities are so far-reaching that she agreed to talk with T-invariant about the serious challenges facing higher education. Her experience as a department chair and dean, and later as a vice president, helps her today to map the critical points in the development of the academic environment: how the new presidential administration is affecting university life, how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has split it, how artificial intelligence is influencing teaching and its administration, what the shrinking of university budgets leads to, and, most importantly, how the very logic by which higher education works has changed.

Top news on scientists’ work and experiences during the war, along with videos and infographics — subscribe to the T-invariant Telegram channelto stay updated.

The economics of structural deficit

T-invariant: You spent more than ten years in administrative work: first as a department chair, then as a dean, and now as a vice president. What changes have you observed over this time, in funding, in administration, in relationships within the faculty, in university politics?

— The most obvious and the most constant thing: there is less and less money. When I was just starting out as a chair, my institution could end the year with a surplus, and that money made it possible to fund special projects. Now many universities are already approaching a state of structural deficit.

It’s important to understand here that American universities are very different, and their funding is structured differently too. There is, for example, the Carnegie Classification by level of research activity. It currently distinguishes R1, R2, and Research Colleges and Universities. For R1 the threshold is at least $50 million in research spending per year and at least 70 research doctoral degrees; for R2, at least $5 million and 20 research doctoral degrees. The next category begins at $2.5 million in research spending. Five million is quite an attainable sum for a small college: the total budget of such an institution might be, say, around $150 million.

R1s are especially vulnerable right now because of cuts to federal research funding. A significant part of their research budgets comes through the NSF, the NIH, and other federal agencies. When those grants are cut, such universities face very serious budgetary problems.

And a grant brings the university money not only for the research itself. What matters here is overhead: the funds the university receives and uses to maintain its infrastructure and its other operations. This is a very significant part of grant funding, sometimes 50 to 60 percent of the entire grant. So R1s, but also R2s and other research universities, depend very heavily on that money.

As I see it, this process began long ago, around 2001: federal research funding started to shrink gradually. Under Obama it was no longer being cut at the same pace, but it did not return to previous levels and did not grow along with inflation. So the financial pressure on universities built up over years.

I myself never worked at R1 universities. For public universities at the R2 level and below, a different source of money matters: state appropriations, that is, ultimately, tax revenue. These too were either cut or stayed at roughly the same level and completely failed to keep up with inflation. At the same time there is strong political pressure not to raise tuition. And now the number of students is falling as well. Even if enrollment were not declining, with this kind of financial structure we would still find ourselves in a very difficult situation.

T-i: And what changed on other levels, for instance, in the university and administrative environment itself?

— A huge change is online education. This is a separate and very complicated topic. Even before the pandemic there were MOOCs, which exist partly outside the traditional university system. Some universities moved very aggressively in this direction and made online education massive and accessible. Then came the pandemic and the total shift online, and in the last two or three years AI appeared as well, and the interaction between online education and AI has created a completely new set of problems.

But there is a deeper change that I think about a lot. It seems to me that the very model of liberal arts education, which is very specific to the United States, is becoming unsustainable.

For someone who received their education outside the United States, the concept itself looks rather strange at first. American higher education rests on the idea that college education should be formative rather than narrowly preparatory: it should teach people to think critically, write well, understand how the world works, and be civically engaged. This idea is very deeply embedded in the American university system.

Historically, this model grew stronger over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: even institutions that began as teachers’ colleges gradually turned into broad-based universities with courses in history, philosophy, anthropology, literature, political science, theater, and other fields.

But it seems to me that the economic conditions that allowed this model to exist in the United States in the twentieth century have now disappeared.

This model was especially viable as long as the United States had a very strong and well-off middle class in which really only the father of the family earned money. In the popular image of the 1980s and 1990s, a single salary could support a suburban house and a family, while four years of college let a child spend several years exploring history, philosophy, or anthropology without having to answer immediately what income that degree would bring. This kind of economy made possible the idea of education as an extended period of exploration before choosing a career.

Today far fewer families can afford this luxury. A student wants to understand in advance what they will do after graduation. So, especially after the pandemic, career readiness has become a much stronger focus: how to connect a major with a specific career, how to build a career map for a student, how to explain the value of a specialization in history or sociology.

There is another feature of the American system that looks rather unusual to someone from Europe or Asia. In many countries you can enter a professional program right after school and train to become a doctor or a lawyer. In the United States, medicine and law belong to the next level of education: before applying to medical school or law school, you need to earn a bachelor’s degree. So the path to a profession turns out to be much longer.

At the same time, professional schools are usually built into a large university. Few independent teachers’ colleges remain today, and medical schools too are usually part of universities. Even engineering schools, where you can go straight into professional training, frequently exist inside universities that also have departments of history, philosophy, and anthropology. So the American university has to sustain this whole broad structure of liberal arts, even if a significant share of its students come there for a quite specific profession.

T-i: And how is this shift in student demand now affecting the university’s structure?

— In the big cities of the United States dozens of colleges and universities exist side by side, and many have their own departments of history, philosophy, anthropology, literature, political science, and theater. Every department needs students who will major in one of the subjects it offers. When the number of such students falls, the old structure stops being sustainable.

And the problem is broader than just a crisis of the humanities. Until recently, accounting and computer science were considered almost ideal career-oriented fields. Now AI is making even these trajectories less obvious. A university cannot simply replace an “impractical” humanities major with one that is guaranteed to be practical: the labor market changes faster than curricula.

Over the past decades, independent research institutes have also been disappearing. This was especially noticeable in biology: as federal funding was cut, many of them became financially unstable and either closed or were absorbed into universities or hospital systems.

T-i: What consequences has all this had, for teaching loads, for instance?

— Teaching load is fairly complicated, because you usually can’t simply increase it. It is fixed either by university bylaws or, in many public universities, by collective bargaining agreements with unions. Those also set the pay scale. So one of the main ways to save money looks different: when a tenured professor retires, their position is increasingly just not reopened.

It’s important to distinguish between different periods here. In the mid-2010s, universities were already under chronic financial pressure, but there were still plenty of students. In the big cities of the United States there was, at the same time, a large market of people with PhDs in history, philosophy, and other disciplines who were looking for academic work. Universities could hire them as part-timers for individual courses for far less money than tenured professors.

Gradually a whole layer of career adjuncts emerged. An instructor might teach at one university on Tuesday and Thursday, at another on Monday and Wednesday, and offer courses in the fall, spring, and summer. Some accumulated a very heavy load this way and essentially lived on teaching alone. In public systems, with a maximum teaching load and a benefits package, you could even reach a fairly decent annual income, but at the cost of an enormous number of courses and giving up research almost entirely.

For a long time I thought this replacement of full-time faculty with part-timers (what’s called adjunctification) was happening in more or less the same way across the country, because I worked in a big city myself. But then I realized how much this model depends on geography. It works well where there are many universities and many people with doctorates nearby: in the big cities of the United States a person can teach in several places at once and doesn’t have to move for a single course.

In rural America the situation is completely different. If a university is in a small town and needs a specialist, a person with a PhD won’t move there for five thousand dollars a course. There simply isn’t a large enough local market for academic labor. So adjunctification was a very uneven process: in the big university centers it could reach enormous scale, while in many rural areas the model barely worked at all.

And now, in many places, the trend has reversed. There are fewer students, and it is extremely difficult to dismiss faculty on permanent contracts. Moreover, in the United States age discrimination is prohibited, and you can’t simply push older professors toward retirement.

The pandemic changed this situation even more. Everyone learned to teach online, and now an older professor sometimes doesn’t need to come to the university regularly at all. I’ve seen professors well past eighty who calmly log onto Zoom twice a week, teach their usual courses, and continue to receive a full professor’s salary. If there are medical grounds that qualify for an accommodation, they can secure the right to teach remotely. In public universities this sometimes slows the renewal of staff even further.

At expensive private colleges the pressure runs strongly the other way: students are paying in part for the in-person experience and react very negatively if an instructor tries to replace on-campus classes with Zoom sessions. So the ability to move fully to remote teaching depends heavily on the type of university.

As a result, when a budget has to be cut today, the first vulnerable group is now the adjuncts themselves. Some of them built their entire professional life on this work over many years, stopped doing research and publishing, and are now at a serious disadvantage when a tenure-track position opens up somewhere. I’ve seen units where, before the pandemic, adjuncts taught half of all courses, and now only one or two of them are left.

It turns out to be a rather sharp historical reversal. First, chronic underfunding combined with large student numbers encouraged the mass use of adjuncts, especially in big cities. Now enrollment is falling, the tenured faculty remains protected and is aging at the same time, and universities are economizing above all on the very layer of adjunct faculty that they themselves created over the previous decades.

Overcoming inertia

T-i: Is the number of permanent professorial positions still shrinking, then?

— Yes, it is. When a professor retires, it is much easier not to reopen their tenure-track line. That is exactly how the cuts happen: you don’t necessarily have to fire anyone, you can simply leave positions unfilled for years. Hence the aging of the faculty and the gap between disciplines that are still hiring actively and those where the department is gradually shrinking.

In 2022–2023 we had a brief reversal at our college. Thanks to federal stimulus funds and the ability to justify new hiring in terms of social mobility, we managed to hire many new full-time faculty on tenure-track lines, including replacing some of the adjuncts. We argued that students from low-income families, of whom we have many at our university, should also have direct access to full-time faculty who are based at the university, do research, and can properly mentor them. It was a very good period, but then funding tightened again.

T-i: And what is happening with the positions of ordinary staff? Are they being cut too?

— Interesting things are happening here. I’ve long had the sense that computers took over the world, but in a way that makes sense for computers: they made us perform more and more tasks we had not performed before, because it became technically possible to create them. What used to be done in the 1990s with a single paper form now turns into several electronic forms, reports, approval systems, and databases.

Hence a strange effect: software, fast internet, Wi-Fi, platforms, specialists for each system — all of this raises the cost of the university. And you need more people, not fewer. We once thought the internet would reduce paper use; the opposite happened. It’s a similar story with staff. Every automation gives rise to new operations and new duties, and in the end the digital infrastructure itself feeds the budget crisis.

AI so far doesn’t look like an exception. It can automate a particular task, but at the same time it creates new demands for oversight, reporting, training, and academic integrity.

T-i: And what changes have there been in what students want, and in how the university responds?

— Over the last two years I’ve seen a fairly rapid retreat from online education, especially among undergraduates. For my students, online courses were very appealing at first. I worked at a public university where many students come from low-income families and work while studying, so the ability not to come to campus every day solved a real problem for them.

But a contradiction soon became apparent: students want online learning, but many of them simply don’t succeed in an online environment. I had students who logged into class while working a store cash register or sitting at their workplace. Formally they were present, but in practice they couldn’t fully participate. Such students began to fall behind, and many of them eventually dropped out of the university altogether.

So now I see a reverse movement: students themselves more often choose traditional in-person courses. The online format, of course, isn’t going anywhere: it’s too important for working students. But the idea that it by itself solves the problem of access to education turned out to be too optimistic. Access to a course does not yet mean the ability to actually learn.

The arrival of AI has added another problem. In an online environment it becomes ever harder to tell whether a student is really doing the work themselves. AI imitates human text very well, and almost any technical measure we try to use against academic dishonesty can be circumvented. So the return to in-person classes is also connected with a very practical question: how to make sure the student is actually learning.

T-i: What changed after the current federal administration took office?

— There are two obvious shifts. The first is rhetorical: from Washington we increasingly hear the idea that higher education is overrated and that what society really needs is vocational and technical training, short programs, and non-academic online courses.

Up-to-date videos on science during wartime, interviews, podcasts, and streams with prominent scientists — subscribe to the T-invariant YouTube channel!

The second is a sharp reversal around DEI policy. For the last twenty or thirty years, the development of DEI was one of the central paradigms of the American university. Offices, programs, grants, and strategic plans were built around it; universities sought to increase diversity among students, faculty, and staff.

When I came to American academia from a different educational system, the point of this policy was not self-evident to me. I was strongly influenced by conversations with colleagues and students. One colleague put it this way: if a society has systematically discriminated against a particular group for a very long time, simply declaring formal equality is not enough, becauseeconomic inequality and a culture that has built up over centuries will still remain. Society is better off when social groups are not locked into a social environment where poverty, criminalization, and drug addiction thrive.

Now an almost 180-degree turn has taken place. Programs built around DEI are losing funding and have been outlawed; legal offices are demanding an inventory of anything that might conflict with the new federal rules.

There is no systematic response to these changes yet. There is a lot of confusion, attempts to understand the limits of what’s permissible, and a desire not to attract unnecessary attention. In more liberal states, universities feel some political protection, but even so they are much more careful about what they put in writing.

My own approach to diversity was always fairly moderate: make searches for job candidates and students as broad as possible, avoid labeling, resist stereotypes, and make the university welcoming for staff and students of different backgrounds. But even that isn’t enough. You have to train campus security and support staff so that they don’t begin an interaction with staff or students on the basis of their appearance or accent.

T-i: What changes of recent years do you see in the students themselves?

— The way students communicate has changed. Before the pandemic, instructors complained that students talked to each other too much in class and couldn’t sit still. After the pandemic I sometimes observe almost complete silence. One recruiter asked me: “Why are all your students whispering?” They find interpersonal communication very stressful, but at the same time they crave it. So sometimes effective pedagogy today consists literally in making them talk to each other in an organized way.

T-i: Why does academia, seeing these threats, change so slowly?

— Because academia is structurally conservative, and I don’t mean politics here. Because of financial constraints, universities hired too few young faculty for many years, and the faculty is aging. Curricula are aging too. Articles that were an intellectual revelation for me in graduate school I still want, out of habit, to assign to students, even though they are now twenty or thirty years old.

I often think of the Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass: “it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place,” which means that to get somewhere you have to run twice as fast. Technology and the labor market change at enormous speed, while curricula and ways of teaching are conservative and dogmatic. That’s why hiring younger and early-career faculty matters not only as a question of fairness in the labor market. It is one of the ways to renew the content of education.

The university and “big” politics

T-i: Is there any political or social force beyond academia that is seriously interested in the development of American higher education?

— My short answer: I don’t see such a force. None of the political parties makes higher education a priority on its agenda. The Democrats have many social programs; among Republicans there is now strong criticism of universities. For governors and Congress, higher education competes for funding with healthcare, transportation, housing programs, support for people with disabilities, environmental projects, schools, and many other areas.

University presidents, of course, lobby governors, Congress, the federal administration. But they aren’t the only ones lobbying; everyone does. From inside the university it seems obvious to us that our funding, specifically, is critically important. From the outside, we are just one of many groups, each of which can present a convincing list of public needs.

Outside the big cities in America, transport and social infrastructure are very weak. Between small towns there may be almost no public transport: train service is infrequent, if it runs at all, the bus network is weak, and without a car it’s hard to reach even the nearest town. You come across poor towns with empty houses and a very limited set of jobs.

That’s exactly why a university there acts as an economic anchor. It brings in hundreds or thousands of students, hires faculty and staff, and around it develop rental housing, cafés, sports facilities, schools for employees’ children, medical services, and cultural events. Often it is the only place in the county where an educated middle class is consistently present. If such a university disappears, it can leave an economic desert behind.

So the question of closing a small public university is at the same time a question of regional policy, even if in university budgets it isn’t called that.

T-i: Then what can universities actually do themselves?

— Public universities retain a strong resource: they can provide high-quality education at a comparatively low price. There is demand for this, and there is a public payoff too. So public universities have a convincing return on investment, ROI: their graduates on average earn more in the labor market, while tuition there is far lower than at expensive private colleges. Our weak point is that we are often bad at telling families and high-school students about this.

We will have to take the demand for career readiness more seriously, work more actively with local communities and schools, and explain better what a university does. Popularizing research is also becoming part of the mission: historians, philosophers, political scientists, and physicists go on YouTube and make short videos explaining their research to a broad audience. Academia long considered such work secondary; now it is becoming a matter of survival.

I don’t really believe that the main survival strategy will emerge from a nationwide or transnational coalition of universities. American institutions are too different: public ones are funded by the states, private ones compete for students, grants, and donors, and there are also religious universities and military academies. It’s useful to meet and talk, but real solutions are usually region-specific.

T-i: Have political conflicts between faculty become sharper in recent years?

— Political differences have always existed and often ran along disciplinary lines: roughly speaking, a finance department might be more Republican, while a sociology department might be very liberal. But in recent years I really have seen extremely sharp conflicts around Israel and Palestine. Sometimes at chairs’ meetings I genuinely feared the argument would come to blows.

As a dean I tried not to show my own political views. So for a while both pro-Israeli and anti-Israeli colleagues were convinced I was on their side, and they took turns coming to my office to complain about one another. In the humanities and social sciences it’s hard to separate a personal position entirely from teaching; it shows in what a person says in class and what they support publicly.

What amazes me most is something else: faculty can mobilize emotionally far more around Middle Eastern politics, which the university can barely influence, than around their own budget and the future of their institution. They merely complain about the lack of funding, but when they discuss the conflict over Israel they’re ready to shout at each other for hours.

T-i: And don’t unions and collective protests give faculty a channel of influence?

— Unions can indeed be active in the fight for funding and contracts, but the protests themselves are often surprisingly small. I went to major rallies in defense of funding for the natural sciences, and each time I was struck by how much smaller the turnout was than I had expected.

There are many reasons for this. A tenured professor has a protected contract, good insurance, a relatively decent salary; the budget crisis isn’t always felt as a matter of life and death. Besides, the bloated bureaucracy keeps people constantly busy with small tasks. On a day off, a person chooses between a rally that probably won’t change anything and their family.

Younger faculty, in my observation, are not necessarily more active than their elders either. Sometimes they are in a much more vulnerable position and are afraid to take risks; sometimes they are simply overloaded. To really understand this, you’d need a separate, sociologically grounded conversation with people about why, on a given day off, they do or don’t go to a protest.

There are internal conflicts too. The same union can represent both full-time and adjunct faculty, whose interests don’t always coincide. Some unions took very hard positions on Israel, which made some Jewish faculty drift away from them. When yet another political agenda is added to a rally in defense of science, you inevitably push away some of the potential participants.

T-i: Do the political divisions among students look the same?

— In the big cities of the United States, the student body is global. The conflict over Israel and Palestine made student politics very visible for the first time in a long while. The division was palpable and did not disappear in a single academic year.

The reaction to immigration policy, meanwhile, looks different. Vulnerable students are often simply afraid, while part of the local student body can be fairly conservative on immigration. At first glance it’s strange that there is intense campus activism around an international conflict and much less around domestic immigration policy, but these issues probably affect different groups of students.

University leadership in recent years, in my experience, tries to take as neutral a position as possible: not to issue loud political statements, not to invite deliberately provocative speakers, to emphasize academic work. The logic is roughly this: don’t draw unnecessary political attention to the university.

T-i: Did the conflict over Israel and Palestine change the composition of the student body itself?

— In some large urban universities, my impression is that after the sharpest campus conflicts the number of Jewish students declined. Some families preferred quieter private institutions, perceived as more openly pro-Israeli or simply more controlled. I can’t turn my own observations into nationwide statistics, but locally the change was noticeable.

[[socialnetworks]]

T-i: We’ve barely talked about international students. What has changed here?

— In the late 1990s, international students were more often described in the terminology of “attracting talent”: the university brings in strong people from all over the world. Later, for many institutions, this also turned into a business model. International students pay higher tuition, so universities began actively recruiting them and building special support systems.

Now visa restrictions are sharply reducing this flow. For some universities this is both a loss of the international environment and a direct blow to the budget. It’s especially noticeable when a large share of international students historically came from one or two countries, and now, in those countries, visas have suddenly become significantly harder to get.

T-i: Do you think that, with all these constraints and difficulties, the American university is able to preserve the quality of its education and research?

— The future is hard to predict, but I believe in the resilience of the model of affordable, quality public education. Enough people still need it, and the mission of social mobility hasn’t gone anywhere.

About research I’m more anxious. The slowdown didn’t begin yesterday: since the early 2000s, individual research institutes have been closing or being absorbed, and federal funding has been shrinking. It seems to me that the United States is gradually losing part of its technological advantage, including in biology and biomedicine, and increasingly importing technologies and ideas from East Asia and Europe. This is a long trajectory, not a consequence of the policies of this presidential term alone.

In education the consequences are less clear-cut. Professors like to say that students “aren’t what they used to be,” but I’ve had very strong groups even in recent years. They just need to be taught a little differently. If you adapt teaching methods to how they take in information today and interact with each other and with us, you can get good results.

T-i: So it turns out that the principles of tenure and shared governance both protect the university and prevent it from restructuring quickly?

— Yes, there is a constant tension here, but it is built into the system itself. Faculty can unite, object, slow things down, or change decisions. Sometimes they defend what seems to me outdated; sometimes it is precisely they who keep the administration from making a catastrophic decision.

Over my years in university administration, relations between faculty and administration moved in waves between conflict and cooperation. It depends on the financial situation, on personalities, and on the specific issue. I don’t consider the tension itself a defect. A university is built around tensions among competing interests: financial sustainability, academic autonomy, and concern for students’ interests. What matters is that all these opposing interests and views actually help us move forward rather than stand still.

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The post “None of the political parties makes higher education a priority on its agenda”: American higher education through the eyes of a university administrator appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Abelardo de la Espriella has now been in office for one month. The far-right president won the election by a narrow margin over leftist Iván Cepeda (less than 1% of valid votes), despite allegations of irregularities made by then-President Gustavo Petro.

However, De la Espriella dismissed the allegations of irregularities and began his administration by attempting to demonstrate military strength, an overt religious faith (for which he had to issue a public apology), and a clear alignment with Washington’s political doctrine.

The earthquake and the return to a state policy of war

However, just three days after he took office, a powerful earthquake struck the western part of the country, leaving more than 300 dead and nearly 5,000 injured. The government’s actions drew controversy. His supporters applauded the government’s response, while critics accused the administration of exploiting the tragedy to boost his public image and giving certain countries – such as Israel – priority in search-and-rescue efforts, while denying entry to rescue teams from other countries.

Added to this is the rhetoric of a return to all-out war against subversive armed groups and criminal organizations that De la Espriella already put forward during his election campaign. But this has not been merely a matter of rhetoric. Since taking office, the executive branch has ordered a series of attacks against positions held by these groups, some of which were engaged in peace talks aimed at their demobilization.

In fact, De la Espriella canceled the peace negotiations, which had been resumed by the Petro administration as part of his “total peace” policy.

Read more: President De la Espriella cancels peace talks in Colombia

In addition, the government’s death-defying political communication strategy has caused quite a stir. In some videos, the president can be seen walking among the bodies of alleged “bandits and terrorists” (as the government calls them), which, according to the Executive Branch, number 40, in addition to the capture of nine people allegedly linked to illegal organizations.

But the bombings have also drawn significant domestic criticism. In the Guaviare Department, three minors were reported killed following the bombings ordered by the president, which were part of a series of attacks that left a total of about ten people dead. And while De la Espriella said that armed groups are responsible for the deaths of the minors, he has not been able to escape criticism from human rights organizations that view indiscriminate bombing as a dangerous threat to innocent people and the civilian population.

A return to neoliberalism

Ultimately, the contrast between Petro’s and De la Espriella’s administrations seems so evident that many wonder whether it is precisely this political distancing that serves as the compass guiding the new government – or whether Colombia is, in fact, attempting to establish a new form of state.

To understand this transformation, BreakThrough News spoke with Danilo Urrea, philosopher at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, who sees in this first month a clear shift toward a return to a state policy of war – one that had previously been implemented with negative results: “In Colombia, this was historically known as the era called ‘La Violencia,’ which was one of the worst periods the country has ever experienced in terms of the barbarity it generated.”

“The president presents the killing of people to the country as a success,” he added. “But he also does so with an aesthetic and a semiotics that portray death, murder, and the like as a possibility for the country. And in a context like Colombia’s – where we have the highest death toll on the entire continent, surpassing even the combined death tolls of all the region’s dictatorships – this shows us that it is a step backward in terms of the possibility of building a country based on dialogue and reconciliation.”

Urrea also says the current government is trying to push the idea that the country it has inherited is in a disastrous financial situation, which is why it must promote a radical neoliberal policy: “We’ve identified efforts to promote a supposed economic turnaround for the country through old formulas that have already been tried and proved disastrous for social cohesion, for the territories, and for the relationship between humans and nature – with negative impacts on the communities living in the very places where this return to an extractive economy is once again being proposed.”

Furthermore, he warns that in the short time De la Espriella has been in office, there has been a setback in environmental and labor matters: “He has also come under attack during this first month, as he has begun to dismantle the gains made in terms of wages, recovery, overtime pay, and certain labor protections … which had been restored under President Petro’s administration through reforms and which this administration is now once again rapidly undoing with the stroke of a pen, supposedly to improve economic conditions. That, in very general terms, is what we’re seeing and what’s projected: the deregulation of all social benefits, of all the hard-won gains; the complete dismantling of all reforms; and the surrender of the country – in the areas of health, education, food, and all fundamental rights – to privatization processes primarily for the profit of transnational corporations.”

A new (old) geopolitical doctrine

Following the Petro administration’s attempts to defend the Palestinian people against Israel’s onslaught, as well as its various clashes with Washington’s hemispheric geopolitical agenda, Urrea asserts that Colombia has joined a regional strategy of control orchestrated by Washington: “The rise of the far right, which is well known … Through this administration, Colombia has become yet another outpost of U.S. imperialism’s advance across the region. And obviously, this has far-reaching consequences for the geopolitics of Latin America and the Caribbean in particular.”

WATCH: Colombia’s new president declares ‘colonial allegiance’ to US & Israel

Furthermore, Urrea highlights the historical importance Colombia – a country with access to both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea – has held in the United States’ geopolitical strategy to control natural resources: “From a geopolitical standpoint, conditions are being created for Colombia to once again become one of the countries that facilitates U.S. military control – but above all, control over the natural resources and assets that are so coveted in this era of challenges for the United States in terms of its economic capacity, its dispute with China, and everything related to critical minerals.”

What is the opposition doing?

Urrea notes that, for now, the opposition parties have not managed to formulate a clear response to De la Espriella’s project. First, he points to a certain caution regarding a state policy that promotes violence and war: “There is obviously a great deal of fear regarding the actions I mentioned earlier – this language of violence, death, and murder. And obviously, in a country like Colombia, this has repercussions for the ability of those opposed to the current regime to act. Furthermore, because there has been an increase in the targeted killings of social leaders in various parts of the country, especially in areas most affected by geopolitical disputes as well as conflicts over economic and commercial control, illegal economies, and so on.”

However, Urrea notes that a coordinated opposition to the popular sectors could emerge, and the people might offer a peaceful and better-coordinated response: “We should consider an opposition that stems more from the popular sector, and there, I believe, there is also fear about how to react in the face of a violent scenario, a dangerous scenario, and manipulation. But I believe that organizations are now focusing on analyzing what the main peaceful and strategic causes might be to address the current situation. It seems to me that one of these fundamental aspects will undoubtedly be, and is already taking shape in the country through popular organization and mobilization, the defense of the environment, the defense of territories that are already being targeted for the control and exploitation of natural resources by transnational corporations, and the issue of fracking.”

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While Slovak politicians calmly keep their academic degrees for copied theses thanks to convenient loopholes in the law, far less visible violations are taking place inside the universities themselves. Dozens of scholars appear to be linked to purchased authorship, data manipulation, and publications in predatory journals. The Plagiat-Navigator project tried to determine how deeply academic fraud has penetrated Slovak science.

In recent years, Slovakia has faced a series of high-profile academic scandals, mostly connected with plagiarism in the dissertations of senior politicians and officials. In September 2025, a scandal broke out around Pavol Gaspar, director of the Slovak Information Service, the country’s main intelligence and counterintelligence agency. His master’s thesis on corruption, defended in 2011, turned out to have been copied by roughly two thirds from uncited sources. In response to the plagiarism allegations, Gaspar said that his work had passed all the required formal checks as part of the defense procedure, after which he was awarded a master’s degree. That same year, member of parliament Marian Kery, who had previously publicly accused other politicians of plagiarism, was himself caught in a similar violation. His 2004 master’s thesis, “The Image of Man in Pushkin’s Belkin Tales,” copies almost verbatim a thesis defended four years earlier by student Martina Brodnanova.

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In 2020, leading journalists from the newspaper Dennik N carried out a broad review of the theses of the country’s top officials. It turned out that plagiarism had been found in the works of several representatives of the ruling coalition’s upper ranks, including the education minister, the speaker of parliament, and the prime minister. The scandal led the Slovak parliament, at the end of 2020, to pass a law allowing academic degrees to be officially revoked for plagiarism. But a significant loophole remained in the law: it is not retroactive and applies only to works defended after 2020. As a result, all the senior officials whose work was found to contain plagiarism, including the intelligence chief Gaspar and MP Kery mentioned above, kept both their degrees and their positions.

Dissertation scandals involving the country’s first-tier officials and other senior figures are only the visible part of a much larger problem. These high-profile cases received broad public attention thanks to targeted journalistic investigations, but in their shadow remains a significant layer of violations of academic integrity among Slovak scholars, professors, and university lecturers.

Here one should mention Petr Jakubek, a Doctor of Sciences in economics and a member of the governing board of DTI University (Dubnicky technologicky institut). In 2019, he received a Doctor of Sciences diploma after defending a dissertation at Chernihiv Technological University in Ukraine. As later became clear, a substantial part of Jakubek’s dissertation text coincides verbatim with the text of the dissertation of his opponent, Svetlana Natroshvili, defended in Kyiv in 2016. Below is an example of improper borrowing on one page of Jakubek’s dissertation.

But the problem is not only the absence of citations: even if they had been present, they would not have resolved the issue. In the text, Jakubek mechanically replaced the National University of Physical Education and Sport of Ukraine, which appeared in Natroshvili’s work, with Chernihiv Technological University, while leaving all quantitative indicators unchanged.

The practice of defending a dissertation in another country and then having the diploma nostrified at home is widespread in Eastern Europe and across the post-Soviet space.

If dissertation plagiarism in Slovakia is at least partly documented and discussed by journalists, a much larger problem is developing outside public view. It is a system in which a scientific career can be built not on genuine research, but on purchased articles, fabricated data, and artificially inflated indicators.

In May 2026, the major academic online platform Research.com published lists of top researchers based on h-index and citation metrics. In the field of plant science and agronomy, Professor Marian Brestic, one of the highest-ranked Slovak researchers at the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, placed 213th in the world. His colleague, Associate Professor Marek Zivcak, placed 1,511th globally, becoming Slovakia’s second-highest-ranked scientist in the field. As a result, the university took 253rd place worldwide in this scientific area and second place among the seven Slovak universities included in the ranking, losing the top national spot only to Comenius University in Bratislava.

Yet back in 2022, Leonid Schneider, an independent science journalist known for his high-profile investigations into academic ethics, devoted an entire section of his For Better Science issue to Brestic and Zivcak. By that time, these Slovak authors, together with colleagues from Middle Eastern countries, had accumulated nine papers with negative reviews on the post-publication peer review platform PubPeer, some of which had already been retracted. Schneider links this to the purchase of co-authorship on the Asian market — a shadow industry where authorship is sold as a commodity. In some of these publications, experts found distorted phrases and terms, or “tortured phrases”: a characteristic trace of machine paraphrasing used to conceal plagiarism. The image below shows one such example in the journal Microorganisms, on the left, alongside an earlier source text by other authors, on the right, from which the “paraphrase” was made.

Since then, the number of problematic publications has grown. Today, PubPeer lists 34 publications by Professor Brestic with critical comments, some of them co-authored with Associate Professor Zivcak. The reasons for criticism, and in some cases for later retraction, included not only plagiarism or conflicts of interest, but also the substitution of authors at the final stage of publication, after all the reviewers’ questions had already been settled. Such substitutions are considered one of the characteristic signs of papers circulating on the purchased-authorship market.

These scandals, retractions, and exposés, however, have almost no effect on rankings. Even if all the disputed papers by Brestic and Zivcak are officially retracted, their citation counts and h-indexes will remain in the databases. These data are not recalculated retroactively after retractions. Formally, the scholars have already taken their places in the global tables, and no later revelations can dislodge them. A victory in the rankings obtained through paper mills and purchased citations formally remains a victory.

The mechanism of these rankings has a direct financial expression. Under the methodology of Slovakia’s Ministry of Education, every publication that falls within the top 1 percent of the world’s most cited papers automatically brings its author 3,000 euros from the state budget, and the same amount to the university. Thus, an artificially inflated citation index means not only a place in a prestigious ranking, but real money. In such a system, artificial citation inflation acquires a direct financial value: high bibliometric indicators affect not only academic status, but also the distribution of public funds. It is worth noting that Slovakia is not alone here: a similar system of monetary rewards for publications in high-ranking journals has long existed in Russia.

An equally telling case of image manipulation was documented in the work of an associate professor at Comenius University. In a joint 2024 publication in the journal Nano-Micro Letters, Dmitry Medvedev, a professor at Ural Federal University and Doctor of Chemical Sciences, and Martin Motola, an associate professor at Comenius University in Bratislava, together with co-authors from China, manually redrew the scale bar on images of nanoparticles obtained using a scanning electron microscope. The article claimed that the particles under study measured tens of nanometers. The microscope’s technical specifications, however, indicate that the real particle sizes were many times larger (see the image below).

In other words, the scale in the images was simply adjusted to fit the desired result. But that was not the end of the matter. In the same article, experts on PubPeer raised well-founded concerns about other data as well, including graphs. This was not an isolated case: in recent years, experts have identified a whole series of Motola’s papers with problems in the data and in their graphical presentation. The regular appearance of such problems in Motola’s articles can hardly be attributed to simple inattention on the part of the authors.

Publications by scholars from Comenius University also contain direct borrowing of visual materials without references to the original source. A telling example is an article by Professor Peter Mikus and Veronika Mikusova on chitosan nanoparticles, in which some illustrations were copied from an earlier publication by Iranian authors.

In papers where experts identify gross violations of publication ethics, links to Asian paper mills can often be traced. These mills specialize in producing ready-made publications and then distributing them through online platforms.

On the shadow market of paper mills, authorship is not the only thing for sale. Another sought-after commodity is citations. References to one’s own work, like references to the work of others, have long since become a valuable asset. In June 2025, the editor of Chemical Engineering Journal retracted a publication by the aforementioned Associate Professor Motola and his university colleague Muhammad Hanif for artificial citation inflation. Between the original publication and the final version of the article, the number of references to Hanif’s work rose from 2 to 19, and references to Motola’s work from 2 to 10.

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Particular concern is raised by the rapidly spreading practice of publishing review articles under the names of fictitious scholars. The purpose of such works is to introduce numerous citations of articles by people who paid intermediaries on the shadow market for this service into the legitimate scientific record. Thus, the publication portfolio of Beata Gavurova, a professor at the Technical University of Kosice, has raised serious questions among the expert community. “More than 40 scientific articles a year — one every nine days — is a pace that defies rational explanation,” Leonid Schneider notes, following a journalistic investigation published by the Slovak online outlet Dennik N. According to him, dozens of Gavurova’s publications appeared in outlets deemed unreliable or predatory, and some of the journals in which she published have already been removed from scientific databases. At the same time, the researcher’s numerous co-authors represent various Asian countries, which, in the experts’ view, points to the purchase of authorship through networked paper mills.

According to Dennik N, up to one third of papers by Slovak scholars are published in dubious predatory journals.

Yet the external signs of questionable publication behavior are only part of the problem. Gavurova’s own papers contain inconsistencies between the text and graphical data, problems with chemical formulas, and dubious spectra with signals of unnatural shape. Some of these articles have received retracted status.

The next case provides direct evidence of purchased authorship in publications distributed by paper mills. Earlier, the Dissernet community drew attention to the interaction of Slovak researchers with a Moscow company that provided article placement services. A telling example is the case of Boris Sturc, an associate professor at the University of Economics and Business: a preliminary offer posted by this exchange was first documented (see the image below), and later a paper with the title listed in the offer appeared in the International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, with Sturc as first co-author. Analysis shows that this was not a one-off: Sturc’s publication list includes other commercially acquired works as well.

Over time, the shadow academic industry is transforming: centralized exchanges selling papers appear to be losing influence. Their place is being taken by decentralized private intermediaries — individual entrepreneurs, or “paper millers.” Technological progress is helping this shift along: modern AI tools make it possible to fabricate scientific texts in the shortest possible time, without involving large teams of specialists from different fields of science. Offers from “paper millers” are easy to find in open internet channels. Traces of this market can also be found in the publications of Slovak researchers. Below are specific episodes involving Slovak scholars in joint publications offered by “paper millers” from Germany, Ukraine, Montenegro, and Middle Eastern countries.

“Olga Golubnitschaja is the editor-in-chief of EPMA, the European Journal of Predictive, Preventive and Personalized Medicine, and at the same time a co-author of many articles in that journal, which is normal. What is surprising, however, is that for many articles in which she is a co-author, very little time passes between submission and acceptance. In some cases it is only a matter of three to five days. Below are several examples from the past year,” says a review of one article involving her. Such short timelines raise the question of whether full scientific peer review was possible — a process that usually includes selecting independent experts, preparing comments, revising the manuscript by the authors, and reassessing the changes made. Olga Golubnitschaja, a professor at the University of Bonn, often appears as a co-author of problematic papers by Russian and Slovak scholars; some of these works later became the subject of criticism for violations of publication norms.

An expert review of a joint article by authors from Slovakia and Ukraine revealed repeated sections in experimental spectra. Among the co-authors of the article, one figure stands out: Taras Kavetsky, an associate professor at Drohobych Pedagogical University in Ukraine, who was found to have used identical schemes of spectral-data fabrication in other scientific works as well.

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Stanislav Dudic, a Doctor of Sciences at Comenius University and a specialist in international economics, industrial engineering, trade, and investment, appeared as a co-author of a publication that raised serious questions. The paper, written together with the Montenegrin co-author Velibor Spalevic, concerned a modified copper-containing metal-organic framework, and experts detected signs of artificial modification of experimental data. It is worth noting that a number of works by Spalevic himself, a professor at the University of Montenegro, have also been criticized on the PubPeer forum.

Professor Natalia Krivinska, head of the Department of Information Systems at the Faculty of Management of Comenius University, is a vivid example of how formal co-authorship with dubious partners can undermine trust in a scholar. Her article on combating DDoS attacks, prepared in co-authorship with Saudi colleagues through machine paraphrasing, was retracted. But Professor Krivinska’s problems are not limited to a single publication: in her works, experts have found a whole bouquet of tortured phrases, bibliographies unrelated to the subject of the paper, and even direct borrowing of illustrations, all of which calls into question the quality of her entire academic record.

Another case of questionable scientific practice involves the Institute of Construction and Architecture of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Its employees, Professor Martin T. Palou and Associate Professor Taher Tawfik, were listed among the co-authors of an international paper with Egyptian and Iraqi colleagues, but a review showed that the images presented in the article had undergone impermissible processing, casting doubt on the reliability of the entire work.

The overwhelming majority of the episodes listed above led to no sanctions against the authors. Journalistic investigations and the volunteer work of experts on PubPeer help reveal problem after problem, but real institutional consequences in Slovakia’s academic sphere are barely visible. Retractions do not affect citation indices, and the law allowing academic degrees to be revoked for plagiarism does not apply to works defended before it came into force. As a result, buyers of authorship keep their positions in rankings and universities.

This is the central paradox. Under the Ministry of Education’s methodology, universities receive 50 percent of the state bonus for each highly ranked publication. This means that, in the race for rankings, the universities themselves become interested parties: the more “outstanding” publications their employees have — even if they were bought on the shadow market — the more public funding the university receives.

At the same time, Slovakia’s system of state funding for science, which generously rewards publications in top-percentile journals, effectively creates a “green corridor” for the shadow market. Cash payments to an author for an article they purchased on the shadow market are resources stolen from science. Public funds intended to develop research instead flow into the pockets of shadow intermediaries.

As long as the academic system continues to measure the quality of science primarily by the number of publications and citations, paper mills will be able to turn manipulation of these indicators into academic status and real money. In the age of AI, when producing texts that look scientific is becoming ever cheaper, the problem of how to evaluate scientific work is only becoming more acute.

The post Ratings for Money: How Slovakia Rewards Scientific Fraud appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Estonia spent years building a reputation as being at the forefront of science, but scandals involving violations of research ethics are becoming increasingly common. Professors sharing authorship with falsifiers; associate professors hiding data behind a “confidential” label; mathematicians publishing “math salad” — all of this reflects today’s challenges: the spread of paper mills and the uncontrolled adoption of AI. Sociologists found that more than 40 percent of Estonian researchers had used “gift” authorship. More in the latest installment of the Plagiat-Navigator project.

In February 2024, the prestigious scientific journal Nature published the article WNT signalling control by KDM5C during development affects cognition. The researchers were trying to understand why mutations in the KDM5C gene cause intellectual disability. The author team brought together researchers from Boston, Oxford, and universities in Australia and China, along with a single Estonian representative from the University of Tartu — Professor Katrin Ounap, a specialist in medical genetics. A year after publication, experts found multiple deliberate manipulations of illustrations in the paper. The figure below shows the same fragments of nerve-cell processes, or dendrites, reused after mirror reflection, 180-degree rotation, and partial retouching. “Such different transformations of individual image fragments are difficult to explain as a simple mistake,” one expert commented. Some images in the paper also bear a striking resemblance to images from earlier publications by other authors.

It turned out that a group of co-authors from Harvard Medical School in Boston, led by Professor Yang Shi, had been using similar methods for at least a decade. In a paper published in early 2016, fragments of dendrite images were likewise copied from another publication and modified through mirroring and scaling.

Professor Ounap’s contribution to the Nature paper was clinical: she provided fibroblast samples from patients. Her co-authorship with the Boston group, however, dates back to 2015. This does not prove that she knew about the falsifications, but in academia co-authorship entails responsibility for the entire content of a paper. The argument that the professor merely supplied biological material does not absolve her of responsibility for the final result fabricated by her colleagues.

While investigations into international publications can drag on for years, within Estonia’s national system universities sometimes demonstrate an ability to act quickly and decisively. The following case is a telling example. In 2013, Andres Menind, an associate professor at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, defended a dissertation on biotechnology for energy production. Soon after the defense, it emerged that the work contained at least three lengthy plagiarized passages, in both the theoretical and research sections. A procedure to revoke his academic degree followed. It was the first case of its kind in the university’s history. The university leadership acted promptly, without delays or bureaucratic evasions. The university did not publish a percentage of textual overlap, stressing that the decision was based on expert assessment of the nature and significance of the borrowings rather than on a formal similarity score exceeding some arbitrary threshold.

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But Estonia’s academic immune system does not always work. In 2002, Valery Korb defended a doctoral dissertation in St. Petersburg that had been copied in its entirety from an earlier work by someone else. Today, the Estonian politician Valery Korb is a member of the supervisory board of Ida-Viru Central Hospital in Kohtla-Jarve. All attempts to strip him of his academic degree have come to nothing.

Manipulation of images in scientific publications often ends in retraction — the formal withdrawal of a paper by a journal. The process is usually slow and can take years. The Nature paper remains under question, but a 2022 publication in Adsorption Science & Technology has already been officially retracted. Its authors included researchers from Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, as well as an Estonian representative, the young University of Tartu scientist Ivar Zekker. The illustration below shows how the same image was used repeatedly, with only its scale, color, and placement changed.

That paper was retracted, as was another publication by Zekker, for serious violations of publication ethics, including nonexistent bibliographic references, unattributed borrowing, and the use of artificial-intelligence tools in preparing the article without disclosing that use, in violation of the journal’s editorial policy. These are not isolated episodes: experts have accumulated concerns about a whole series of Zekker’s papers. In 2021, his publication output increased by dozens of times, while researchers from Middle Eastern countries began appearing among his co-authors with increasing frequency. This pattern often points to the use of paper mills — shadow Asian markets where ready-made papers and fictitious co-authorship are sold.

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In 2023, the University of Tartu conducted and later published an anonymous survey of 354 Estonian researchers. Among other things, they were asked whether they had observed signs of research misconduct in the actions of colleagues. More than 40 percent of respondents said that colleagues had accepted “gift” authorship, while more than 10 percent had witnessed colleagues falsifying data in scientific work. These figures reflect not so much precise statistics as the troubling environment in which Estonian researchers work today.

The University of Tartu is far from the only Estonian research institution where questions have arisen about the reliability of published images. One of the most prominent figures in such cases is Sabarathinam Shanmugam, an associate professor at the Estonian University of Life Sciences. According to the post-publication peer review platform PubPeer, roughly one in five papers involving him has become the subject of critical discussion.

One publication by Shanmugam is especially revealing. Experts found manipulation of figures in the paper. After concerns were raised, the authors replaced the illustrations several times, each time apologizing and attributing what had happened to an “unfortunate mistake.” Yet every new version again contained signs of manipulation. Eventually the exchange reached a dead end: the authors never provided convincing explanations, and discussion of the apparent fakes simply faded away. In a later paper, Shanmugam and his co-authors chose a different defense strategy, stating: The data that has been used are confidential. That position effectively deprived independent researchers of any opportunity to verify the reported results.

The story does not end there. A number of Shanmugam’s publications were later retracted after journal editors discovered that the author list had been replaced at the final stage of preparing the papers for publication. Such author substitution is considered one of the characteristic signs of papers circulating on the purchased-authorship market. While one set of “dealers” pushes a manuscript through the journal with a credible author list, another takes orders from people wishing to buy co-authorship in the almost-published paper. At the final stage, once all reviewers’ questions have been resolved, comes the climax: in the last version of the manuscript, the names of the original authors are quietly replaced, without the editors’ approval, by those who responded to the offer in time and paid. The editor, unaware of the switch, publishes the paper. The newly minted co-authors receive a publication to which they did not contribute a single line and which they most likely never even read.

Finally, Tallinn University and one of its employees, mathematics professor Jorge Eduardo Macias-Diaz, also deserve attention. In recent years, specialists have increasingly encountered papers prepared with generative artificial intelligence. In mathematics, such publications are often betrayed less by stylistic roughness than by gross errors in formulas and proofs. To a non-specialist, the text may look entirely convincing, yet mistakes already appear in the first stages of the calculations, rendering everything that follows meaningless.

Mathematics is an exact science. If the third line of a calculation contains the wrong sign, the final ten pages lose all meaning, no matter how many formulas they contain. The image below shows examples from four relatively recent papers by Macias-Diaz in which such errors appear literally in the opening lines of calculations or theorem proofs.

“Math salad” is the term specialists use for texts that look scientific on the surface because they contain an abundance of formulas and technical terminology, but on closer inspection turn out to be internally contradictory or contain errors that make their conclusions unreliable. Naturally, artificial intelligence is “to blame” for everything: the author simply gave the neural network a task and then copied the result into the paper without even checking it.

A curious manifestation of this practice emerged in a case that went far beyond university offices. Tallinn Administrative Court fined a group of plaintiffs who had cited “authoritative scientific studies” on the harms of clear-cutting in their filings. There was only one problem: both the studies and their authors had been entirely generated by a neural network. The court treated this as fabrication of evidence and fined the plaintiffs.

To conclude, here is a curious case in which nonexistent Estonian researchers appeared not only in materials before a Tallinn court, but also on the pages of scientific journals. In a paper by Chinese authors on estimating fuel-cell parameters using the metaphor-based “Grey Wolf” optimization algorithm, a co-author from Tallinn University of Technology suddenly appeared: Tekle Demsas. Apparently, adding a mysterious Estonian scientist to the author list was meant to give the paper greater weight. The deception did not last long. After checking the author’s credentials, the editors established that no such researcher actually existed. The paper was then retracted.

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Estonia, which spent years building a reputation as being at the forefront of science, is now confronting the underside of the global crisis in academic ethics. The cases involving Ounap, Zekker, Shanmugam, and Macias-Diaz are not merely isolated scandals, but reflections of today’s challenges: the spread of paper mills, the ethics of co-authorship, and the uncontrolled adoption of AI. The results of the University of Tartu survey show that these problems are systemic.

The central problem for Estonian science is not that violations occur, but how institutions respond to them. Universities often prefer to look the other way, outsourcing the role of “academic police” to journal editors, courts, and volunteers on PubPeer. In the twenty-first century, a reputation as a scientific center can no longer be taken for granted. Maintaining zero tolerance for falsification requires daily work. And the sooner Estonian universities recognize that responsibility, the fewer reasons for sarcasm they will leave to those watching them.

The post Estonian Academic Solitaire: How AI and Paper Mills Are Undermining Science appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

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Russian-American Science Association strongly condemns the decision of the Russian authorities to designate our colleague Tatiana Tatarinova, a distinguished bioinformatics scholar and professor at the University of La Verne, as a “foreign agent.”

Tatiana joins a growing number of Russian-speaking scholars and members of the RASA community who have been subjected to political persecution, intimidation, and restrictions on their academic and civic freedom. These measures have nothing to do with the quality of their scholarship or their professional activities. They are part of a broader campaign to silence independent voices and to suppress international academic ties.

We stand in solidarity with Tatiana and with all our colleagues who continue to face repression for exercising their fundamental rights to think, speak, conduct research, and communicate freely.

RASA will continue to defend academic freedom and to support scholars subjected to political persecution, wherever they are.

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