Astudent writer for the Harvard Crimson has called for a university-wide review of all faculty publications after investigative journalists uncovered more examples of alleged academic dishonesty at the hands of a black female former Harvard professor.
On Wednesday, Christopher Rufo of City Journal and Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire revealed that Lisa D. Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and a tenured professor at Michigan State University, has allegedly been even more untruthful about her academic work than previously thought.
Cook’s economic credentials have been called into question at least since President Joe Biden nominated her to the Federal Reserve board in January 2022. Back then, critics noted not only that her list of publications was unusually thin for a tenured professor but that her most celebrated article — “Violence and Economic Activity: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870 to 1940,” published in 2014 — was predicated on egregiously flawed data, leading her to unfairly argue that lynching and discrimination caused the number of patents issued to black people to collapse around the turn of the 20th century.
One attempt at replicating her research for that article indicated that the number of patents issued to blacks at that time could have been nearly 70 times higher than the number Cook offered.
She also continues to mislead about the quality of at least one her publications. In 2022, Chris Brunet of the Daily Caller News Foundation noticed that Cook had claimed she had been published in the American Economic Review, described by Brunet as “the top peer-reviewed economics journal in the world.” However, that 2009 article actually appeared in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, which is not peer-reviewed. Though this detail has been publicly documented for more than two years, the CV included on Cook’s personal academic website — which is also linked to her directory listing at the MSU Department of Economics — still implies the article appeared in the more prestigious version of AER.