Harvard Gives Christie’s Education Plans a Warm Welcome

 

Speaking to almost 200 students and staff members at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the New Jersey governor drew rounds of applause with his talk of sharply limiting teacher tenure, rigorously evaluating teachers and administrators, curbing the power of teachers’ unions and pledging to appoint more-conservative justices to the State Supreme Court.

Mr. Christie’s first ovation came when he said, “The reason I’m engaging in this battle with the teachers’ union is because it’s the only fight worth having.”

The ground he covered would be familiar to anyone who has watched the town hall-style forums in New Jersey that have made Mr. Christie a YouTube star. There, at least a few detractors usually show up to question him, and his policies and pugnacious statements can make even some supporters uncomfortable.

But here, during Mr. Christie’s 40-minute opening talk and a question-and-answer session of the same length, the response was less equivocal.

“I came away very encouraged, and I admire him for saying things that might be unpopular,” said Matt Shiraki, 26, a graduate student at the Kennedy School of Government.

The closest thing to a hostile question Mr. Christie faced came after he embraced the title bestowed on him recently by The New York Times Magazine: The Disrupter. Jenny Hanson, a graduate student in education, told him that she liked his ideas, but added, “I think using language like ‘disrupter’ and ‘battle’ and ‘fight’ could prevent buy-in.”

Mr. Christie, uncharacteristically, said he often thought about — and “struggled a lot” with — the notion that he is too combative, his language too harsh.

But he said he would not change his tone until the teachers’ union, the New Jersey Education Association, agreed that schools are in crisis and showed more willingness to make major changes.

“I have to convince the public that the house is on fire,” he said.

The friendly response here could reflect concerns about the state of American schools among those who study and may some day run them. It parallels opinion poll findings that Mr. Christie is more popular around the country than he is back home. And, of course, the audience was a self-selected one, turning out for a visiting Republican governor best known for videos in which he publicly berates people.

Still, many of those applauding him described themselves in interviews afterward as politically liberal. Any objections they raised tended to be technical rather than philosophical — like how, not whether, to evaluate teachers.

The tone of the session was polite and subdued, and the questions alternately supportive and wonkish. More than usual, Mr. Christie stayed away from incendiary language, though toward the end he loosened up and opened fire on the teachers’ union (“a political thuggery operation”).

He broke some new ground in saying that he planned to change New Jersey’s system of elected local school boards, though he did not say how. The teachers’ union is a powerful force in electing board members, and it is those boards that have approved contracts with the benefits and job protections the governor reviles.

“They’ll be the next step,” he said. “Even for me there’s just so much you can swallow at one time.”

Mr. Christie said that when he told his young son, Patrick, that he was traveling to Harvard, the boy replied, “You don’t go there, do you?”

A graduate of the University of Delaware and the Seton Hall University School of Law, the governor quipped that it had taken him 30 years to get here. But he also reflected on the stature of Harvard and the influence the audience would have.

“You are among the leaders of our educational future,” he said, “and if you’re not disrupted yet, I’m going to disrupt you now.”

 

A Journal’s Statement May Aid a Harvard Researcher Accused of Misconduct

Some researchers said they saw the Science statement as a step toward the eventual exoneration of Dr. Hauser, an animal psychologist who specializes in the cognition and behavior of monkeys, while others said it had little bearing on the overall case against him. He is now on administrative leave,?unable?to teach classes; in February, the psychology department voted to?bar him from teaching for the coming academic year as well.

Dr. Hauser became known to a wider audience through his 2007 book “Moral Minds,” which argued that people have an innate sense of morality. But his career was jeopardized when his students complained about his research methods, prompting an inquiry by the Harvard faculty.

Though the precise charges have never been published, the faculty dean said they concerned three published articles and five unpublished articles. In two of the published articles, the inquiry found, Dr. Hauser could not locate the original data, prompting him and a colleague to redo the original experiments and submit the new data to the journals that had published the results, Science and Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In a third article, published in Cognition in 2002, the data did not support the published results, a serious problem that has not yet been explained. Dr. Hauser retracted the article last year without admitting misconduct.

Given the problems with the Cognition article, the absence of the original data for the Science article suggested some more serious failing than bad archiving practices: that perhaps, for instance, the reported experiments had never been done. But Science’s referees seem to have assuaged such concerns by reviewing the submitted videotapes and other raw data and concluding, in a statement released Monday, that the results “replicate those reported in the original paper in terms of statistical significance.”

The case against Dr. Hauser is being reviewed by?the Office of Research Integrity, a government agency that investigates scientific misconduct, and both sides are meant to keep mum until the findings are released. But that has not stopped others from weighing in.

“The fact that two of the three published papers have now been replicated and the third has been withdrawn suggests something is wrong, and it’s not with Hauser,” said Bennett G. Galef Jr., an expert on animal behavior at McMaster University in Ontario. He said he believed Harvard’s inquiry was at fault.

The loss of original data for two papers may be sloppiness but does not amount to misconduct, Dr. Galef said, as is the case with the unpublished papers. “How in the world can they get in trouble for data they didn’t publish?” he asked. The only serious issue, in Dr. Galef’s view, concerns the Cognition article. “There’s no question that experiment was very deeply flawed,” he said.

Dr. Galef, because of his interest in research ethics, was asked by Dr. Hauser last year to review Harvard’s charges against him and concluded, based on material made available by Dr. Hauser’s lawyers, that the accusations were unfounded. But others in the field put a more guarded interpretation on the Science report.

Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, said it might be legally helpful to Dr. Hauser. “But his fellow scientists will be more focused on evaluating his reputation, and that may depend more heavily on the credibility of the people who had expressed concerns than on whether any particular study can be replicated,” he said.

Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany, said, “To the extent this satisfied the people at Science it’s fine, but it doesn’t mean the issue is resolved.”

Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science, explained that “Science did not seek to confirm or refute Harvard’s broader findings; we sought only to determine whether the original findings could be replicated, and they were.”

A Harvard spokesman, Jeff Neal, said that the university was glad to see that concerns about the scientific record were being addressed but did not respond to a question about whether scientific misconduct was still an issue with the Science article.

Dr. Hauser said in an e-mail that he was pleased that Science’s publication of his data would let others examine his results.

 

A Journal’s Statement May Aid a Harvard Researcher Accused of Misconduct

Some researchers said they saw the Science statement as a step toward the eventual exoneration of Dr. Hauser, an animal psychologist who specializes in the cognition and behavior of monkeys, while others said it had little bearing on the overall case against him. He is now on administrative leave,?unable?to teach classes; in February, the psychology department voted to?bar him from teaching for the coming academic year as well.

Dr. Hauser became known to a wider audience through his 2007 book “Moral Minds,” which argued that people have an innate sense of morality. But his career was jeopardized when his students complained about his research methods, prompting an inquiry by the Harvard faculty.

Though the precise charges have never been published, the faculty dean said they concerned three published articles and five unpublished articles. In two of the published articles, the inquiry found, Dr. Hauser could not locate the original data, prompting him and a colleague to redo the original experiments and submit the new data to the journals that had published the results, Science and Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In a third article, published in Cognition in 2002, the data did not support the published results, a serious problem that has not yet been explained. Dr. Hauser retracted the article last year without admitting misconduct.

Given the problems with the Cognition article, the absence of the original data for the Science article suggested some more serious failing than bad archiving practices: that perhaps, for instance, the reported experiments had never been done. But Science’s referees seem to have assuaged such concerns by reviewing the submitted videotapes and other raw data and concluding, in a statement released Monday, that the results “replicate those reported in the original paper in terms of statistical significance.”

The case against Dr. Hauser is being reviewed by?the Office of Research Integrity, a government agency that investigates scientific misconduct, and both sides are meant to keep mum until the findings are released. But that has not stopped others from weighing in.

“The fact that two of the three published papers have now been replicated and the third has been withdrawn suggests something is wrong, and it’s not with Hauser,” said Bennett G. Galef Jr., an expert on animal behavior at McMaster University in Ontario. He said he believed Harvard’s inquiry was at fault.

The loss of original data for two papers may be sloppiness but does not amount to misconduct, Dr. Galef said, as is the case with the unpublished papers. “How in the world can they get in trouble for data they didn’t publish?” he asked. The only serious issue, in Dr. Galef’s view, concerns the Cognition article. “There’s no question that experiment was very deeply flawed,” he said.

Dr. Galef, because of his interest in research ethics, was asked by Dr. Hauser last year to review Harvard’s charges against him and concluded, based on material made available by Dr. Hauser’s lawyers, that the accusations were unfounded. But others in the field put a more guarded interpretation on the Science report.

Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, said it might be legally helpful to Dr. Hauser. “But his fellow scientists will be more focused on evaluating his reputation, and that may depend more heavily on the credibility of the people who had expressed concerns than on whether any particular study can be replicated,” he said.

Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany, said, “To the extent this satisfied the people at Science it’s fine, but it doesn’t mean the issue is resolved.”

Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science, explained that “Science did not seek to confirm or refute Harvard’s broader findings; we sought only to determine whether the original findings could be replicated, and they were.”

A Harvard spokesman, Jeff Neal, said that the university was glad to see that concerns about the scientific record were being addressed but did not respond to a question about whether scientific misconduct was still an issue with the Science article.

Dr. Hauser said in an e-mail that he was pleased that Science’s publication of his data would let others examine his results.