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Notes -
This is the professional website of the study's lead author
This is me reading tea-leaves a little bit, but some things stand out to me.
The majority of his academic background is in business (MBA) and a fanci-fied version of IT. His professional experience was with CACI which is laughably described as a "mid-size" consulting firm. CACI is a notorious "body shop" Beltway Bandit that makes billions of dollars off of staff augmentation for Federal Contracts. Their own website states they employ about 25,000 people.
This provides a mental model, at least, of how this study - and its accompanying malfeasance - came into being. This is a consultant in a classroom. "What does the client want as an outcome? Racism. Okay, great! We can work the numbers to make it say that."
In the Daily Caller piece that the reddit post links to, they have a screenshot of this guy's Microsoft Word comments - one of them literally says, "this is not the story we're trying to tell." This is straight out of a consulting 101 MBA class.
At some point in the 2000s, Academia became a kind of side option career for people who aren't actually serious academics or researchers. You could pickup up a PhD from somewhere in something and then get associate or adjunct status. Sure, this salary wasn't great, but it gave you that credential to pass around as a digital hustler - you could go on podcasts, do paid speaking engagements, consult on the side for $300 an hour. It was a weird kind of self-reputation-maxxing. And that's part of the real long term rot of the academy. If you got a PhD in the 1950s or before, it's because you were almost monkish in your devotion to serious study in a field.
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