From Edward Fullbrook Norbert Häring’s story about misleading academic research reminds me of another story. Big-money offering bribes to academics is, I suspect, more common than people, including academics, realize. I first encountered the practice when I was an undergraduate. My university’s most popular course, “Insurance”, was taught by an economics professor whose students affectionately called Doc Elliot. He taught not only how the insurance industry purported to work, but also how it really worked, and he frequently accepted off-campus speaking engagements. Doc Elliot may be the only person who has ever lived who could talk insurance and make people laugh. Certainly, he was the funniest person I’d ever known; and, despite our 35-year age gap, we became friends of a sort.
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from Edward Fullbrook
Norbert Häring’s story about misleading academic research reminds me of another story.
Big-money offering bribes to academics is, I suspect, more common than people, including academics, realize. I first encountered the practice when I was an undergraduate. My university’s most popular course, “Insurance”, was taught by an economics professor whose students affectionately called Doc Elliot. He taught not only how the insurance industry purported to work, but also how it really worked, and he frequently accepted off-campus speaking engagements.
Doc Elliot may be the only person who has ever lived who could talk insurance and make people laugh. Certainly, he was the funniest person I’d ever known; and, despite our 35-year age gap, we became friends of a sort. One day I was sitting with him in his office when, handing me a business letter, he said, “Here, this is what a bribe offer looks like.”
The letter was from a national association of insurance companies. It praised his eminence as a world authority on insurance and said they would like to be able to occasionally call on him for advice. For this they would pay him $80,000 a year. At the time the university’s highest professor’s salary was $10,000, and so far as I know there was no money in this professor’s family.
“In the world we live in,” explained Doc Elliot, “refraining from telling the truth is often worth lots more than telling it. I get between-the-lines offers like this all the time. But I think this one deserves to go up on my bulletin board.”