At Least He’s Well-Positioned to Get a Job at Jukt Micronics
By More than one person in the academic world told me that the “Original Data & Grants” section of LaCour’s curriculum vitae — basically just a longer, academic version of a résumé — is wildly unrealistic. For various institutional reasons, it’s simply difficult for graduate students in political science to rack up all that much grant funding. And yet LaCour lists $793,000 worth of grants received from various foundations, including the Haas and Ford foundations, on the strength of his persuasion research. (LaCour appears to have pulled the CV down from his website sometime over the last few days, but I downloaded a copy before he did.)
[…]
The largest of these is a $160,000 grant in 2014 from the Jay and Rose Phillips Family Foundation of Minnesota. But Patrick J. Troska, executive director of the foundation, which is focused on projects that combat discrimination, wrote in an email to Science of Us, “The Foundation did not provide a grant of any size to Mr. LaCour for this research. We did not make a grant of $160,000 to him.”
A political science professor at a large research university told me that the numbers on the CV should have stood out to the many older, more experienced researchers LaCour interacted and worked with during his time as a Ph.D. student.
It does seem odd, in particular, that nobody at UCLA noticed that $800K in grants was resulting in little or no money being spent.