No, this is not a bad university. The research that was found to be false was a development of his thesis work. Therefore, his doctorate has been revoked. Note that he has 30 days to appeal; that means if it is not falsified, he can still walk away with a PhD. However, it is falsified. I happened to work with some scientists from Konstanz last year, and they read his thesis just after the scandal broke. It contained "questionable content".
They can revoke a degree if the examinable material for that degree was found to be falsified. In this case, the work he was sacked for at the Bell labs was related to that of his PhD, so it was revoked. I recently worked with some scientists from the same institution, and they were complaining that the central admin of the institution did nothing - after an extensive 6 month investigation. You have to remember they had access to his thesis, and with hindsight it contained fabticated data.
This guy was an extremely intelligent man; I work in his field and could not hope to understand the problems well enough to be able to fabricate data that fooled the academic community for years, and then provide a perfectly reasonable (and quite sexy!) explanation. You have got to remember he published this in the top journals in the world; their peer review process is extremely rigorous. He some how managed to work out what we wanted to hear, and produce the data to give us the answer. It is just a shame his efforts and ability was so misguided.
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No, this is not a bad university. The research that was found to be false was a development of his thesis work. Therefore, his doctorate has been revoked. Note that he has 30 days to appeal; that means if it is not falsified, he can still walk away with a PhD. However, it is falsified. I happened to work with some scientists from Konstanz last year, and they read his thesis just after the scandal broke. It contained "questionable content".
This guy was an extremely intelligent man; I work in his field and could not hope to understand the problems well enough to be able to fabricate data that fooled the academic community for years, and then provide a perfectly reasonable (and quite sexy!) explanation. You have got to remember he published this in the top journals in the world; their peer review process is extremely rigorous. He some how managed to work out what we wanted to hear, and produce the data to give us the answer. It is just a shame his efforts and ability was so misguided.