A) Walk through the gates and claim your schedule. B) Turn and run while you still have legs. C) Ask the skeletal man what his thesis was about.
From 2020–2024, major publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley) retracted over 10,000 papers, many traced to commercial paper mills selling authorship. Investigations revealed systemic fraud: fake peer review rings, stolen identities, and ChatGPT-generated nonsense passing as research. Universities responded slowly, often protecting powerful authors. This scandal crystallizes the corrupted academy: when publishing is decoupled from truth, the degree becomes a credential, not a certificate of competence. corrupted academy