I got caught up in this mess because I was VPR at Minnesota in 2019 and the first author on the paper (Jordan Lasker) lists a Minnesota affiliation. Of course, the hot emails went to the President's office, and she tasked me with figuring out what the hell was going on. Happily, neither Minnesota nor its IRB had "formally" been involved. I regularly sent the attached reply, which seemed to satisfy folks. But you come to realize, as VPR, just how little control you actually have if a researcher in your massive institution really wants to go rogue... 😰

Dear [redacted],

Thank you for writing to President Gabel to share your concern with respect to an article published in Psych in 2019 purporting to have an author from the University of Minnesota. The President has asked me to respond on her behalf.

In 2018, our department of Economics requested a non-employee status for Jordan Lasker while he was working with a faculty member of that department as a data consultant. Such status permitted him a working umn.edu email address. He appears to have used that email address to claim an affiliation with the University of Minnesota that was neither warranted nor known to us prior to the publication of the article in question. Upon discovery of the article in late 2019, we immediately verified that his access had been terminated and we moreover transmitted to him that we was not to falsely claim University of Minnesota affiliation in the future. We have had no contact with him since then. He has continued to publish similarly execrable articles, sadly, but he now lists himself as an “independent researcher”.

Best regards,

Chris Cramer