A University of Nevada, Reno student this week launched a petition urging Engineering Dean Erick Jones to resign after he was accused of research misconduct. College of Engineering graduate student Joseph Dailey launched the petition on Change.org and said it had reached 110 signatures in just three days.
“For perspective, that’s over 20% of the number of students who received engineering degrees at UNR last year,” Dailey wrote in an update on the petition page Thursday. “By my count, these signatures include UNR faculty from twelve departments in seven colleges (which is all the detail I will be providing for obvious reasons).”
The allegations of misconduct are over journal articles published by Jones that he co-authored with his son, Erick Jones Jr. of the University of Texas at Arlington, and Felicia Jefferson, a UNR professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and also his wife.
Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, first called out the articles on his blog, noting that they are “not just content-free but so bad, just unfathomably bad, enough so that the entire scenario is baffling. Can you imagine being an engineering student at UNR and getting a C on a paper because it had some flaws—and then seeing what the dean of [the] school is attaching his name to? The whole thing is just nuts.”
Dailey agreed.
“The students of the University of Nevada are intelligent and hardworking; they rightly expect competence and honesty from the people overseeing their studies,” he wrote on the petition. “It is clear on the basis of the work to which he willingly puts his name that Dean Jones lacks either the competence or the honesty to execute his office as well as UNR deserves.”
The petition also calls on UNR leadership to “conduct a review of its hiring processes, to ensure that senior faculty are held to at least the same standards of academic integrity as are undergraduate students.”
UNR officials last week said they were investigating the claims, and this week made a similar statement. “The University is aware of the concerns,” spokesperson Scott Walquist said. “We take such claims seriously and the University has a defined process in place when such claims are made.”
The process for dealing with allegations of research misconduct involves an inquiry, investigation, and potentially, a hearing. UNR policy states these are to be led by the vice president of research and innovation, Mridul Gautam, but it’s generally the Office of Research Integrity that executes the process. Because Jones’ work involves federal research grants, details of the investigation must also be shared with the funding agencies and the university could have that funding withdrawn.
The UNR chapter of the Nevada Faculty Alliance is also calling for greater shared governance in hiring executive-level leaders. In a blog post published this week, members expressed concern over the hiring process for Jones and other UNR leaders.
“It has come to our attention that the processes set in place by college and university bylaws are not always being followed in leadership searches,” they wrote.
They alleged campus administrators ignored concerns expressed by faculty across several departments when hiring Jones for the job. The original search process yielded five candidates, none of whom were hired.
“Dean Jones was invited to campus in the middle of the summer, when most faculty are off contract, and appointed a few weeks later,” an NFA representative said. Engineering faculty said they were left out of the process.
NFA said five of UNR’s current vice presidents were appointed to their positions within the past two years. One is an interim appointment made Nov. 30, 2023, with a candidate search underway, but another appointment—Patricia Richard, the interim vice president for advancement—has been in place since May 5, 2023, with no search for a replacement.
No search was conducted for vice president of legal affairs or vice president of governmental relations, positions held by Mary Dugan and Michael Flores, respectively.
“In multiple instances, the hiring of leaders has been perceived as being decided by who they know, rather than the qualities they bring to the positions,” NFA members wrote.
That’s potentially the case for Andrew Clinger, who was appointed as vice president of administration and finance on June 1, 2023. Clinger has a long relationship with UNR President Brian Sandoval, having worked in Sandoval’s administration when he served as governor.
A source said Clinger was among the top nine candidates selected from the initial pool of applicants but, in interviews, seemed to put in little effort compared with other candidates. He didn’t make the top three candidates selected by the search committee.
Richard, who worked in President Brian Sandoval’s office at the time, allegedly asked for a second vote, but Clinger was still excluded from the list of finalists.
Despite this, the source said Richard presented a longer list of even more candidates to Sandoval, a longer list that included Clinger. Following what some surveyed said was a low-effort presentation at the campus forums held as part of the hiring process, Clinger was hired soon after.
