Stuck with Hommel, or Bad Choices in Leiden

In June 2022, I published an article about the academic power couple and European heavyweights of psychology research: the Italian Lorenza Colzato and her German husband, mentor and former boss at the Leiden University in the Netherlands, Bernhard Hommel. After an investigation by the Dutch university found Colzato guilty of research misconduct, a number of her papers were retracted, and further studies were found to have been manipulated as well. Some were co-authored by Hommel. Yet all this didn’t prevent the German university TU Dresden to offer both a new faculty job, having proclaimed that Colzato was wrongfully accused and Hommel fully acquitted by the Leiden University. Neither was true, and Hommel was never investigated.

This is a follow-up. Because Hommel remains professor in Leiden, I tried to get the Dutch university to investigate his role in his wife’s misconduct. I even succeeded to get the Dutch national authority to advise Leiden University to do that. But its leadership wouldn’t budge, maybe they hope for money from China. Because that’s where Hommel and Colzato are now, singing praise for the totalitarian regime.

This was my article:

On 14 June 2022, I placed a Notification of suspected research misconduct with the Leiden University.

In the previous research misconduct investigation, only the role of Colzato was addressed, and her personal research misconduct was established. The whistleblower students were declared to be innocent, rightly so. But Colzato’s husband Hommel still remains an active professor at Leiden. He co-authored four out of seven officially fraudulent and now retracted papers, sometimes as last author. Surely his contribution to these fraudulent studies is worth knowing? After all, the psychology department even has specific guide on publication authorships . According to department’s own guidelines, Hommel had to “substantially contribute” and “approve the final version of the manuscript to be published“, and:

“AND agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he or she has done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work and an author should have justified confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors”.

Either Hommel contributed little to nothing and is therefore only guilty of accepting a gift authorship, or he was deeply involved and hence culpable. Easy to investigate. If one wanted to.

In July 2022, Leiden University informed me my notification wasn’t specific enough and will be rejected as inadmissible unless I provide concrete evidence. So I explained that Hommel was the most senior researcher on his wife’s papers and until 2016, he was institute’s director, and thus responsible for adhering to the university’s data storage mandate. Especially since the university investigation determined in several cases “problems with collecting the underlying data sets and protocols” and that ”Datasets were not available“ despite these studies being just a few years old.

On 14 July 2022, I received a letter from the Leiden University rector, Hester Bijl, where I was informed:

“The decision of the Board is that, taking into account the considerations on which the recommendation is based, the complaint is deemed inadmissible.
If you do not agree with this opinion, you can request the Netherlands Board for Scientific Integrity (LOWI), P.O. Box 19121, 1000 GC Amsterdam, within six weeks of the date of this letter to issue an second opinion on this decision.”

A longer opinion letter from the Praesidium of the Academic Integrity Committee (CWI) of Leiden University was attached:

This quote is relevant:

“After reviewing the complaint, the Praesidium concludes that the complaint is based on the circumstance that a co-author of an article in which he collaborated, violated the rules on academic integrity. From what the Complainant has put forward however, it does not appear which concrete acts the Defendant has committed that violate the standards of the Code of Conduct for Scientific Integrity 2018. In other words, the complainant did not provide any direct evidence that the accused acted contrary to scientific integrity.

To the extent that the complaint relates to the Research Data Management Regulations, it also applies here that insufficient specific evidence has been provided to justify an investigation into the defendant’s conduct. Moreover, it cannot be assumed that acting in breach of research data-regulations will also
constitute an infringement of scientific integrity. After all, the Commission assesses complaints on the basis of the complaints procedure against the Code of Conduct.
As the complaint does not contain a clear description of the suspected violation of academic integrity by the Accused, the Praesidium concludes that the complaint is inadmissible”

Basically, they say two things:

• the faculty’s guidelines on authors’ responsibilities and accountabilities are invalid
• the university’s own rules of research data management are invalid as well

Probably only in Hommel’s case, I don’t advise other Leiden researchers to try same. Of course I lodged a complaint with LOWI.

LOWI invited the Leiden University and Hommel himself to submit a statement. There, Hommel denied being responsible for anything in his own papers with his own wife, except some general discussions:

“Most importantly, however, there has never been any question or doubt in the fact that I was not involved in any handling of the data, from collection to analyses to storage.

Any of the people involved, irrespective of their kind of involvement, will be happy to confirm that. This is exactly the reason why Leiden University has not opened the trial against me or any of the other co-authors. Again, it is interesting to see that complainant picks me as the only co-author of problematic papers, even though my role was often comparatively minor. Even if one would be willing to construe some more important impact from my last authorship in some of the papers, the acknowledgments make it clear that the reported experiments were part of Colzato’s postdoc grant received from the Dutch NWO—with her as the only PI, while I was mainly needed for the broader theoretical implications of the studies.”

Hommel also kept misrepresenting my complaint, claiming I accused him of destroying the data. I never did, I pointed out he was responsible for its proper storage in his capacity as institute director. Yet Hommel also denied having been director of the Cognitive Psychology Unit when the “studies and articles from 2014-2017” were done. Which is simply not true: he led the department from 2000 till 2016 according to his own CV. Afterwards the Leiden University listed him (and still does) as “Full Professor, Chair of General Psychology” and “Governing Board of Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition”. Basically, he was responsible for the correct data storage of his wife, who was merely junior faculty, an assistant professor. Instead, Hommel busied himself with defending his wife from her students’ allegations, and otherwise, with creating a toxic and intimidating work climate, as NRC reported already in 2019.

On 22 February 2023, LOWI issued this decision, in Dutch:

This was LOWI’s opinion (DeepL-translated):

The National Organization for Scientific Integrity:

I. Declares the request well-founded;

II. advises the Board to decide, after considering all the interests involved, whether the role of the Respondent (as the last author or co-author) in the creation of the various publications to be withdrawn because of malpractice should be investigated.

I asked Leiden University if they will comply. They needed rather long to figure out what to do about LOWI’s advice. On 6 April 2023, I received this letter:

Key part:

“The Board would like to note that the follow-up investigation was aimed at cleaning up the literature, that it was not assessed whether the scientific integrity was violated and that it was therefore not determined who was guilty of the malpractices found.
Scientific articles often have more than one author, with different contributions and responsibilities. It cannot be the case that in all events of demonstrated malpractice in publications, where one or more authors have been shown to have breached the scientific integrity, all other authors are therefore suspect without any further indication.

More specifically, in the aforementioned CWI procedure, it has been demonstrated that the data manipulation took place in the transfer of data by junior researchers to the employee concerned, or during the analyses.
In addition, we do not support the LOWI’s assertion that in publications in psychology the last author is usually responsible for the data.”

This quote is bizarre:

“In addition, we do not support the LOWI’s assertion that in publications in psychology the last author is usually responsible for the data. We refer to the Leiden University Institute of Psychology Authorship Guidelines, which concluded that there are many different ways to determine the order of authorship in different disciplines: “As a result, it is not possible to deduce the respective contributions of individual authors from the sequence in which the authors are listed.”

I suggest they read that guideline properly, because it says Hommel had agreed “to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.”

The university figuratively wiped its bottom with its own guidelines for authorships and data storage, once again. All because of Hommel. Why?

Colzato was found guilty of research misconduct, and her PhD students (who blew the whistle) were explicitly found not guilty. Incidentally, all were women, and all were investigated. Incidentally, the most senior male co-author can never ever be investigated, the board and the rector have spoken. And Hommel’s responsibility for data storage? Not even mentioned in the final letter from Leiden.

Hommel remains publicly listed as professor at Leiden University, now as “Gues” yet quite possibly he is even paid. The head of legal affairs told me:

“Due to privacy legislation, we are not allowed to provide information about appointments and remuneration to third parties.”

They never say this about people who aren’t their employees.

By now, both Colzato and Hommel left Dresden, for China. The German university deleted his profile page, but retained hers. Sweet memory? From October 2022 on, the professorial couple is staying at the Shandong Normal University in Jinan. As they write, for four years.

In a series of articles starting February 2023 in the rather controversial German platform called Overton Magazin, Colzato and Hommel now regularly praise China, and accuse the German media of spreading lies about this perfectly free and happy society. Because of its colonial and Nazi past, Germany has no right to criticise China, the anti-fascist couple of China-Understanders says.

Draconic COVID-19 restrictions? Accepted by Chinese people with joy and understanding, the psychologist duo explains in their inaugural article. There never were any real COVID-19 lockdown protests, don’t believe western lies. Total surveillance? They saw no “cameras, police measures, regular controls”, so it’s all a western lie also. Chinese state is better in every respect, in fact it is not just freer, it us even more scientific, running its society on advanced psychology principles of calm, composure and self-control.

In the next article we are educated by a couple dressed up in Chinese traditional clothing about the beauty of the collectivism, subordination and self-sacrifice, which is presumably so much better than that evil western concept of human rights and dignity. This is utter cringe (translated):

“…colleagues realized that there was hardly anything more important and satisfying for them than to fulfill our wishes. With a German background, sentences of this kind may come as a surprise, perhaps disconcerting, or even exaggerated – but, with all due courtesy and respect for our privileged status, we have no reason to believe that they were not authentic”

But it is the other Germans and the German media who are the evil imperialists. However, in the next article, we are told that imperialism and colonialism are not really a bad thing, maybe it’s Chinese official policy towards russia’s war on Ukraine colouring off? In fact, it is even wrong to associate colonialism with racism, as Hommel and Colzato educate us after a visit to the former German colony Qingdao. I can’t wait for this couple to visit Xinjiang, and tell us all about the happy Uygurs there.

And this is probably why the Leiden University put its foot down and announced never to investigate their professor Hommel. They must be hoping for Chinese money, with Hommel being their bridge-maker, so to say. Other Dutch universities did worse things for Chinese cash:

Hommel also wrote a book, targetted against “identity politics”. The accused are people of colour, immigrants, women, LGBT+, who according to Hommel expect affirmative action from wealthy privileged white heterosexual men like himself while doing nothing at all to advance themselves. Look at Hommel’s wife Colzato, a success story WomenInStem – this PhD student advanced her career by marrying her professor, and then committing research fraud on massive scale! And now they both hang on the teat of the Chinese Communist Party, preaching the scientific beauty of totalitarianism and colonialism. This couple is surely a role model for us all.

Der Psychologe Bernhard Hommel befürwortet zwar die Ziele der #Identitätspolitik, hinterfragt aus psychologischer Sicht aber die Sinnhaftigkeit der Wege, die derzeit diskutiert und beschritten werden,.
Sein Buch ist ab heute im Handel erhältlich.https://t.co/aeEXvf47D4 pic.twitter.com/o78ZTJ6toy

— Westend Verlag (@WestendVerlag) March 20, 2023

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