Contribution short abstract:

By linking the case study of a project fraud at a German university with international discussions on academic feudalism, I argue that the institutions and routines set up to secure compliance serve as useful Potemkin villages covering and strengthening premodern habits in postmodern institutions.

Contribution long abstract:

Working in academia holds a variety of challenges for beginners and experts. Some of them are widespread in similar working cultures such as third-party-funding, temporary working contracts ranging from a few months to some years, bouncing from employed to freelance status and back with gaps in social security and income, discontinuous work on long-time research and publication projects. An important additive for employees at universitites and research institutions is the rule of good scientific practise. After impressive cases of scientific misconduct found their way into the non-academic public, institutions and rules for compliance procedures have been set up lately. The codes of conduct and the commissions to investigate fraud and other academic misbehaviour prove to be powerful resources to the institutions and those actors protecting them from bad reputation. They serve not as tools to resolve the officially addressed problem of broken rules in academia but on the contrary, reenforce it, as Sara Ahmed in her work on complaint at British universities points out (Ahmed forthcoming). It is up to discussion whether the notion "academic feudalism" (Ulrich 2016, Holligan 2011) supports a better understanding of the phenomena here presented, and whether social practises based on non-academic rules, that is: proposed by courts and social movements, are more appropriate tools to guarantee academic rules. The empirical material for this paper is based on my experiences in a third-party-funded research project where I reported severe irregularities according to the guidelines of my employer.