the mysterious disappearance of the Leiden statistics group

I was forwarded an article from Mare, the journal of the University of Leiden (Universiteit Leiden), a weekly newspaper written by an independent team of professional journalists. Entitled “Fraude, verdwenen evaluaties en een verziekt klimaat: hoe de beste statistiekgroep van Nederland uiteenviel” (Fraud, lost evaluations and a sickening climate: how the best statistics group in the Netherlands fell apart), it tells (through Google translate) the appalling story of how an investigation on mishandled student course evaluations led to the disintegration of the World-renowned Leiden statistics group,  with the departure of a large fraction of its members, including its head, Aad van der Vaart, a giant in mathematical statistics, author of deep, reference, books like Asymptotic Statistics and  Fundamentals of Nonparametric Bayesian Inference, an ERC advanced grant recipient, and now professor at TU Delft… While I am not at all acquainted with the specifics, reading the article makes the chain of events sound like chaos propagation, when the suspicious disappearance of student evaluation forms about a statistics course leads to a re-evaluation round, itself put under scrutiny by the University, then to a recruitment freeze of prospective statistician appointments by the (pure math) successor of Aad, as well as increasing harassment of the statisticians in the  Mathematisch Instituut, and eventually to the exile of most of them. Wat een verspilling!

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