During those study years, my interests were undergoing profound transformations. Ideas flexibly shifted positions, and I was searching for horizons that stimulated my intellectual curiosity away from the noise of pure science and the daily pulls of politics. I found my answer in the topic of "human intelligence," which captured my thinking and later became one of my most important intellectual and educational focal points. In the midst of this passion, I came across a "scandal" that shook international academic circles when The Sunday Times published in October 1976 an investigation that exploded a surprise that was not expected.
My reading of the newspaper that morning was not just a routine ritual of sipping tea, but a confrontation with an intellectual earthquake that shook my convictions. I still remember the striking headline written by journalist Oliver Gillie: "Crucial Data Falsified by Prominent Psychologist." The accused was none other than "Sir Cyril Burt," the godfather of educational psychology in Britain, on whose twin studies the foundations of understanding individual differences and the heritability of mental abilities were built.
This article brought me back to my deep questions that had taken root since reading the book of the educational scholar Nouri Jaafar, "Thought... Its Nature and Development" (1970). Nouri Jaafar had brilliantly asserted that intelligence and higher mental functions are not born complete, but rather arise and develop in the crucible of human activity and the course of life. He even bitterly ridiculed the claim that the "Negro" is biologically inferior in intelligence to the "European," likening this claim to someone asserting that a black horse is less authentic than a white one simply because of its color.
The Times article posed the same existential question: Is intelligence an inevitable biological destiny we are born with, or is it the product of complex interaction with the environment? Burt represented to educators the absolute "voice of science," but Gillie's digging behind the numbers revealed inconceivable flaws: statistical results repeated with strange rigidity, and fictional assistants who never set foot on the ground of reality.
That fall was the first building block that shaped my awareness of "academic integrity." I realized then that scientific research is not merely numbers and equations, but an ethical practice that begins with the researcher's honesty with himself. I reflected on how a scientist could fall into the "trap of showmanship" and favor theory over truth, manipulating numbers to serve his convictions rather than allowing research to lead him to certainty.
Over the decades, this issue of integrity became the "lens" through which I view the tragedy of higher education in Iraq today. What Gillie revealed about "Burt" in the 1970s, I see repeating now in more blatant and organized forms in our universities, where academic corruption, widespread research falsification, and purchase of titles have led to the fall of scientific research into the "mire" of narrow interests.
Integrity has disappeared, and with it radical reform, and some universities have transformed from beacons of critical thought to arenas of superficial display and illusory promotions. My battle today against this corruption is an extension of that feeling that overwhelmed me while reading the Times article, for science that loses its ethics builds no nation but rather erects castles of sand that quickly collapse at the first test of truth.