Fraudulent academic papers are on the rise, and will continue to be on the rise as long as academics substitute counting for judgment. The fetish for sheer numbers of publications should have ended decades ago, but the professoriate can’t confront its addiction, or accept its responsibility for creating this vast system of perverse incentives. It’s always interesting to see what elements of their wobbly structures academics are simply unable to reconsider, no matter how dire the situation. In this case, I think people who have climbed the greasy pole to tenure can’t bear the thought that some younger people might be less miserable than they and their cohort were. 

UPDATE: Useful commentary on this subject by Victor Mair.