If the Power List had an impact weighting Aleksandr Kogan would be towards the top – how many others could be fairly described as having made a material contribution to the election of Donald Trump (and in the popular imagination, Brexit)? As the Cambridge academic who developed the social media profiling tool that gathered research data for Cambridge Analytica, Aleksandr Kogan represents the idea that academic standards and ethical norms have, if broken, far-reaching global effects.
There’s been a lot of university bashing over the last two years – in the most part we see this as the politically-motivated attack it is intended to be. But on breaches of research ethics and research integrity, academia deserves all the criticism it gets – if not always the politicians it deserves.