Today’s Globe reports that “Harvard” has confirmed that it has investigated Marc Hauser and has taken “steps to ensure that the scientific record is corrected.”

I put “Harvard” in quotes because the only actual person associated with the university who’ll speak to the Globe is spokesman Jeff Neal. What an impressive display of taking responsibility. Is there no one at “Harvard” who will stand up and say, “The buck stops here”?

Like, for example, its president?

But “Harvard” refused to specify what was wrong with the research or what “Harvard” had done to correct the scientific record.

The calls for more disclosure continued yesterday. Robert Seyfarth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was one of Hauser’s doctoral advisors at the University of California, Los Angeles in the 1980s, said in an e-mail that the lack of information about the misconduct may cast suspicion on innocent researchers.

“Harvard” does appear to respond to my suggestion on this blog that, given that taxpayers paid for this research, it owed the university an explanation.

The Harvard statement said that in cases like Hauser’s, Harvard reports its findings to federal funding agencies, which do their own reviews.

“At the conclusion of the federal investigatory process, in cases where the government concludes scientific misconduct occurred, the federal agency makes those findings publicly available,’’ Neal wrote.

What cynical and dishonest doublespeak!

Implicit in this painstakingly crafted language—how many bureaucrats vetted it?— is the suggestion that Harvard can not disclose its findings because the government is investigating and Harvard is prohibited from speaking until the government finishes its job.

I’ll bet anyone dinner at the restaurant of my choice that this is simply not true; if “Harvard” found a problem, I’m quite sure that federal guidelines do not prohibit the public disclosure of it.

What is almost surely going on here is that “Harvard” is covering its ass—perhaps it hopes the government will find no wrongdoing, or that people will mostly have forgotten about this when the government reports, or perhaps it’s worried that it will have to return research funding, or that it will lose other research funding.

This is not how “a great university” acts.

Meanwhile, the Times follows suit, reporting on the “ripple effect” of Harvard’s silence.

Jeff Neal, a public affairs officer at Harvard, suggested in an e-mail that it was up to the federal government, which financed some of the research, to publish any report on the case. Harvard reports any findings about research misconduct to the government, he said, and “in cases where the government concludes scientific misconduct occurred, the federal agency makes those findings publicly available.”

But, of course, we already know what this really means: that, while the government can make its findings public, it does not prohibit “Harvard” from doing the same first.

“Most universities in these situations try to be open because that is usually the best policy,” said Michael Tomasello, a leading psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “We have no statement from anyone, just one withdrawn paper. The scientific community needs to know if this was a quirk or a pattern.”

At the very least, “Harvard” could give a reason for its silence. That it does not suggests it is not proud of its reasoning.