What to do if I am on a hiring committee and I am aware that a candidate has exhibited unethical behavior in his previous position? After a series of unethical incidents that affected me directly in my previous academic institution, I managed to move to a higher ranked department in my field about seven years ago. I am now in the hiring committee in my current institution and one of the candidates who is being considered is from my former institution.

There are two unethical practices that the candidate performed that I am aware of. One is that he managed to squeeze in as a third author on a finished paper and he thus made no contribution. I did most of the work for the paper and the paper was finished when my co-author added this person's name and submitted it. The second incident is that the candidate has announced in the past how he has changed his research results before submission to please the editor of a top journal in my field. He did this in the early years of his career. There are others in my former institution who know about it but they find this to be no big deal.

I am considering doing one of the following:


Discuss this with my current dept. 
Keep quiet and stay in the committee. 
Keep quiet but step down from the committee


For your information, I am a foreigner whose work is appreciated by everyone. However, I feel that I will not get much support if I open up. I had tried this in my previous institution and I realized that only a couple of people supported me. What should I do?
If you're on the hiring committee, then your job is to evaluate the candidates.  I see no need to back away from that (and by the way, I can't see what your being a "foreigner" could possibly have to do with any of this).

One has to exercise some restraint in repeating "hearsay" in official matters: unless you can find evidence about the changed research, I would hesitate to bring it up because it's hard for everyone else to independently evaluate.  On the other hand, if you are a coauthor of a paper with the candidate in question, then your colleagues should be very interested to hear your take on that.  I think you should certainly describe the candidate's contributions -- or lack thereof -- honestly to your colleagues.  I might avoid putting the banner of "unethical behavior" on it: the ethics of it are really for your colleagues to evaluate as well, right?  In general I think that in these kinds of matters it is more collegial and also more convincing to provide information which is factual rather than subjective or purely evaluative.

There is also the issue of why you, as the first author of a paper, allowed a coauthor whom you feel did absolutely nothing.  Isn't that at least arguably unethical behavior on your part?  I think it's better not to open that can of worms, but rather say that in fact the candidate's contribution to the joint work was minimal and that you do not feel like he should get much credit for it.