Lloyd Rhodes is a professor at Leland University.
Background[]
Professor Rhodes is the father of Rhodesian economics. He has worked in the field for forty-five years and is one of the most popular professors at Leland. For the last three years, he and Alex P. Keaton have been working on "An Econometric Analysis of the Household's Intemporal Allocation Under Additive Preferences," a paper that Professor Rhodes considers the culmination of his life's work, and that Alex hopes will win him the Wilson Award for Outstanding Research Achievement. Alex idolizes Professor Rhodes.
On the series[]
Alex receives the final data and discovers that it doesn't support his and Professor Rhodes' thesis. Alex tells Professor Rhodes that the paper is invalid. Professor Rhodes tells Alex that universities care more about a professor's research than about his teaching abilities and that the failure will seriously harm his career. As soon as Alex is out of the room, Professor Rhodes calls Dean Ellis and lies that the paper is completed and will be a breakthrough. When Alex finds out that Professor Rhodes will be presenting the paper, he goes to his office to confront him. Professor Rhodes refuses to retract the paper despite Alex's appeals to ethics. He says that if he doesn't publish the paper, he'll lose his job, and soon everyone will forget about it anyway. At the award ceremony (where the Wilson Award goes to Eve Kimball), Alex gives a speech about his admiration for Professor Rhodes, but doesn't expose him as a fraud. Then Professor Rhodes gives a speech in which he confesses to faking the paper. Alex tells Professor Rhodes that he's proud to be his student.