One of Harvard’s most celebrated professors has paid a historic price after seemingly telling on herself.
As The New York Post reported, Francesca Gino, a renowned behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, was fired and stripped of tenure after the school’s top governing board discovered she manipulated data in four studies to ensure that findings would boost her hypotheses. Harvard refused to detail the specific reason for the decision, but this marked the first time since the 1940s that a professor at Harvard had their tenure revoked, which is when rules for academic protection at the school were formalized according to the Harvard Crimson.
Ironically, Gino’s work focused on honesty and ethical behavior. The Harvard Crimson reveals that she was a celebrated researcher in her field and the fifth-highest paid employee at Harvard in 2018 and 2019. Overall, she received more than $1 million in compensation each year.
The school launched an initial investigation into Gino in October 2021 after hearing allegations that a study she co-authored claimed that individuals are more likely to be truthful if they sign an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form instead of at the end. That year, three behavioral scientists presented evidence on a blog called Data Colada, allegedly showing Gino’s paper contained “fraudulent data.”
As The Harvard Crimson notes, Harvard Business School (HBS) in 2022 launched an 18-month investigation. In the end, the school determined that Gino had committed academic misconduct.
HBS Dean Srikant M. Datar then placed Gino on unpaid administrative leave, kicked her off campus, and removed her named professorship in June 2023. That same month, the three behavioral scientists presented additional evidence on Data Colada, allegedly showing that three more of Gino’s papers co-authored and published between 2012 and 2020 contained made-up data.
Here more from the New York Post ragrding the case’s background:
A full probe into the allegations was conducted in 2022 and 2023, where Gino and people who worked with her on the papers were interviewed, with faculty of the Harvard Business School also reviewing and analyzing her data, emails, and papers’ manuscripts.
An outside forensics firm was also hired to analyze her studies’ data.
When asked about the issues with her work, Gino asserted that issues with her work may stem from errors by her or her research assistants or potential tampering by someone with “malicious intentions,” according to the university report.
However, investigators rejected both theories and provided findings to HBS Dean Datar in March 2023. The Ivy League school placed Gino on unpaid leave and began termination proceedings.
Gino proclaimed her innocence and later filed a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard, Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar, and the Data Colada bloggers. The Harvard Crimson reports that a federal judge in Boston dismissed her defamation claims last September.
The judge ruled that because Gino was a public figure, Harvard and Data Colada were well within their rights to investigate her work under the First Amendment.
