Harvard dishonesty expert stripped of tenure and fired over alleged data falsification, rampant plagiarism

Harvard University has many problems these days, but one of the biggest still appears to be academic dishonesty.

Francesca Gino — a professor of business administration who has long studied the psychology of organizations, dishonesty, and how people justify unethical behavior — was called out in 2021 for alleged data falsification, then later for apparent plagiarism. Her years-long fight to keep her job appears to have come to an end.

The Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board, decided earlier this month to both revoke the prominent professor’s tenure and give her the boot.

The revocation of Gino’s tenure — which was first reported by the public radio station GBH, then confirmed to the Harvard Crimson by a university spokesperson — appears to be the first time that the university has stripped an instructor of tenure since at least the 1940s.

In 2021, business professors Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson, and Joseph Simmons — all affiliated with other universities — and anonymous researchers began exposing Gino’s apparent academic dishonesty on the blog Data Colada, highlighting “evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade,” as well as in papers as recent as 2020.

The Data Colada sleuths shared their findings with Harvard Business School in October 2021. The university launched an 18-month probe shortly thereafter.

According to the investigation completed by the Harvard Business School in 2023, Gino, a professor at the university for over a decade, “committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly.”

In 2023, several of Gino’s papers were retracted and slapped with notices indicating that HBS’ investigation found “discrepancies” between her records and the published data, reported Science.

‘Some passages duplicate text from news reports or blogs.’

Gino reportedly tried passing the discrepancies off as errors made by her research assistants. She also suggested that someone might have been trying to sabotage her. The university investigators did not buy what Gino was selling.

The HBS noted that Gino’s “repeated and strenuous argument for a scenario of data falsification by bad actors across four different studies, an argument we find to be highly implausible, leads us to doubt the credibility of her written and oral statements to this committee more generally.”

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Photo by Zhu Ziyu/VCG via Getty Images

The university investigators concluded that the dishonesty professor had “engaged in multiple instances of research misconduct, across all four studies at issue.”

After Gino was placed on unpaid administrative leave and barred from campus in June 2023, Simonsohn, Nelson, and Simmons indicated that they found additional papers Gino had authored that allegedly contained fraudulent data.

Besides churning out apparent fakeries, it turns out Gino was also apparently appropriating other people’s writing and ideas and passing them off as her own.

After Gino sued Harvard and Data Colada for defamation, claiming she had “never falsified or fabricated data,” University of Montreal psychologist Erinn Acland took a closer look at the Harvard professor’s writing, comparing Gino’s work on Google Scholar against other works.

Acland told Science that she immediately found plagiarism, noting that the first sentence of a 2016 chapter Gino had written about dishonesty was lifted “word for word” from a 2010 paper.

Science confirmed Acland’s findings and found at least 15 additional passages of plagiarized text in two of Gino’s books.

“Some passages duplicate text from news reports or blogs. Others contain phrasing identical to passages from academic literature,” reported Science. “The extent of duplication varies between passages, but all contain multiple identical phrases, as well as clear paraphrases and significant structural similarity.”

While a federal judge dismissed Gino’s defamation claims against Harvard and Data Colada, U.S. District Court Judge Myong Joun reportedly enabled her breach of contract claim to move forward.

RELATED: Harvard president Claudine Gay resigns in disgrace, paints herself as a victim of ‘racial animus’

Former Harvard University president Claudine Gay. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Gino is hardly the first big name at Harvard University outed for academic dishonesty.

Claudine Gay resigned her post in disgrace as Harvard’s 30th president on Jan. 2, 2024, after nearly 50 complaints had been filed against her implicating seven of her 17 published works, including her 1997 doctoral thesis.

That same month, Sherri Ann Charleston, the university’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, was slapped with a complaint identifying 40 examples of alleged plagiarism in two of her academic works, including her 2009 dissertation.

Harvard Medical School assistant professor Dipak Panigrahy was accused of plagiarism in April 2024 by a federal judge, reported the New York Post.

U.S. District Court Judge Roy Dalton Jr. granted a motion to toss a report submitted by Panigrahy as evidence in a class action case against Lockheed Martin, stating, “The plagiarism is so ubiquitous throughout the report that it is frankly overwhelming to try to make heads or tails of just what is Dr. Panigrahy’s own work.”

Blaze News previously reported that four research scientists with faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School — Laurie Glimcher, William Hahn, Irene Ghobrial, and Kenneth Anderson — were accused last year of manipulating data in their published research.

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