The discredited former Harvard professor — fired from her cushy position for fabricating data on studies focused on dishonesty — was once one of the top-earning employees at the Ivy League school.
Francesca Gino earned a staggering $1 million per year as a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School and, from 2018 to 2019, was the fifth-highest-paid employee at the university, according to the university’s student-run Harvard Crimson.
However, Gino’s career at the Ivy League school came to a screeching halt last week when administrators stripped her of tenure and fired her after an investigation determined she tweaked observations in four studies so that their findings boosted her hypotheses.
The once-celebrated academic became the first professor at Harvard to have their tenure revoked since the 1940s when the American Association of University Professors formalized termination rules.
Gino — who had authored over 140 scholarly papers and snagged numerous awards — had first come under scrutiny in 2023. A trio of behavioral scientists published a series of blog posts on Data Colada citing evidence claiming four of her co-authored papers published between 2012 and 2020 contained “fraudulent data.”
A preliminary investigation into Gino’s work by Harvard was launched in October 2021, following concerns about a study she co-authored that claimed requiring individuals to sign an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form rather than at the end significantly boosts honest responses.
This study was definitively retracted in 2021 due to “evidence” of data fabrication, which relied on three separate lab experiments to support its findings.
The same three behavioral scientists identified evidence that three other studies in the same paper appeared to rely on manipulated data.
A full probe into the allegations was conducted in 2022 and 2023, during which Gino and individuals who worked with her on the papers were interviewed.
The faculty of the Harvard Business School also reviewed and analyzed her data, emails, and manuscripts and brought in an outside forensic firm to analyze the data from her studies.
Gino, whose behavioral research studies relating to cheating, lying, and dishonesty received widespread media coverage over the past decade, 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.
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.
Investigators also suggested that the university audit Gino’s work and request retractions for three of the papers; a fourth paper had already been retracted by the time of their inquiry.
After being put on unpaid leave, Gino denied and slammed the allegations against her on her website.
“There is one thing I know for sure: I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result,” she wrote.
Gino filed a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard, Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar, and the Data Colada bloggers.
However, a federal judge in Boston dismissed Gino’s defamation claims against both Harvard and the Data Colada bloggers last September, ruling that her work was open to scrutiny under the First Amendment since she was a public figure.
Her firing comes months after the Trump administration cut more than $2.6 billion in grants and other funding from Harvard.
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