05/28/2025
This is disturbing. Destroys creditability.
A famous Harvard University professor was STRIPPED of her tenure and FIRED after an investigation found she fabricated data on multiple studies focused on dishonesty.
Francesca Gino, a celebrated behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, was FIRED after the school’s top governing board determined she tweaked observations in four studies so that their findings boosted her hypotheses.
Harvard administrators notified business faculty that Gino was out of a job in a closed-door meeting.
Harvard did not detail the professor’s firing or tenure being stripped — citing it as a personnel matter — but says that the school had not revoked a professor’s tenure in decades.
No professors have had their tenure revoked at Harvard since the 1940s, when the American Association of University Professors formalized termination rules.
The star Ivy League professor — who had authored over 140 scholarly papers and snagged numerous awards — had come under scrutiny in 2023 when a trio of behavioral scientists published a series of blog posts on Data Colada with evidence accusing four of her papers published between 2012 and 2020 she had co-authored 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.
