Good day all. Once upon a time, there was this small university based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was founded before there was a United States. It became the “Go to” university for anyone who wanted the finest education anywhere, first in the Colonies and later in the world.
Oh how the mighty have fallen. I have covered how Harvard has managed to piss off not just the Trump administration, but more then half the country. You have their antisemitism, general racism, (Particularly towards Asians and Whites), and flat out hatred of the United States. I’ve already been covering all that. Now we have yet another nail for the Harvard coffin. A now former tenured professor has been stripped of her tenure and fired. Here are the details from the New York Post:
A renowned 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 let go after the school’s top governing board determined she tweaked observations in four studies so that their findings boosted her hypotheses, GBH News reported. Harvard administrators notified business faculty that Gino was out of a job in a closed-door meeting this past week, the outlet reported.
Harvard hasn’t stripped tenure from a professor in decades, if ever. According to the NY Posts story, which referred back to the Harvard Crimson, it appears no tenured professor has ever been stripped of their tenure since the rules were put in place back in the 1940’s. That, in and of itself makes me wonder just how bad Ms. Gino’s fraud was. You practically have to kill someone these days to lose tenure, and even then, that might not do it. Speaking of the Harvard Crimson, here are additional details from them:
The move concluded Gino’s two-year battle to keep her position at the school — and marked a historic penalty for a faculty member at Harvard, where no professor is known to have lost their tenure since at least the 1940s, when rules for the academic protection were formalized.
Gino, a behavioral scientist who became famous for studying honesty and ethical behavior, was accused of manipulating observations to better support her conclusions. Before her work came under scrutiny, she was a prominent researcher in her field and the fifth-highest paid employee at Harvard in 2018 and 2019, receiving more than $1 million in compensation each year.
I will ask the question. What was this idiot thinking? While I’m no academic, (Obviously, I have common sense), even I know that all these studies should be going through some sort of review process. I think that might be part of the problem. Since the whole Hamas debacle, people have started looking at just what many of these “Researchers and administrators” have been producing. Unsurprisingly, they’ve been finding a lot of drivel that wouldn’t even make good fertilizer.
Her work first came under public scrutiny in August 2021, when the investigation blog Data Colada alleged that data in a paper she co-authored was fraudulent. The paper was retracted in September 2021.
At this point, the Harvard Business School began looking into Ms. Gino, and they apparently found things.
HBS Dean Srikant M. Datar placed Gino on unpaid administrative leave, barred her from campus, and revoked her named professorship in June 2023. The same month, Data Colada accused Gino of committing data fraud in three additional research papers she co-authored.
I wasn’t aware they stopped paying her. That’s basically firing someone. I would have thought that until the investigation was completed, she would have been paid until formally terminated. I don’t know how those things work in academia or Harvard. I’m also curious about what may have happened to her co-authors on these papers. Were they also shown the door?
In July 2023, the University also initiated a formal review of Gino’s tenure at Datar’s request. A month later, Gino filed her $25 million lawsuit, alleging that the University, HBS Dean Srikant M. Datar, and the Data Colada bloggers — Uri Simonsohn, Leif D. Nelson, and Joseph P. Simmons — had conspired to defame her.
The suit challenged a new policy established by HBS in August 2021 after allegations of data fraud were first brought against Gino. The policy — which was neither vetted by nor announced to HBS faculty, a departure from the school’s usual practice — expanded the definition of research misconduct. And it established that those who broke the policy could “be subject to sanctions up to and including termination.”
I’m not at all surprised about the lawsuit of course, especially after what looks like retroactive policy changes with no notice to the faculty. What this sounds like is the old Animal House “Double Secret probation.”
In her lawsuit, Gino alleged that the new rules were created solely for her.
That wouldn’t surprise me. The lawsuit is ongoing but is mixed in its current results. The defamation claim has been dismissed, (No surprise there. That’s always been tough to win), but the breach of contract claim is proceeding. She’s also amending her suit adding discrimination claims. Considering that this is Harvard, and they are currently being raked over the coals for just that reason by the Trump Administration, that one might actually have some legs to it.
Gino has also taken her battle to the court of public opinion. In September 2023, Gino penned a letter to HBS faculty claiming she was innocent and had “to right this wrong.” She also published a personal website, where she accused HBS of misconduct and conspiring with Data Colada to damage her reputation.
I wish her luck on that front. Up until now, I had never heard of her. I did look up Data Colada, (And be honest, you also had Pina colada go through your mind), and found their web site. I will be the first to admit that this site means nothing to me. I read their about section and it provided no clarification to me on who they are and just what it is they actually do.
As for Francesca Gino? I have no idea on whether or not she put out papers with fraudulent data in them or if the papers were just flat out wrong in their results. I haven’t read them, and won’t bother since I don’t have any qualifications on understanding them.
I would like to know why she was fired and others who were caught flat out plagiarizing and weren’t also fired by Harvard. They does seem to be a bit of a double standard. (Which her lawyers should bring up if they are any good) Considering how things are going with Harvard, it will be interesting to see how all this plays out.
Thatisall
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