Harvard Fires Star Business Professor for Faking Her Findings on Honesty
Harvard University has stripped a celebrated business professor of her tenure and fired her over allegations of academic misconduct and fraud.
Francesca Gino was a leading scholar in the field of behavioral science who published famous studies on ways to promote honest behavior, The New York Times reported.
Her work with Harvard's Mind Brain Behavior initiative earned her a global following in business, academia, and government, including speaking engagements with Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies.
Over the past week, however, Harvard administrators told the business faculty the university's governing board had decided to revoke Gino's tenure and fire her from Harvard Business School, local public broadcasting affiliate GBH News reported.
The decision came after an internal investigation found Gino had manipulated the data to support her hypotheses in at least four studies. The university said it hadn't stripped a professor of tenure in decades, and GBH News could not find any other examples of tenure being revoked at Harvard.
The university declined to comment further, and Gino did not respond to GBH's requests for comment. The Daily Beast has reached out to both sides for comment.
'I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result. I did not falsify data to bolster any result,' Gino said in a 2023 statement on her personal website.
Her dismissal comes as Harvard faces intense scrutiny as a result of President Donald Trump's attacks on the university.
Over the past month and a half, the Trump administration has sought to deny Harvard $2.2 billion in federal funding, strip it of its tax-exempt status, and prevent the university from enrolling international students.
Administration officials have said the moves were intended to fight antisemitism on campus, while the university has accused officials of a 'campaign of retribution.'
Harvard has sued to try to restore its lost funding and to continue enrolling international students, but the administration has warned that other universities could be next.
Given the feud with Harvard and the administration's attempts to undermine trust in higher education more broadly, other professors at Harvard Business School were reluctant to comment on Gino's case, GBH reported.
Questions about her work, however, predate the Trump administration.
Gino earned a Ph.D. in economics and management in her native Italy and originally came to Harvard as a visiting fellow, before landing a faculty position there in 2010. By 2020, she was the university's fifth-highest-paid employee, earning about $1 million a year, and made $50,000 to $100,000 per speaking engagement, The New Yorker reported.
In 2012, Gino co-authored a landmark study that found that putting a declaration of truthfulness at the top of a tax or insurance document instead of at the bottom reduced lying on the form by about 10 percent.
Governments worldwide took notice—including the Obama administration—and began studying whether they could recoup billions of dollars in lost tax revenue by revising their forms, according to The New Yorker.
But a group of behavioral scientists who run a blog called Data Colada notified Harvard in 2021 that they believed Gino had faked the data in the 2012 paper, along with three other studies.
They had been tipped off by a recent Ph.D. who believed she had found flaws both in the car insurance paper data and in another famous study by Gino that had found people felt dirty after networking.
Following an internal investigation, Gino was put on unpaid administrative leave in 2023, and the papers were retracted. Gino denied the fraud allegations and filed a $25 million defamation suit against Harvard, which was dismissed last September, according to GBH News.
Her website accuses Harvard's academic integrity procedures of denying her the chance to mount a proper defense by limiting the number of experts she was allowed to consult and not letting her discuss the investigation with her collaborators.
As early as 2015, though, one of Gino's graduate students reported to Harvard Business School that she thought her professor was tampering with the raw data from their experiments, The New Yorker reported.
For the internal investigation that was concluded in 2023, Harvard hired an outside firm to compare the published data with the original data file and found that it had been altered in myriad ways. The report that found Gino culpable was 1,200 pages long.
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