Latest news with #Gino
Vox
3 days ago
- Business
- Vox
Harvard just fired a tenured professor for the first time in 80 years. Good.
is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox's effective altruism-inspired section on the world's biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter. The Harvard University crest on the Baker Library of the Harvard Business School in Boston on May 27. Sophie Park/Bloomberg via Getty Images In the summer of 2023, I wrote about a shocking scandal at Harvard Business School: Star professor Francesca Gino had been accused of falsifying data in four of her published papers, with whispers there was falsification in others, too. A series of posts on Data Colada, a blog that focuses on research integrity, documented Gino's apparent brazen data manipulation, which involved clearly changing study data to better support her hypotheses. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. This was a major accusation against a researcher at the top of her field, but Gino's denials were unconvincing. She didn't have a good explanation for what had gone wrong, asserting that maybe a research assistant had done it, even though she was the only author listed across all four of the falsified studies. Harvard put her on unpaid administrative leave and barred her from campus. The cherry on top? Gino's main academic area of study was honesty in business. As I wrote at the time, my read of the evidence was that Gino had most likely committed fraud. That impression was only reinforced by her subsequent lawsuit against Harvard and the Data Colada authors. Gino complained that she'd been defamed and that Harvard hadn't followed the right investigation process, but she didn't offer any convincing explanation of how she'd ended up putting her name to paper after paper with fake data. This week, almost two years after the news first broke, the process has reached its resolution: Gino was stripped of tenure, the first time Harvard has essentially fired a tenured professor in at least 80 years. (Her defamation lawsuit against the bloggers who found the data manipulation was dismissed last year.) What we do right and wrong when it comes to scientific fraud Harvard is in the news right now for its war with the Trump administration, which has sent a series of escalating demands to the university, canceled billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, and is now blocking the university from enrolling international students, all in an apparent attempt to force the university to conform to MAGA's ideological demands. Stripping a celebrity professor of tenure might not seem like the best look at a moment when Harvard is in an existential struggle for its right to exist as an independent academic institution. But the Gino situation, which long predates the conflict with Trump, shouldn't be interpreted solely through the lens of that fight. Scientific fraud is a real problem, one that is chillingly common across academia. But far from putting the university in a bad light, Harvard's handling of the Gino case has actually been unusually good, even though it still underscores just how much further academia has to go to ensure scientific fraud becomes rare and is reliably caught and punished. There are two parts to fraud response: catching it and punishing it. Academia clearly isn't very good at the first part. The peer-review process that all meaningful research undergoes tends to start from the default assumption that data in a reviewed paper is real, and instead focuses on whether the paper represents a meaningful advance and is correctly positioned with respect to other research. Almost no reviewer is going back to check to see if what is described in a paper actually happened. Fraud, therefore, is often caught only when other researchers actively try to replicate a result or take a close look at the data. Science watchdogs who find these fraud cases tell me that we need a strong expectation that data be made public — which makes it much harder to fake — as well as a scientific culture that embraces replications. (Given the premiums journals put on novelty in research and the supreme importance of publishing for academic careers, there's been little motivation for scientists to pursue replication.). It is these watchdogs, not anyone at Harvard or in the peer-review process, who caught the discrepancies that ultimately sunk Gino. Crime and no punishment Even when fraud is caught, academia too often fails to properly punish it. When third-party investigators bring a concern to the attention of a university, it's been unusual for the responsible party to actually face consequences. One of Gino's co-authors on one of the retracted papers was Dan Ariely, a star professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He, too, has been credibly accused of falsifying data: For example, he published one study that he claimed took place at UCLA with the assistance of researcher Aimee Drolet Rossi. But UCLA says the study didn't happen there, and Rossi says she did not participate in it. In a past case, he claimed on a podcast to have gotten data from the insurance company Delta Dental, which the company says it did not collect. In another case, an investigation by Duke reportedly found that data from a paper he co-authored with Gino had been falsified, but that there was no evidence Ariely had used fake data knowingly. Frankly, I don't buy this. Maybe an unlucky professor might once end up using data that was faked without their knowledge. But if it happens again, I'm not willing to credit bad luck, and at some point, a professor who keeps 'accidentally' using falsified or nonexistent data should be out of a job even if we can't prove it was no accident. But Ariely, who has maintained his innocence, is still at Duke. Or take Olivier Voinnet, a plant biologist who had multiple papers conclusively demonstrated to contain image manipulation. He was found guilty of misconduct and suspended for two years. It's hard to imagine a higher scientific sin than faking and manipulating data. If you can't lose your job for that, the message to young scientists is inevitably that fraud isn't really that serious. What it means to take fraud seriously Gino's loss of tenure, which is one of a few recent cases where misconduct has had major career consequences, might be a sign that the tides are changing. In 2023, around when the Gino scandal broke, Stanford's then-president Marc Tessier-Lavigne stepped down after 12 papers he authored were found to contain manipulated data. A few weeks ago, MIT announced a data falsification scandal with a terse announcement that the university no longer had confidence in a widely distributed paper 'by a former second-year PhD student.' It's reasonable to assume the student was expelled from the program. I hope that these high-profile cases are a sign we are moving in the right direction on scientific fraud because its persistence is enormously damaging to science. Other researchers waste time and energy following false lines of research substantiated by fake data; in medicine, falsification can outright kill people. But even more than that, research fraud damages the reputation of science at exactly the moment when it is most under attack. We should tighten standards to make fraud much harder to commit in the first place, and when it is identified, the consequences should be immediate and serious. Let's hope Harvard sets a trend.
International Business Times
4 days ago
- International Business Times
Francesca Gino: Disgraced Harvard Professor Earned $1M Annually Before Being Fired for Fabricating Research Used in Studies on 'Dishonesty'
The disgraced ex-Harvard professor—fired from her cushy job for fabricating data in research centered on dishonesty—was once one of the highest-paid staff members at the Ivy League institution. Francesca Gino was paid a staggering $1 million annually as a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, according to the student-run Harvard Crimson. She was ranked as the university's fifth-highest-paid employee between 2018 and 2019. However, her career at the Ivy League institution came to an abrupt halt last week after school officials stripped her of tenure and fired her after an investigation concluded that she had manipulated data in four studies to make the findings boosted her proposed hypothesis. Lost the Top Job Once a celebrity academic, Gino became the first Harvard professor since the 1940s to have their tenure revoked, following the introduction of formal dismissal guidelines by the American Association of University Professors. Gino — the author of more than 140 academic papers and recipient of several prestigious awards — first came under investigation in 2023. Three behavioral scientists behind the blog Data Colada published a series of posts presenting evidence that four papers she co-authored between 2012 and 2020 included "fraudulent data." Scrutiny over her work began with a 2012 study she co-authored, which claimed that asking people to sign an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form, rather than at the end, led to more truthful answers. That particular study was retracted in 2021 due to apparent data manipulation by another researcher involved in the project, which was based on three separate lab experiments. Several years later, an internal review concluded that Gino had fabricated data to support her findings in at least four of her published studies. According to The Daily Beast, Harvard had not stripped a professor of their tenure in decades and offered no further comment on the matter. When the investigation began in 2023, Gino responded on her personal website, firmly rejecting the accusations made against her. "There is one thing I know for sure: I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result," it reads. "I did not falsify data to bolster any result. I did not commit the offense I am accused of. Period." After allegation started to spread, Gino was placed on administrative leave. The journal Psychological Science also withdrew two of her published articles, saying that the decision was based on recommendations from the Research Integrity Office at Harvard Business School (HBS). In both instances, the journal noted that an independent forensic firm hired by HBS had found "discrepancies" between the final published data and earlier versions from Gino's behavioral research. Image Completely Tarnished Separately, Harvard requested the withdrawal of a third study published by Gino in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and according to the Financial Times, the journal's publisher planned to pull the article in its September 2023 edition. The two papers recently withdrawn by Psychological Science included a 2015 study titled "The Moral Virtue of Authenticity: How Inauthenticity Produces Feelings of Immorality and Impurity" and a 2014 study called "Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity." The 2020 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is now set to be retracted, was titled "Why Connect? Moral Consequences of Networking with a Promotion or Prevention Focus." The study "Evil Genius" included five separate lab experiments involving human participants, who were given chances to act dishonestly by exaggerating their performance on certain tasks, followed by assessments of their creativity. According to the original abstract, the research claimed that "acting dishonestly leads to greater creativity in subsequent tasks." In August 2023, Gino fired back at the university and filed a $25 million lawsuit, alleging she was the victim of a "smear campaign." The 100-page complaint, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, accused Harvard and the three data analysts of defaming her by spreading false accusations of academic misconduct. "I want to be very clear: I have never, ever falsified data or engaged in research misconduct of any kind," Gino said. In her lawsuit, Gino argued that any irregularities in the spreadsheets could have been caused by research assistants manually transferring data from paper forms—a method that is inherently susceptible to human mistakes. Gino's lawsuit further claimed that Harvard conducted an unjust and biased investigation into the data fraud accusations. She alleged that the university "overlooked evidence that could have cleared her" and introduced a new policy for handling academic misconduct cases that was enforced solely in her situation.
Hindustan Times
4 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Who is Francesca Gino? Harvard fires star professor with $1 million salary after data fraud allegations
Francesca Gino, a professor of business at Harvard, has been fired for allegedly manipulating data to support her hypothesis on honesty. The famed Ivy League revoked the 47-year-old's tenure in a rare move on Tuesday, nearly four years after she was first accused of data fraud, per Fox News. 'This is the first time it has occurred in recent decades,' a spokesperson for Harvard said of the professor's tenure being revoked in a statement to the outlet. A leading scholar of behavioural science, Gino published over 140 papers on human behaviour, honesty, and related areas. She earned global recognition for her work with Harvard University's Mind Brain Behavior initiative. Also Read: Photos show Alpine village almost completely destroyed by Swiss glacier collapse Before being fired, Gino was among the highest-paid educators, receiving more than $1 million in compensation in 2018 and 2019 at Harvard. But in 2021, her work came under scrutiny by scholars, who accused her of data fraud in a series of posts on the Data Colada website. 'We and a team of anonymous researchers examined a number of studies co-authored by Gino, because we had concerns that they contained fraudulent data,' a post published in 2023 reads. 'We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020).' Also Read: Swiss glacier collapses, destroys nearly all of Alpine village. Watch wild video She has since denied the allegations, filing a lawsuit against the blog writers and Harvard. Gino publicly declared her 'innocence' on her website, with a statement that reads, 'There is one thing I know for sure: 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. I did not commit the offense I am accused of. Period.'
Time of India
4 days ago
- Time of India
The jaw-dropping salary of the Harvard professor Francesca Gino fired for data manipulation
Francesca Gino , a former professor at Harvard Business School , was once among the university's most highly compensated employees—earning an eye-popping $1 million per year. Between 2018 and 2019, she was the fifth-highest-paid employee at Harvard, drawing a six-figure salary that placed her well above many academic peers. But Gino's high-profile career—and high salary—came crashing down when Harvard fired her following a damning investigation into alleged research misconduct. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Famous Celebrities With Unexpected Degrees Learn More Undo A Million-Dollar Scandal Gino, a behavioral scientist known for her work on ethics, dishonesty, and human behavior, was placed on unpaid leave and ultimately fired after Harvard concluded that she had manipulated data in at least four published studies between 2012 and 2020. The university also stripped her of tenure—making her the first Harvard professor to lose tenure since the 1940s. Live Events The controversy began in October 2021, when questions were raised about a study she co-authored. The research claimed that having people sign an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form, rather than at the end, significantly increased truthful responses. That study was retracted in 2021 after suspicions of data fabrication emerged. Soon after, the blog Data Colada, run by three behavioral scientists, published a series of posts alleging data fraud in four of Gino's co-authored papers. The claims triggered a full-scale investigation by Harvard throughout 2022 and 2023. No Margin for Error Investigators reviewed her raw data, emails, and research manuscripts and even brought in an outside forensic firm for further analysis. They concluded that Gino had intentionally altered data to ensure the findings supported her hypotheses. Her explanations—citing possible mistakes by research assistants or malicious tampering—were rejected by investigators. Despite Gino's public denial of the allegations—stating on her website, 'I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result'—Harvard moved forward with termination proceedings. She later filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Harvard, HBS Dean Srikant Datar, and the Data Colada bloggers. But in September, a federal judge in Boston dismissed the claims, ruling that as a public figure, Gino's academic work was subject to public scrutiny under the First Amendment.
Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Harvard Professor fired: The most shocking part? Not the fraud, but the salary
So, Harvard just fired a professor and no, this isn't your average academic drama. Francesca Gino, a big name at Harvard Business School known for researching honesty and ethics, has been shown the door after being caught fudging data in multiple studies. But here's the real kicker: the fraud was bad, sure, but her salary? That's what really has people's jaws on the floor. The rise and fall of Harvard's "honesty expert" Francesca Gino wasn't just any professor. She was a star in the world of behavioral science, writing bestselling books, racking up awards, and speaking at top companies about how to build trust, promote ethical behavior, and boost integrity. Her research was quoted everywhere from boardrooms to TED Talks. She built an empire on understanding why people lie... turns out she could've just looked in the mirror. It all started back in 2021, when the blog Data Colada raised suspicions about the accuracy of some of Gino's published data. What began as quiet academic gossip turned into a full-blown scandal. Harvard launched an internal investigation, and outside experts were called in to examine her research. The result? At least four studies showed clear signs of data manipulation. Several papers were retracted, and Gino's academic reputation took a nosedive almost overnight. The salary that raised eyebrows Here's where things go from bad to straight-up bonkers. While the data fraud is serious, what really shocked people was her paycheck. Reports suggest that Gino was pulling in over $1 million a year from Harvard alone, making her one of the highest-paid professors on campus. That's not even counting the $50,000 to $100,000 she allegedly made per speaking gig. Yep, people were shelling out big bucks to hear her talk about ethics. The internet did not take this well. People weren't just mad about the fraud—they were floored that someone earning that kind of money could get away with manipulating research for so long. After being fired, Gino didn't go quietly. She hit back with a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard, accusing the university of defamation and unfair treatment. She claims Harvard applied a new policy retroactively, giving her no fair shot at defending herself. Some of her claims have already been thrown out, but parts of the case—like breach of contract—are still ongoing.
