Probe Finds Harvard ‘Honesty’ Prof Who Allegedly Tampered With Data Should be Fired
“The committee concludes that Professor Gino has engaged in multiple instances of research misconduct, across all four studies at issue in these allegations”
We highlighted this story when it broke last August. This is an interesting update.
The New York Post reports:
Harvard professor of honesty tampered with data and should be fired: university probe
A celebrated Harvard honesty professor who researched why people cheat tampered with data in her work — and should be fired, a university probe released this week found.
Francesca Gino, a star behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School whose work has focused on dishonesty, was found to have tweaked observations in four studies so that their findings boosted their hypotheses, according to a nearly 1,300-page report detailing the school’s months-long investigation.
“The committee concludes that Professor Gino has engaged in multiple instances of research misconduct, across all four studies at issue in these allegations,” the report read.
Gino, a star academic who had authored over 140 academic papers and snagged numerous awards, came under fire last year after a trio of behavioral scientists published a series of explosive posts on their blog Data Colada, writing four academic papers published between 2012 and 2020 that the Harvard professor had co-authored “contained fraudulent data.”
The university report detailed that Harvard began a preliminary investigation of Gino’s work in October 2021 after the Data Colada researchers brought their concerns about the papers’ sketchy data to the school.
A full probe was conducted in 2022 and 2023, with three HBS faculty members interviewing Gino and people who worked with her on the papers, in addition to reviewing her data, emails, and papers’ manuscripts. An outside forensics firm also was hired to analyze her studies’ data.
When asked about the issues with her work, Gino told investigators either she or her research assistants may have made errors when handling the data — or someone with “malicious intentions” could have tampered with it, according to the university report.
The investigators rejected both theories and provided findings to HBS Dean Datar in March 2023, advising the school to place her on unpaid leave and begin termination proceedings.
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Comments
So plagiarism is not as bad as fudging data. I sort of thought it was the other way round in the scale of academic crimes. Now we’ll have to fire all the academics responsible for the “reproducibility crisis” which means most of those who work with data. Perhaps this is how academia ends.
Or maybe it depends who is doing the fudging and who is doing the plagiarizing. I’m not thinking of some other Harvard professor who until recently had a prominent administrative role, of course.
No, data misconduct is the ultimate crime. It is difficult to prove in the first place…much more difficult than plagiarism and the impacts on society can be much more far-reaching.
In a broader societal sense you’re probably right, but within the academy, I think the enforcement priority was the other way. Which one is it that university students are disciplined for?
Your counter-argument is that university students except doctoral students are not responsible for creating new knowledge, but faculty are. Still, universities talk endlessly of a single culture for everyone, and the one that’s gotten many members of the university (students) punished is plagiarism. So to see faculty getting a slap on the wrist and keeping most of their ill-gotten gains from plagiarism really destroys the whole culture. People now will pay it lip service but only that; it will become another aspect of political correctness now.
So she is academia’s Hector”Big Weasel” Marroquin.
Wrong color so your out. Sorry, you just lost the Intersectional Olympics.
Is anybody surprised? Its harvard where claudine gay cheated her way to the top of the university, and is still getting paid $900k.
Quote about a book she authored:
“She is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author, most recently, of “Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and Life.”
Hmmmm, not a great payoff this time?! Something about hoisted on your own petard.
Why aren’t they accepting this? Harvard accepts plagiarism on a daily basis–is this so much worse? It’s hard to figure out what goes on at Harvard
So, Harvard’s faculty are cooking the books again? They should remove “University” and just change over the name to “Culiinary Institute” and be done with it.