Star Harvard business professor stripped of tenure, fired for manipulating data in studies on dishonesty

NY Post ^ | 05/27/2025 | Richard Pollina

[DFG]

A renowned Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an investigation found she allegedly manipulated data to support multiple studies she conducted.

Francesca Gino, a celebrated behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School whose work has focused on dishonesty, was let go after the school’s top governing board determined she tweaked observations in four studies so that their findings boosted her hypotheses, GHB 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 did not detail the professor’s firing or tenure being stripped — citing it as a personnel matter — but told GHB 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, according to The Harvard Crimson.

The Post has reached out to Harvard for comment.

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 accusing four of her papers published between 2012 and 2020 she had co-authored contained “fraudulent data.”

A preliminary investigation of Gino’s work by Harvard was launched in October 2021 after concerns about the papers’ sketchy data were brought to the school.

A full probe into the allegations was conducted in 2022 and 2023, where Gino and people who worked with her on the papers were interviewed, with faculty of the Harvard Business School also reviewing and analyzing her data, emails, and papers’ manuscripts.

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TOPICS: Education
KEYWORDS: academia; education; fraud; harvard; harvardprofessor; harvarduniversity; professor; university

[ClearCase_guy]

[albie]

It’s a start!

[lowbridge]

Im so ashamed of my Alma Mater.

I have half a mind to put my Harvard degree back into the Cracker Jack’s box I found it in.

[Qwapisking]

Honestly... you can’t make this stuff up.

[BBQToadRibs2]

I was fully expecting this to be coming from The Bee.

These “Elite” Univerities are a pale shadow of their former selves.

[Cowgirl of Justice]

Wow. I stopped off at a professor’s house to drop something off one night back in the 90’s. I was going to a private college and this professor was just awesome and greatly loved! She had company and the ‘vibe’ was one of deep respect and old money. I can completely see the same with this ‘untenured’ Harvard professor and cannot even imagine the ruins her life is in now as she has probably lost what mattered most to her - respect and people bowing to her accomplishments.

[utax]

“Francesca Gino, a celebrated behavioral scientist..”

I’ve celebrated her many times!

[chuckee]

She was dishonestly probing dishonesty

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Irony can be pretty ironic

You ain't kidding. One of the four retracted papers is titled:

Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity

But for Trump, she, or at least her career, might have survived.

[Aevery_Freeman]

According to Mike Benz, they are CIA/FBI front groups now.

[Dixie Yooper]

I have half a mind to put my Harvard degree back into the Cracker Jack’s box I found it in

I burned mine at a protest for someone who was having a problem with something that was causing problems for someone else. I still don't know what I'm going to do for a living, but I feel so much better unburdening myself from what could have been myself.

[redfreedom]

“These “Elite” Univerities are a pale shadow of their former selves.”

This sort of corruption is at the upper echelons of our entire society, from the communist committee that ran the Biden presidency to major institutions of higher learning on down to the public education system, Hollywood and the MSM.

We have allowed the communists to almost completely take over the country. Had the voters not outvoted voter fraud, the USA as we know it would no longer exist under a Harris regime.

[rightwingcrazy]

A subject matter expert.

[Leaning Right]

It’s her own fault for not being a Climate Change scientist. Those folks can make stuff up all day long without penalty.

[outpostinmass2]

And yet Claudine Gay, former head of Harvard, whose entire academic career was shown to be a fraud, is still tenured at the school.

[Libloather]

Francesca had one job...

[Lizavetta]

[trebb]

I was gonna say, “You can’t make this crap up”, but the perfesser proved they can, and do, make that crap up....

[sgt_lau]

Oh the irony.