A renowned Harvard Business School behavioral scientist was stripped of tenure last week after a board investigation determined she had manipulated data in numerous, widely-cited studies and papers she had published on the topics of, per the New York Post, “cheating, lying, and dishonesty.”
Yeah. It’s not clear if Francesca Gino’s body of work is itself some sort of larger meta-scheme in which she’s teaching a grander lesson on the value of honesty or something. She doesn’t seem to think so as in 2024, after being placed on leave, she filed a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard, Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar, and a group of bloggers who had exposed her fraud.
A Boston federal judge tossed the case last September. Gino’s firing comes at maybe not the best time for Harvard’s public image given certain other external threats to its operational capacity.