By Andrew Follett
Saturday, May 31, 2025
A once-prominent Harvard University professor was
stripped of her tenure and fired this week for outright fabricating data on
numerous academic studies of dishonesty and unethical behavior. The timing
couldn’t be worse for Harvard: The troubled university currently faces a
critical dispute over funding and foreign student visas with the Trump
administration.
Francesca Gino was regularly cited as an authority by
prominent left-leaning outlets such as National
Public Radio and the
New York Times. Both outlets now admit
that Gino’s research was likely fabricated. Disturbingly, the flaws in her
research were exposed not by the allegedly robust university system of peer
review, but by a series of posts by
science bloggers.
No professor has had tenure revoked at Harvard since the
1940s, when the rules for doing so were formalized, according
to the Harvard Crimson. This is the academic nuclear option.
Gino’s first retracted study showed evidence of data
fabrication all the
way back in 2021, and an investigation into her academic dishonesty lasted
for the following two years. Gino initially blamed errors by her research
assistants or potential tampering by an unknown outside party. She was placed
on leave in March 2023.
Gino maintains her innocence and states on her private website,
“There is one thing I know for sure: I did not commit academic fraud. I did not
manipulate data to produce a particular result.” On the site, she explains why
she filed a lawsuit against Harvard for $25 million in damages, citing
reputation damage and lost income. A federal judge dismissed
Gino’s claims against Harvard last September.
She received more than $1 million in compensation
annually and was the university’s fifth-highest-paid employee in 2018 and 2019,
according
to the Harvard Crimson. The lengthy tenure and high pay of Gino
shows just how far the university’s standards have slipped in allowing this
level of fraud for 15 years.
When independent bloggers and scientists looked at the
data, it became clear that she was both exaggerating
the size of “nudge” effects and outright fabricating any effect
of nudges on behavior. Much of Gino’s research repeatedly tested a series of
arbitrary data combinations until arriving at the desired statistical
correlation she wanted to believe.
Specifically, Gino’s “research” was aligned with
progressive assumptions about how the world works, stating that small “nudges,”
such as putting the signature for an honesty pledge at the start of a form as
opposed to its end, can alter human behavior in this case. This type of
research was
of great interest to the Obama administration, which weaponized it in an
attempt to “improve” human behavior in accordance with its ideals. Attempts to change human nature in
this manner have long been central to leftist politics.
Essentially, Gino was designing her studies to generate
evidence for a belief favorable to progressives, which effectively ensured that
very few in her elite left-wing circles questioned it. She was telling academia
what it wanted to hear, so very few looked deeply into it, and instead widely
cited it.
When I previously wrote
about this scandal in July 2023, I predicted this was “just the tip of the
iceberg,” which has sadly been borne out by recent events.
Shortly afterward, Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, was
ousted for plagiarism following investigations
by conservative outlets and activists. Media publications focused at first
not on the more than 50 clear examples of plagiarism, but instead on the fact
that conservatives were the ones finding the plagiarism . . . and of course
asked “how
serious was it really?” while noting that Harvard’s own board found “no
violations of Harvard’s standard for research misconduct.” That’s exactly the
problem!
This tenacious redefinition of plagiarism to benefit
Harvard’s president followed her testimony before Congress that calling for the
genocide of Jews would
violate the university’s rules only “depending on the context.”
Politically motivated lying for advancement shouldn’t be
surprising, as it’s incredibly easy for researchers to slightly alter their
conclusions to fit a progressive narrative, knowing that such results are “too
good to check.”
Like Gino, any social scientist who wants an academic
career has a very clear incentive to select only a study design or a dataset
that is likely to generate results that are uncontroversial in academia. According
to the Harvard Crimson, fewer than 3 percent of Harvard faculty
members identify their personal political leanings as “conservative” or “very
conservative,” while 32 percent identify as “very liberal” while another 45
percent identify as merely “liberal.” Any group politically polarized to this
extent will have a difficult time arriving at the truth without injecting
ideological bias, as the easiest way to advance is clearly to flatter the
preconceptions of progressive faculty.
This creates a kind of ideological streetlight effect,
in which researchers uncritically accept studies that favor their ideological
preconceptions.
An excellent example of this occurred in 2015, when
University of California, Los Angeles doctoral candidate Michael LaCour faked
data in a political science study to “prove” that gay canvassers could change
voters’ minds in favor of LGBT causes through brief conversations. The
resulting study, coauthored with a Columbia University professor, received an
immense amount of media attention, including
from the New York Times, which set LaCour on an easy path to
academic success, even landing him a coveted job offer to become an assistant
professor at Princeton University. When it was revealed that LaCour seemingly
never conducted any study at all and simply made up the data, Princeton
University rescinded its offer, and the New York Times was left
asking, “How
could this happen?”
Science is failing because of the strong incentives to
lie to flatter progressive sensibilities. Work that flatters them advances and
gets promoted in the media. Work that doesn’t is met with direct censorship by
the powers that be in universities.
But it’s actually worse than that.
Most universities — including my own graduate alma mater
of George Mason University, with its famously pro-free-market economics program
— flat-out demand that potential scientists sign loyalty
oaths to “anti-racism” as a condition of employment. Mason demands that
“every member of our community” create “an inclusive and equitable campus
environment in which every member of our community, without exception, is
valued, supported, and experiences a sense of belonging” so that “George Mason
University will become a national exemplar of anti-racism and inclusive
excellence.”
Major scientific journals such as Nature openly
refuse to publish politically incorrect ideas. Given the incredible
pressure of the academic job market, these measures ensure that true inquiry is
effectively impossible.
By definition, such motivated reasoning cannot be truly
considered science, as it openly coerces prospective researchers not to
investigate their chosen fields outside of strict political boundaries.
As one of GMU’s own
tenured professors pointed out, the wording of GMU’s diversity statement is
more severe than the infamous McCarthy-era loyalty oaths to America that
progressives still are complaining about decades later.
“A devout Leninist revolutionary could honestly swear
this oath as long as he doesn’t belong to an organization that advocates the
government’s violent overthrow,” libertarian GMU economist Bryan Caplan wrote on his blog about
a UC Berkeley anti-communist oath from 1950. “Furthermore, he could belong to
an alternative Communist Party dedicated to establishing Communism by
democratic means. In sharp contrast, diversity statements really do demand your
outright, wholehearted agreement with DEI.”
Harvard’s dishonest expert on honesty is a poignant
symbol of a far larger problem in academia: ideological allegiance replacing
the quest for truth. Science is dead, and the left killed it.
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