Award-Winning Professor Fired After Research Data Found Manipulated

Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino has been stripped of her tenure and terminated following a multi-year investigation that concluded she manipulated data in multiple published studies centered on dishonesty, as reported by The New York Post.

Gino, a prominent behavioral scientist who had authored over 140 scholarly papers and won numerous academic awards, was removed after Harvard University’s top governing board determined she altered data in at least four studies to support her hypotheses, according to a report from the Harvard Crimson and GHB.

Francesca Gino built a career studying honesty, ethics, and integrity.

Harvard just fired her for faking data in her studies — on honesty.

You couldn’t script a better metaphor for modern academia: moral posturing, rotten core.

The irony isn’t just poetic, it’s diagnostic. pic.twitter.com/YwF18fByuC

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) May 27, 2025

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Harvard Business School faculty were informed of the decision in a closed-door meeting last week. While Harvard declined to comment on the firing specifically, citing personnel privacy, the university confirmed that revoking tenure is extremely rare.

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According to historical records, no Harvard professor has had their tenure revoked since the 1940s, when formal termination policies were established by the American Association of University Professors.

Gino’s academic work came under scrutiny in 2023 when three behavioral scientists published blog posts on Data Colada alleging data fraud in four of her co-authored papers published between 2012 and 2020.

One of the studies, retracted in 2021, claimed that individuals were more likely to give honest responses if asked to sign an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form rather than at the end. The retraction cited manipulated data from three separate lab experiments.

A preliminary review began in October 2021, followed by a full-scale investigation through 2022 and 2023.

The process included interviews with Gino and her research collaborators, a review of her emails and manuscripts by Harvard Business School faculty, and a forensic data analysis by an external firm.

When questioned about the discrepancies, Gino suggested the possibility of human error or sabotage by someone acting with “malicious intentions.”

Investigators rejected these explanations and presented their findings to Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar in March 2023. Gino was placed on unpaid leave, and formal dismissal proceedings began.

Investigators also recommended that Harvard audit Gino’s entire body of work and pursue retractions for three additional papers. One of the four flagged studies had already been retracted before the full investigation concluded.

In response, Gino has consistently denied the allegations. “There is one thing I know for sure: I did not commit academic fraud,” she wrote on her website. “I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result. I did not falsify data to bolster any result.”

In 2023, she filed a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard, Dean Datar, and the Data Colada bloggers, claiming reputational harm, financial losses, and damage to her career.

However, in September 2023, a federal judge in Boston dismissed her defamation claims. The court ruled Gino to be a public figure, stating that her work could be critiqued under First Amendment protections.

The investigation marks one of the most high-profile academic fraud cases in recent memory and highlights the rarity of tenure revocation at institutions like Harvard.

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