Being a professor at an elite university can make a person believe that he or she has a special status over regular people. For Francesca Gino, formerly a professor at Harvard Business School, her status as a professor gave her the impression that she could scientifically calibrate a system that would inculcate regular people toward morality.
Gino claimed that putting a signature line testifying to truth-telling at the top of a form, rather than at the bottom, would invite greater honesty. She said that giving a person ownership over an object would activate “prosocial behavior” and “self-esteem.” And she asserted that having a person count to 10 before eating would cause that person to choose healthier foods.
All of these conclusions, Gino claimed, were reached through robust scientific research — a research that was ever-so special because it was done by her. She was the all-star professor who could draw speaking and consulting gigs from Fortune 500 companies seemingly at will, thus giving her “scientific” conclusions an imprimatur of authority.
This week, the Harvard Crimson reported that Gino’s tenure has been revoked and she has been fired. This all follows years of repeated discoveries that Gino’s claimed technocratic tricks for getting people to act morally and honestly could be better described as made-up hunches that were propped up by (manipulated) research papers.
The irony, for many, is too much. The woman who came up with a bunch of “scientifically backed” schemes to get people to act honestly was lying about (at least some of) those very schemes.
Examining Gino’s past research through the lens of knowing she is a liar puts an entirely different spin on her findings. For instance, what exactly was Gino thinking when she concluded in one study that just “one bad apple” who cheats and lies can induce others to do the same?
Regardless of whether Gino lied to herself as well as the world, this professor of “honesty” and “authenticity” reveals much about the rottenness of academia today.
First, Gino shows how elite academia has coalesced around the goal of enforcing a leftist worldview. To cite one case, Gino used her research on how “one bad apple” can induce others to act immorally to claim that the death of George Floyd showed that a “toxic culture” had infiltrated the Minneapolis police department. In another case, Gino called on people to foster a more inclusive work environment for racial minorities by acting “authentically,” such as not toning down one’s preferred style of dress. Gino did not stop with framing this as advice for how to help racial minorities. No, Gino claimed that acting “authentically” was scientifically proven to also benefit white people. In a study, Gino purportedly showed that people who are more “authentic” in a job interview are more likely to get hired. Thus, Gino tried to induce white people to create her envisioned racially just world by claiming that doing what she believed would help racial minorities would also help white people.
We are in a time when, according to Claremont McKenna College professor Jon A. Shields, the percentage of professors in the humanities fields who are conservative has dropped into the single digits (apart from economics). When this is combined with liberal professors who use their position not to advance truth and knowledge but to further liberal ideology — even if, as in the case of Gino, this means inventing things out of whole cloth — we arrive at a situation where the university is a propaganda machine for liberal ideology.
Second, Gino shows how scientific, psychological, and sociological research is created to be marketable and to further a professor’s career, rather than to advance human knowledge. The replication crisis has demonstrated the enormous extent to which this is the case across numerous fields: In 2015, for instance, psychologists repeated 97 studies and found that just 36 percent of them replicated, and in 2018, 62 percent of 21 social and behavioral science papers were replicated. Gino was first caught when a graduate student named Zoé Ziani attempted to reproduce one of Gino’s studies and found that it did not replicate. Showing just how much shoddy research is protected by academia, two members of Ziani’s dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis until she deleted criticism of Gino’s research from it. It’s especially unbelievable that these professors silenced Ziani’s critiques given how Gino’s research conclusions read as though they were spun up for newspaper headlines.
Gino’s story also demonstrates how institutions of higher education give very low priority to the education of the next generation. According to a 2025 report from the Manhattan Institute, full-time college students spend an average of just 20 to 25 hours per week in class and doing schoolwork. Indeed, universities, particularly elite ones, are not in the business of actually teaching students anything but rather exist to bestow their paying customers with an (often false) reputation for intelligence and education. Gino was part of this whole scheme. She taught a course titled “Anatomy of a Badass,” which was “about learning to be unapologetically bold and authentic at work.” This is Harvard’s idea of a serious education. To make matters worse, Gino’s course was geared around celebrity and elitism, as it “featured” Bozoma Saint John, Netflix’s chief marketing officer. Yet somehow, Gino was one of Harvard’s most well-compensated professors and was held up as one of its best teachers.
Elite academia is built upon ideology and status rather than truth and education. Francesca Gino’s firing, which coincides with the Trump administration’s defunding of Harvard University, marks a turning point in the call for accountability.
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