There are run of the mill news stories, there are news stories that cause you to raise an eyebrow, and then there are the news stories that make you laugh into your Cheerios while reading the morning paper.
The New York Times’ Victor Mather reports, “Francesca Gino, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and a prominent behavioral scientist, has studied how small changes can influence behavior.”
But this week, after a multi-year controversy, Harvard’s star business school professor is out and has been banned from campus:
In a 2012 paper, Dr. Gino found that people who were paid a small amount of money to solve puzzles were more likely to be honest about how many they had solved if a question about the accuracy of their reports was put at the top of the document instead of the bottom. But in a 2023 blog post at a site about statistical methods called Data Colada, three professors said that some of the data in the study had been changed in a way that made the result more robust.
Dr. Gino was also a co-author in a similar study in which insurance customers who reported the mileage on their cars were more honest if the question was at the top of the form. In a blog post in 2021, the same authors had found that much of the data came from someone connected to the study, not from the customers.
Gino has denied wrongdoing — “I absolutely did not commit academic fraud,” she has said — but amid the accusations and dueling lawsuits, Harvard has stripped Gino of tenure and relieved her of her duties.
The loss of tenure is a remarkable development. The Harvard Crimson reports, “No professor is known to have lost their tenure since at least the 1940s, when rules for the academic protection were formalized.”
Of course, it’s also notable that former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who came under immense fire over plagiarism allegations and her mishandling of antisemitic protests on campus in 2024, is still gainfully employed by and teaching in Cambridge.
The question must be asked: If we can’t even trust our society’s honesty experts, whom can we trust?