The ethics of the ethics researcher
Another Harvard professor has been determined to be falsifying data or an incompetent researcher, take your pick (or both?). The twist here is that her specialty is honesty and ethics:
Harvard University has stripped a world-renowned scholar of her tenure status. The university’s top governing board, the Harvard Corporation, decided this month to revoke Francesca Gino’s tenure and end her employment at Harvard Business School.
Gino, who was celebrated for her research on honesty and ethical behavior, had faced scathing allegations of academic misconduct and fraud. …
In 2023, Harvard launched an internal investigation into Gino’s work after concerns were raised on a blog called Data Colada, run by a group of behavioral scientists who scrutinize academic research. The Harvard investigation concluded that Gino had manipulated certain data to support her hypotheses in at least four of her studies.
At that point, the university placed her on unpaid administrative leave.
Gino denied the allegations and filed a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard …
Irony noted.
But heck, if you look like Andie MacDowell in “Groundhog’s Day,” who’s complaining?
https://www.foxnews.com/us/harvard-revokes-professors-tenure-rare-move-amid-data-manipulation-allegations
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/feb/07/groundhog-day-perfect-comedy-for-ever
But as they pointed out on gutfeld there are plenty of unethical even deranged professors at harvard
The watchward is quic custodium custodies (who watches the watchers)
Harvard can’t catch a break!
We may well be watching Harvard and Hollywood in the throes of their self-destruction.
FAFO.
How long before the first Trump appointed district court judge reverses this decision by Harvard?
Since st elmos fire when she was a cameo part (also four weddings and a funeral)
More to the point when an academic proclaims ethics ‘run for your lives’ same for times columnists ombudsmen et al)
Authority in every profession is too easily abused
Yeah, that was a funny one.
(Her salary, um, not so much…)
Hey! Maybe DOGE should run through Harvard salaries…. Profs AND—especially—administrators.
I wonder which nest of faculty influentials had it in for her.
every once in a while, Harvard shows some sense, (around the time one of those smaller comets show up) so derrick bell didn’t get tenure on the Charles, but he was received elsewhere, I think there was some dispute about one of Samuel Huntington’s papers, but for everyone of those, you have a richard falk who receives more prestigious assignments (well the UN human rights council considere it self such) he had khomeini all wrong,
I can’t even pretend to be surprised and/or outraged about this. The irony made me shake my head for about five seconds.
I’ve seen so much in the past few years, I think the irony receptors in my brain are burnt out. Years ago, the high from this level of mendacity could keep me going for days on end, but now the high doesn’t even last a news cycle.
I remember the good old days, when Joe Biden was hounded out of a presidential campaign for plagiarizing Niel Kinnock, of all people. Irony was way more potent back then.
there is a cult of shamelessness, in the modern era, ward churchill might not have been fired, as his lefty narrative, has gotten purchase, of course lets not speak of Hank Rogers, (Ibrahim Kendi) and Di Angelo, thats a motherload of lies, omissions et al, who have done very well,
Speaking of “funny”, someone out there has a wicked sense of humor….
“Biden May Be Called To Testify On Cover-Up Of His Own Cognitive Decline: Comer”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-may-be-called-testify-cover-his-own-cognitive-decline-comer
(The Biden Crime Family could all pull a Comey…and no one would be the wiser. Dementia, among other things, would seemingly be seen to run in the family—just ask Ben Hur for confirmation—besides, aren’t they all the bearer of pardons unto the tenth generation??)
– – – – – – – –
Meanwhile the Gray Lady is having some fun with Elon Musk’s—GASP!—drug problem.
Stands to reason. Working 30 hours a day…and all those—DOUBLE GASP!!— KIDS!
(Underlying message: Of COURSE Musk’s a junkie. Why couldn’t he be reasonable, sensible and sober…like the Biden Family Syndicate?)
But the Oscar in this case MUST, ultimately, go to POTUS46! (Cue fanfare…)
https://nypost.com/2025/05/30/us-news/biden-says-politics-are-so-divided-in-first-speech-since-cancer-diagnosis/
https://instapundit.com/722909/
cue that line about Grant, and the scotch he drinks,
you know I almost feel sorry for the old galoot then he opens his mouth,
you tried to put your opponent and his attys in jail,
yes neil kinnock, not as glib as tony blair, then again the tories hadn’t knifed the iron lady in the back, and then fumbled the ball, aitken, archer mellor et al,
of course a generation later they still didn’t learn any lesson,
similarly dukakis who drew the short straw, was not slick enough, enter Clinton who has been haunting our body politic ever since,
Hmm. Seems yer forgettin’ John Major in that august list of backstabbers…
– – – – – – –
Oops.
Here’s that NYT-Musk-Drug link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/elon-musk-drugs-children-trump.html
And, as expected(!) the other uber-virtuous Media members (in good standing) pile on.
BTW, Musk denies it, but who would ever believe him against the incredible integrity of those storied truth-tellers…?
Wonder what her point was;
Just get something published?
Make her mark?
Have an effect in law of some kind?
@Richard Aubrey: Wonder what her point was;
Getting a teaching position at Harvard is about the same order of difficulty as getting a starring role in a major Hollywood movie. Academia is extremely competitive at the Ivies.
Here’s the story of Amy Bishop, a Harvard-educated scientist, who was denied tenure at University of Alabama and committed a mass shooting at her biology department at the end of her last semester at UAH.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_University_of_Alabama_in_Huntsville_shooting
Harvard.
Hmm … is there a pattern emerging here?
I assume our friend, Francesca Gino, had a long history of cheating and shortcuts.
Today’s academia is a cutthroat game. The stakes are high and the competition is fiercer than fierce.
___________________________
Disgraced Harvard professor Francesca Gino was paid more than $1 million a year at the height of her career, it was revealed, even as she allegedly manipulated data in research papers about honesty.
Gino, a former Harvard Business School professor, once hailed as a rising star in behavioral science, was the fifth-highest paid employee at Harvard in both 2018 and 2019, according to records obtained by The Harvard Crimson.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14759137/Outrageous-salary-Harvard-dishonesty-professor-revealed-university-risks-losing-billions.html
___________________________
I like Data Colada and catching frauds in the rain…
–“RUPERT HOLMES – Escape (The Pina Colada Song) (1980)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGAeI5KODLA
Getting a position in any university is hard. When we would interview at the state university (not the university of state, the other one) all the applicants were from the Ivy League. And so that was a clue, as someone whose degree was going to say State University and not Harvard, that a permanent career in academia might not be in the cards. But there’s lots of ways to make a living, you don’t have to imprison yourself in your expectations.
A few statistics:
* In 1940 less than 5% of Americans had degrees.
* Today more than 50% of Americans have degrees.
There’s nothing special about a college degree today. At best it gets your foot in the door.
If one wishes to parlay a degree into a university position today, it’s far more competitive and difficult.
If one wishes to parlay a degree into a job today, it’s not quite as hard, but still difficult.
A college degree doesn’t guarantee a path to success like it used to. Yet it is several times more expensive.
The university system is facing massive disruption. Yet it is so ossified I see little chance it will respond in a sensible, nimble fashion.
Academic scandals, like Gino’s, IMO are symptoms of a larger crisis in higher ed.
“But heck, if you look like Andie MacDowell in “Groundhog’s Day,” who’s complaining?”
If you look carefully huxley, Gino has rather oversized teeth not unlike AOC. There may be certain acts of pleasure you would rather not engage in with these allegedly attractive leftist women.
Life in Montana is so desirable that neither university hires faculty who have worked their way up through a genuinely strong scholastic system. Rather each university hires according to genetic code(children of great wealth) and/or they hire from familites who have made large “donations” to the university. That is easy/peasy to track. Of course, during the last 15 + years some of the daughters of great wealth who are already tenured insist on hiring “deserving” women from withint the Democratic party. That is to say women who have been brought up in a feminist system that has taught them to do “dirty tricks”, or as they like to say “show their strength qualifications for leadership”. In other words the daughters of great wealth hire female flunkies (flunkettes?) What used to be just local wealth getting lifetime jobs for their own kids has now become a nationwide scramble among the wealthiest!
The twist here is that her specialty is honesty and ethics:
Am I the only one that notices that this story has a strong resemblance to a page from the standard Democrat politician’s playbook? Posture as a paragon of ethics and integrity, while being entirely crooked.
I’m not surprised that she thought she could get away with the scam, especially at Harvard. But then again, Harvard is now under the Trump microscope. Would she have gotten away with this if Trump hadn’t been elected?
“behavioral science” is pretty close to fog herding.
U-Mich had an experiment some years ago. Get male students to sign up for an experiment. When they arrive, act as if they’d screwed up the date and time and be really annoying. To the extent that, on the way out, a big guy gives them the shoulder.
STOP
Now we’re going to do a blood study. Turns out guys from the South spiked their adrenalin and testosterone higher than the guys from the North, and it lasted longer.
So….
Let’s see; Former Harvard president Claudine Gay was also accused of plagiarism but she did not get fired. She was just re-assigned to some sort of very lucrative teaching position there.
So why wasn’t she fired from Harvard?? Let me guess; because she is black and she is leftist, pro-Hamas.
But Francesca Gino is white, so it’s clear Harvard will aim to get her fired. Perhaps if she “comes out” as a male, she will save her job.
Check out what Harvard did to their famous black economist, Roland Freyer, who had the temerity, the cohones, to produce studies that shredded the the left wing dogma about why blacks do not excel academically. He was warned, unofficially of course, that he should not publish his findings because it gave the “wrong” message.
He was suspended from Harvard for two years, supposedly for inappropriate comments he made to some females at Harvard, but there is some controversy about that.
Safe to say, that if Freyer were white, he would no longer be at Harvard.