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.
Several sources tell GBH News that Harvard administrators notified business faculty of their decision during a closed-door meeting this past week, and a university spokesperson confirmed the move. Gino did not immediately respond to several requests for comment.
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.
A little-appreciated aspect of the @Harvard Morgue case, as well as all Harvard -related litigation in Massachusetts is the high number of judges there who are alumni of @Harvard_Law. None of them ever recuses him- or herself because of the potential appearance of bias, but all invariably rule in favor of @Harvard. The families who donated their relatives’ bodies to Harvard’s Morgue tried suing the university for damages but Judge Kenneth W. Salinger (Harvard Law ’90) threw out their case, ruling Harvard was not liable.
1970 Harvard Graduate James Fallows:
A century ago, the Harvard football team was a national powerhouse and even won the Rose Bowl in 1920. As the Trump administration is discovering, this 389-year-old institution can be tougher than it looks. (1907 Edward Penfield illustration, via Getty Images.)
This post is about the language of civic struggle in our times. Last week, while outside the country, in Greenland (about which more, later), I came across a rapid-fire, three-part sequence of documents, which together tell a revealing tale.
All three involve the Trump team’s escalating and lawless attempts to damage Harvard university: Its people, its research projects, its finances, its global influence, everything about it.
In reality these are acts of “burn it down!” resentment, comparable to Mao’s unleashing the nihilistic Red Guards during China’s Cultural Revolution 60 years ago. But as a paper-thin pretext, the Trump team has presented its war against Harvard as a way to make Jewish students and faculty feel more comfortable and at home there.
As outlined many times before (eg by former Harvard president Larry Summers), this Trump pretext is not just cynical but also destructive. It is destructive not simply to the university as a whole but in particular to its Jewish students and faculty. Soon after Trump’s supposed “war against antisemitism” at Harvard began, the student paper, The Crimson, published a column by Jacob Miller, a graduating senior who as president of Harvard Hillel had sounded the alarm about real incidents of antisemitism. He argued that Team Trump’s sudden tenderness toward Jewish students amounted to “seizing on Jews as their perfect political pawns.”¹
Also as outlined many times before, Harvard’s response to this intimidation switched from initial, cowed-seeming compliance, to a resounding “Hell, no!”, which gave courage and cover to other educational leaders—all of whom, by definition, represent institutions with shorter histories and smaller endowments than Harvard has.
This brings us to the one-two-three series of threats, responses, and results last week—and to an examination of the words each party chose.
