Harvard revokes tenure of prof. over data manipulation allegations

Harvard University just yanked the tenure of Francesca Gino, a big-shot business administration professor, after she got tangled up in accusations of cooking the books on her data. This isn’t some minor slap on the wrist. Harvard’s pulling rank, and it’s a rare move. “This is the first time it has occurred in recent decades,” a Harvard spokesperson spilled to Fox News Digital, sounding about as thrilled as a bureaucrat at a tax audit.

Losing tenure is like getting your VIP pass yanked; it’s a big deal and usually only happens if the institution thinks you’ve crossed a major line, like fudging research or breaking ethical codes. Even then, it’s a slog to strip it away, which is why Gino fought for years to keep hers.

Gino’s been slugging it out against these claims for nearly four years, according to The Harvard Crimson. Before the data fraud stink hit, she was a rockstar in the ivory tower, diving deep into the irony of studying honesty and ethics. Her whole gig was preaching integrity while allegedly fudging numbers to make her theories pop. The Crimson says she was raking in serious cash too, pulling over a million bucks a year in 2018 and 2019, making her the fifth-highest-paid suit at Harvard. 

Hypocrisy much?

The trouble started when some eagle-eyed scholars sniffed something off in her work and aired it out on Data Colada, a blog that checks out the veracity of studies and doesn’t mess around. 

“In 2021, we and a team of anonymous researchers examined a number of studies co-authored by Gino, because we had concerns that they contained fraudulent data,” the blog’s authors wrote, dropping a bombshell. They claimed to have found evidence of Gino playing fast and loose with data across a decade, including as recently as 2020. They took their findings to Harvard Business School in fall 2021, and you can bet that lit a fire under the administration.

Gino, not one to go down quietly, slapped a lawsuit on both the Data Colada crew and Harvard itself, per The Hill. Parts of that legal brawl are still grinding through the courts. 

Meanwhile, she’s shouting her innocence from the rooftops—or at least her website. “I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result. I did not falsify data to bolster any result. I did not commit the offense I am accused of. Period,” she declared.

Before this mess, Gino was a prolific name, churning out over 140 scholarly papers and scooping up awards like they were going out of style. But now, with her tenure gone and her reputation under fire, she’s fighting to clear her name in a world where trust is harder to earn than a Harvard degree.

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