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Francesca Gino looks forward to her day in court
A Harvard University professor who lost her tenure due to data fraud maintains she is innocent and said she plans to fight for her reputation in court.
Francesca Gino became the first person since the 1940s to lose tenure at Harvard University after the school investigated allegations she tampered with data. The investigation followed accusations made by a trio of behavioral scientists with the blog Data Colada.
Gino (pictured), a business ethics professor, consistently denied the allegations and is fighting back with a lawsuit against Harvard. A judge previously ruled against her lawsuit against the Data Colada authors. However, the judge ruled Gino’s breach of contract claims can continue. She filed a further response on June 23, while Harvard has filed other motions in the past week.
In an unsigned email to The College Fix, Gino’s team noted several major concerns about the integrity of Harvard’s investigation.
According to Gino’s team, Harvard’s investigation report did not include the underlying data needed to independently verify Harvard’s claims. That is, the school denied the professor a proper forensic evaluation and access to raw datasets.
The response also said the burden of proof was reversed. Harvard’s own policy requires that the university proves misconduct occurred and not place the burden on the accused, but Gino was forced to prove her innocence without the backing of resources. Harvard was also supposed to prove the misconduct was committed “recklessly,” “knowingly,” or “intentionally.”
For example, Gino was reportedly not allowed to question witnesses, including her own co-authors and research assistants. She was also unable to obtain documentation that could potentially show who accessed or edited the data, Gino’s team said.
Gino’s team also noted four of five papers under scrutiny were published more than six years before the investigation, which falls outside the statute of limitations for misconduct investigations set by both Harvard and federal standards.
“The available evidence simply did not allow a thorough audit of the relevant data sets,” the email read.
The Harvard professor previously pointed out how one of her accusers, Uri Simonsohn, said: “My belief is that she did it. But there is no evidence. But it doesn’t really matter.”
Simonsohn did not respond to several requests for comment in the past two weeks.
Simmons, one of the Data Colada authors, referred The Fix to more recent blog posts, which he said provides evidence that data was altered by Gino and her team. He also suggested a close reading of the 1,200 page Harvard report.
The Fix reached out to the other Data Colada author, Leif Nelson, but also did not hear back in response to inquiries.
The Harvard media team declined to comment on this story. The Fix asked for clarification regarding its own statute of limitations policy and why it wasn’t followed, whether the investigation data will be released, and the potential role of race in why the cases of Gino and Claudine Gay were treated so differently.
According to the unsigned press email, though, Gino has worked with independent forensic experts since the investigation ended. Her team alleged that some of Harvard’s conclusions confuse routine data cleaning with fraud.
For example, in one study, researchers corrected basic math errors. In another, they excluded those who did not follow directions. However, the Harvard report found these were fraud, not routine methodological decisions.
Gino’s team also revealed Harvard did not ask for IP addresses or other stamps and might identify who altered a dataset.
Her team, in its email to The Fix, also said its forensic evidence will be presented in court.
Beyond this, Professor Gino and her team did not respond to multiple requests for information via email. The Fix asked for an updated response now that she has access to forensic experts, specific explanations to the above claims from her team, and updates to her lawsuit.
Her attorney, Andrew Miltenberg, declined to comment.
Professor Frances Frei, who defended Gino in The Fix’s previous coverage, also did not respond to multiple requests for information via email spanning two weeks. The Fix asked for her input on the fraud allegations and for comment on the situation.
Scholars comment on differences between Claudine Gay, Gino case
The Fix also reached out to several experts to discuss this case and how it compared to the substantial plagiarism allegations against former Harvard President Claudine Gay. Though Gay eventually lost her presidential role, she retained a professorship that was reportedly worth nearly $1 million.
Ian Oxnevad from the National Association of Scholars says, “the only way to fathom Harvard’s motivations will probably require an aggressive FOIA campaign.”
However, he did say since Francesca Gino and Claudine Gay were accused of different offenses, they suffer different disciplinary consequences.
“Gay was accused of plagiarism. Gino was accused of falsifying data. Her project was presumably grant funded, and if it was federally funded, this brings in a new level of investigations and sanctions,” he said.
“[T]he penalties for scientific misconduct are typically light, with a guilty researcher being barred from applying for federal grants for a few years,” he told The Fix via email. “Also, this kind of data fudging usually is not a fireable offense. The president of Stanford, for example, was found to have altered photographs in some of his papers. He resigned from the presidency, but like Gay, kept his faculty appointment.”
Without public records, though, there is no way to pinpoint any bias, racial or not, with respect to the treatments of Gay versus Gino.
The Fix reached out to Professor Michael New at Catholic University of America, who is a quantitative social scientist with a background in statistics, for an analysis of the Data Colada concerns. He is not so convinced by Gino’s defense.
“It is not just that some survey answers were coded in an odd way, it is that those answers that were coded in an unusual way also had results that substantially deviated from the rest of the survey,” New said.
He believes that since this was found in multiple projects, it is rather clear evidence of fraud.
New also finds the results of Harvard’s investigation to be persuasive:
Harvard almost certainly has resources and information that was not available to the authors of the [Data Colada] blog. They invested a significant amount of time and effort in investigating Professor Gino’s research and arrived at the conclusion that her findings were fraudulent.
“Dismissing a tenured professor requires significant evidence of scholarly misconduct.,” he said.
While New acknowledges circumstances where this type of discipline is mishandled – like with political motives or in sexual misconduct cases – he does not deem Gino’s case to fall under either.
Editor’s note: The article has been updated with a response from Andrew Miltenberg.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Harvard University Professor Francesca Gino; TedX Talks/YouTube