Harvard Professor Sues School for $25 Million After Fraud Investigation

The Baker Library at Harvard University. (Susan Young for Harvard Business School)

Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino announced Wednesday that she is suing the school for $25 million after she was placed on leave while an investigation into allegations of research fraud is taking place.

The 100-page lawsuit filed Wednesday claims she has “never falsified or fabricated data.”

“I want to be very clear: I have never, ever falsified data or engaged in research misconduct of any kind,” Ms. Gino wrote in a LinkedIn post.

“Today I had no choice but to file a lawsuit against Harvard University and members of the Data Colada group, who worked together to destroy my career and reputation despite admitting they have no evidence proving their allegations.”

Ms. Gino wrote that she hadn’t addressed the allegations earlier in order to focus on defending herself and her career.

Earlier this year, Data Colada began publishing a four-part series investigating fraud in four academic papers published over a decade, which were all co-authored by Ms. Gino. It led the investigators, behavioral scientists Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson, and Joe Simmons, to believe similar issues of fraudulent data existed in “perhaps dozens” of other papers Ms. Gino had published.

The team began its investigation in 2021 and shared its findings with Harvard Business School. According to the school’s website, Ms. Gino was placed on leave in May. Harvard Business School declined to comment for this story.

Ms. Gino argues in the suit that Data Colada and Harvard Business School negotiated without her knowledge, with the school agreeing the investigation results could be published on Data Colada’s blog.

“While claiming to stand for process excellence, they reached outrageous conclusions based entirely on inference, assumption, and implausible leaps of logic,” she wrote.

“They created and perpetuated a false narrative about my ethics and integrity, which has had a devastating impact on my friends, colleagues, collaborators and, most of all, my family,” she wrote. “I stayed quiet to focus my effort on meaningfully defending myself and my career.”

In the wake of the exposé, many colleagues of Ms. Gino’s weighed in on the likelihood of fraud, commenting on the speed with which she was able to gather data in the studies, which she executed on her own and didn’t necessarily share raw data for.

The Data Colada team wrote that “to the best of our knowledge, none of Gino’s co-authors carried out or assisted with the data collection for the studies in this series.”

Book: ‘Why It Pays to Break the Rules’

Coverage of Ms. Gino’s possible fraud regularly bills her as the author of a book titled “Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and Life”—noting the irony of her specialized field and the accusations currently levied against her.

Ms. Gino, who joined Harvard in 2010, is a behavioral scientist whose area of expertise includes human dishonesty, and has published more than 140 articles.

She has co-authored papers on lying, cheating, and misleading others in order to profit, including examinations of how “dishonesty can lead to greater creativity.”

Ms. Gino’s findings were practical and related to work and success, and touted tips like counting to 10 before deciding what to eat in order to make a healthier choice, or how networking “makes us feel dirty.” She was being paid $1 million annually by Harvard and had speaking engagements and other collaborations, such as a LinkedIn Learning course.

Three of the four papers investigated have already been retracted, and the fourth one is set to be retracted in September, according to a Harvard publication. Harvard had contacted the journals and recommended the retractions.

Professor Maurice Schweitzer, a frequent co-author of Ms. Gino’s, spoke out frequently in light of the allegations, telling The New York times he was scrutinizing the eight papers they worked on together, and that he had serious concerns because of her standing in the field.

He said the investigation was having large “reverberations in the academic community” because Ms. Gino had “so many collaborators, so many articles,“ and was ”really a leading scholar in the field.”