Influential Harvard Business School Alum Backs Francesca Gino
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Francesca Gino at Harvard Business School
Former Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino
William A. Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and ’92 Harvard Business School, has publicly declared his support for embattled former Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. In an extensive post on X, where Ackman boasts 1.9-million followers, he declares that Gino is innocent of charges that she committed academic fraud. Ackman, who reveals he has been financially supporting her litigation against Harvard and the business school, says Gino’s fight to restore her reputation is one of the most important cases in the history of academia.
Harvard stripped Gino of tenure last year, making her the first professor in the history of the university to forcefully lose tenure. That decision came nearly two years after Harvard’s Office of the President notified Gino on July 28 of 2023 that it had begun the process of reviewing her tenure over allegations of research misconduct. The tenure review was initiated by HBS Dean Srikant Datar who by then had put Gino on an unpaid administrative leave, banned her from campus, revoked her named professorship, and prevented the professor from publishing on Harvard Business School platforms.
Ackman is not the only person to come to Gino’s defense. Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig has been doing a series of highly-detailed podcasts that maintain Gino’s innocence. Lessig believes that the unprecedented decision to take tenure away from Gino was completely unjustified, calling the conclusion that she is guilty of academic fraud “just fantasy” and “crazy talk.”
Harvard Business School alum Bill Ackman
Harvard Business School alum Bill Ackman
Ackman is just as adamant about Gino’s innocence in his post. “Almost nothing makes my blood boil more than when a large powerful institution unfairly destroys someone’s reputation, and its principal reason for doing so is to minimize bad publicity in an effort to protect its own ‘reputation,” he writes. “Sadly, I have seen this occur in many academic institutions when a faculty member or student’s reputation, career, and often life are destroyed for a crime they did not commit. In the good cases, it is often many years later where all of the facts emerge and the individual is exonerated, but unfortunately justice delayed is often justice denied. Sadly, many such examples lead the accused to depression and occasionally even suicide.”
The Harvard Business School alum says he first grew interested in Gino’s case because he has been one of the largest funders of behavioral economics at Harvard, the department of which Gino was a member. “Since October 7th, 2023, I had developed a much more skeptical view of the University,” he notes. “Also, my father was an early and large funder of ethics research at HBS so his ethics endowment likely has been the source of funding for some of Gino’s research.”
Gino, who he first met when she presented her work to the HBS Board of Dean’s Advisors years earlier, reached out to him in late 2023 when he was publicly critical of then-Harvard President Claudine Gay. “Gay was found to have plagiarized large portions of her limited research oeuvre (50 or so unattributed word-for-word insertions in 8 of 17 of her papers),” writes Ackman.
“The resulting publicity combined with her mishandling of an explosion of anti-Semitism on campus led to her stepping down from the presidency,” he continues. “But despite the vast amount of unattributed work in Gay’s published research, she remains at Harvard to this day as a $1 million per annum or so member of the faculty, apparently in good standing. While I noted the disparity between how Gino’s case compared with how Gay’s was handled by the University, at that point, I did not know the details about Gino’s situation.”
After delving into the details of Gino’s case, Ackman says he strongly believes that Gino is “entirely innocent,” a victim of what he calls “some unintentional data errors made by some of the research associates that assisted her in her research as well as scammer(s) who earned fees for answering various surveys that led to corrupted data sets for some of her papers.”
He also believes that Harvard failed to meet its “clear and convincing” standard for finding academic misconduct. “Lastly, it appears that Harvard may have also violated its own statute of limitations provisions in terminating Gino’s tenure as the papers in questions are more than a decade old, and Harvard’s statute of limitations is six years. While the facts are complicated and take time to understand, a clear picture emerges once you do the work.”
HAS A HIGH REGARD FOR DEAN DATAR BUT CARES MORE ABOUT THE TRUTH
His vehement defense of Gino is being made despite what Ackman says is his high regard for Dean Srikant Datar, who became dean five years ago. “While I care enormously about the institution, I care more about the truth,” declares Akman. “Once you come to understand how big institutions and their leaders respond to the fear of negative publicity and the incentives of the attention economy, you can better understand why an innocent person has been found guilty here. In some ways, this is the more interesting part of the story.”
I believe that Harvard thought the accusations were so reputationally damaging to he institution that it was hoping to resolve the matter as privately as possible, and if disclosure was required, to do so in a way that minimized the reputational damage to the University. While these are reasonable goals, the impact on Gino was to eliminate her due process and fundamentally take away her ability to defend herself until after the University had already come to a false conclusion about her culpability, the train had left the station, and the damage was done.”
In his post, Ackman vows to continue his financial and moral support of Gino to the end. “The problem with big institutions is that they are massive bureaucracies which occasionally put aside the core principles on which they are founded because they are embarrassed, because they are busy, and/or it is easier to ignore the harm they may cause to the little guy in the interest of protecting their reputation and/or avoiding further distraction to leadership. They also often assume that the little guy will eventually give up and/or run out of resources to keep fighting. I am going to make sure that doesn’t happen here.
“I learned a lot when I went to Harvard. I am applying what I learned at Harvard to protect Harvard from itself and to help someone who needs help because Veritas matters,” he writes.
An award-winning behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, Gino was first accused of fabricating data by Data Colada in July of 2021 when authors of the blog approached Harvard Business School with their allegations. According to her lawsuit, Dean Datar negotiated a secret agreement with Data Colada, putting off the publication of their posts until HBS had the opportunity to investigate the claims.
After an 18-month-long investigation by a three-person committee of former and current HBS professors, the panel concluded that Gino was responsible for research misconduct. Dean Datar accepted the committee’s verdict and stripped Gino of her pay and benefits, even banning her from campus. Gino has maintained her innocence throughout, raising questions about the fairness of the process as well as the harshness of the penalties imposed on her.
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