In a new podcast series, Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig presents his version of the truth in a four-year-old academic controversy that resulted in the loss of tenure for Harvard Business School superstar Francesca Gino.
Lessig, a highly influential and thoughtful observer of the law, is not an unbiased moderator. He is both a friend of Gino’s, a lawyer who helped to counsel her as she faced allegations of academic fraud in four specific research studies. He also authored the appeal of the university’s decision to May of this year to strip her of tenure. (Lessig’s detailed response to the allegations is an appendix to a recent court filing by Gino).
Lessig believes that unprecedented decision is completely unjustified. “I am convinced Francesca did no wrong,” he says in the first episode of the podcast launched on Aug. 21. “I am convinced she is innocent absolutely. But I would concede that there is at least a conceivable scenario to support the idea that she is not innocent… Indeed she could be guilty but I am quite certain that scenario is just fantasy…that conclusion is just crazy talk.”
The series requires a formidable investment in time: the second podcast episode alone is one hour and 53 minutes long. But Lessig’s approach is thoughtful and reasonable, based on logic and fact, not emotional appeal. He expects a series composed of six to eight episodes, some of which will feature Gino herself, each delivered in a colloquial but confident voice. In fact, she appears in the second episode entitled “How You Know A Business School Is Not A Law School.” At one point during that episode, Gino concedes: “I was radioactive.”
‘SHE WAS EFFECTIVELY GAGGED FOR THE PAST FOUR YEARS’
Former Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino
Throughout, Lessig is attempting to convince many in academia, who believe Gino is guilty, that they never really heard her side of the story because Harvard Business School and Harvard University put in place rules that did not allow her to defend herself. “She has effectively been gagged for almost all of these past four years,” declares Lessig. “You might believe you know the truth. I am not going to call you out for that. Give me some time and after you have heard everything, ask yourself again, ‘Were you right originally? Are you confident you were right?’”
When the university’s hearing committee revoked her tenure in May, making Gino the only professor in the history of Harvard to lose that honor, Lessig believed a great injustice occurred.
“The question the committee was supposed to answer was not is it possible that Francesca committed academic misconduct,” he explains. “It was not even is it more likely than not that Francesca committed academic misconduct. The question they were supposed to answer is whether there was clear and convincing evidence that she committed academic misconduct. Any lawyer will recognize that that is an extraordinarily high bar. It plainly requires clear proof of a wrong.”
‘ASTONISHED OVER THE CONFIDENCE THAT PEOPLE WHO KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE FACTS SEEM TO HAVE ABOUT THE FACTS’
Lessig maintains no proof of the sort exists. He believes there was a rush to judgment as Harvard prevented her from fully defending herself at a time when social media has become a significant shaper of opinion. “In the culture of tweeting,” Lessig notes, “it is an easy story to mischaracterize. In the culture of tweeting, it is an easy story to mock. I have been astonished with the confidence that people who know nothing about the facts seem to have about the facts. So I am going to give you a picture of the facts.”
Gino says she met Lessig shortly after arriving at Harvard in July of 2010 as an associate professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School after stints at North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and Carnegie Mellon University. The Italian-born professor became a highly prolific and acclaimed teacher and scholar at HBS, obtaining tenure as a full professor in four years in July of 2014. Over those years, she published 140 papers and was much in demand by consulting and leadership development clients, including Disney, Nike, EY, General Mills, and Honeywell. She was Harvard’s fifth-highest-paid employee from 2018 to 2019, earning up to $1 million a year.
All of that success came to an abrupt end in July of 2021 when Data Colada, a blog written by three behavioral scientists, contacted Harvard Business School about data anomalies in four studies authored by Gino and others. The school launched a probe into the charges while getting Data Colada not to report its findings until HBS had fully investigated them.
It would take more than three months before Harvard let Gino know about the accusations during which time the school secretly developed a new 16-page policy for dealing with academic misconduct. The faculty was not given notice of this new policy, which was eight times longer than the previous policy, nor was there a faculty vote. The new process placed severe restrictions on any professor accused of academic misconduct, limiting Gino to engage with two advisors and preventing her from speaking to anyone else, including all the researchers and co-authors of her papers. If she violated those restrictions, the school would impost sanctions on her up to termination.
A 10 A.M. EMAIL CALLING FOR AN IMMEDIATE MEETING TO DISCUSS A ‘SERIOUS & TIME SENSITIVE MANNER’
It was not until she received an email on October 27th of 2021 at 10 a.m. asking her to meet on the same day with a newly appointed research integrity officer, a position created by the new policy, and to bring her HBS-issued devices with her to the session. The email vaguely referred to a “serious and time sensitive manner.” On that day, she was teaching in Harvard’s MBA program, also had parent-teaching conferences for her own children, as well as her husband’s 50th birthday.
Nonetheless, she walked to campus for the meeting that afternoon accompanied by her husband and was finally told of the allegations from an anonymous source and the start of an inquiry. “The scene was puzzling since security was there when I showed up,” recalls Gino in the second podcast episode. “It was a little bit like being in a movie and asking yourself if this is your story…I remember being shocked, I couldn’t quite understand what I was hearing but then I decided there was an error because I didn’t commit any misconduct. So right from the start, I was collaborative and did what I was told.”
As her two advisors, she picked an HBS colleague and mentor outside her field, Gary Pisano, and a lawyer based on the recommendation from the research integrity officer. She was called before an inquiry panel of two HBS faculty members in February of 2022; a month later, the inquiry led to a full investigation by an expanded group of three HBS professors. Gino was then informed that the committee hired a forensic consulting firm to examine her studies but also told, Gino recalls, that she could not hire her own firm because she had already reached her limit of two advisors.