Lights Out

She was just faking it:

University of Minnesota Prof. Rachel Hardeman’s rise to academic superstardom in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis included major media coverage of her research on racial bias and maternal and infant mortality, a tenured position, and recognition as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people. Now, two former employees allege that she plagiarized the research proposal that helped rocket her into a national figure. An influential study on infant mortality omitted a data point that undermined the pro-DEI narrative, according to FOIA docs obtained by @donoharm pic.twitter.com/a3uOqVXVYR — Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) March 31, 2025 Hardeman secured a landmarkNational Institutes of Health grant in 2021 — the sole NIH proposal for which she is the primary author — with a hypothesis and methodologies she copied from her mentee’s dissertation proposal, they allege. The former mentee alleges Hardeman plagiarized the grant proposal with near identical wording, equations, graphics and even formatting, and that the university scuttled the misconduct claims to protect its star. A second employee, a coauthor of two papers underwritten by the NIH grant, alleges that when employees ran the center’s grant proposals through a plagiarism checker they “lit up like a Christmas tree.”

Christmas seems to be over for her...