University of Minnesota’s Rachel Hardeman steps down as plagiarism accusations are made public

Rachel Hardeman, a University of Minnesota health policy professor who was named to Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people, announced her resignation this week from the school as allegations surfaced accusing her of plagiarism.

In the last week, two scholars who said they once saw Hardeman as a mentor alleged in a series of LinkedIn posts that she plagiarized and then profited off their work over the years. Another scholar said Hardeman had made her work environment difficult and set her back in her career.

In an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune on Monday, after she announced her departure, Hardeman denied the accusations and said she was leaving the U next month after nine years because it was time for a change. She also said an investigation by the university, spurred by a formal complaint, found no wrongdoing.

“This decision has been in the works for over a year,” she said. “I also want to be perfectly clear that the allegations against me are simply not true.”

Hardeman, who joined the faculty in 2016, gained renown for her studies of the health effects of structural racism, specifically on maternal health. She is the founding director of the university’s Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity (CARHE) and has won numerous awards, including the McKnight Presidential Fellow Award in 2020.

She made Time’s list last year along with other notable people such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and actress and comedian Maya Rudolph.

Now Hardeman’s work is being called into question.

The project was awarded an NIH grant in 2020.

“Perhaps someone who has never done their own work could not recognize their own words, but I know mine,” Davis wrote in a LinkedIn post Thursday.

Brittney Francis, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said Hardeman had taken a graphic that Francis made to illustrate the complexities of structural racism and used it in Hardeman’s own presentations and grant applications without proper attribution or permission.

Now, Francis said, she has difficulty trusting other academics.

“I really don’t collaborate with folks, which is really frowned upon in academia, but part of that is because I’m very nervous about people taking my research,” she said.

Davis said she never filed a complaint with the university but did so with the NIH last August. With significant staff cuts hitting the NIH in recent weeks, she said she is not expecting Hardeman to be held accountable.

Hardeman said the copying Davis mentioned was an “honest error” and she took responsibility for it.

But, in an interview this week, Davis rejected the idea that it was a mistake, arguing the verbatim copy could have only been done intentionally. When she found out about the issue in 2022, after she had joined the CARHE research staff, Davis said she refused to work on the grant that she believed was stolen from her.

“I would hate for somebody else to go out there and share some new thought, or some new idea and have it taken from them again,” Davis said in an interview.

In a statement addressing the allegations, Hardeman asserted that the university’s Office of Research Integrity and Compliance investigated allegations of misconduct against her and “concluded that any errors were honest and unintentional.”

Social and behavioral scientist Jé Judson met Hardeman on a panel when Judson was a Ph.D. student, and she later added Hardeman to her dissertation committee.

“It was the first time I felt like my work and my approach not only actually mattered but was rigorous enough to be taken seriously – validation I didn’t receive at my home institution,” Judson wrote in a blog post.

However, under Hardeman, Judson said she dealt with a high workload of projects that couldn’t realistically be accomplished due to Hardeman’s lack of involvement at CARHE.

Meeting with funders and rewriting research protocols over those two years meant that Judson could not focus on work that would have benefited her own career as she was promised, she said.

“I couldn’t even publish my own dissertation like my peers were,” Judson said, in an interview. “Because those grants never got finished, I don’t even get the benefit of the publications from those grants, because that research just didn’t get done. For two years, I just largely have nothing to show for it, and that’s really damaging as an early career scholar.”

In a letter to faculty, Melina Pettigrew, the dean of the university’s School of Public Health, said she would “make a determination regarding CARHE in the near future.”

Hardeman did not say what is next for her after she departs the U.

“I remain steadfastly committed to ensuring that Black moms and babies have the opportunity to thrive, and will be contributing to research,” she said. “The rest of it, I wish I could talk about it right now. I will say I’m very excited for new collaborations, and I definitely will share as soon as I can.”

On Wednesday, she is scheduled to be part of a Black Maternal Health Week panel moderated by MPR host Angela Davis.