U of M accused of mishandling plagiarism allegations against influential professor
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University of Minnesota officials are facing accusations they mishandled claims of plagiarism against a prominent professor who delivered millions of dollars in grant money to the university.
Rachel Hardeman, known nationally for studying the effects of structural racism on mothers and children of color, had been accused internally of copying a protégé’s work and passing it off as her own.
In documents and interviews, MPR News found the university chose not to discipline Hardeman despite reports from three colleagues that she copied the work of researcher Brigette Davis and used it in a federal grant application.
Epidemiology professor Rachel Widome said she filed a complaint about Hardeman in April 2024, only to find the university had marked it resolved less than two weeks later without talking to her. She eventually filed two more complaints related to the matter, then met with university officials responsible for policing faculty misconduct.
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“I want you to understand what this is doing to the reputation of the University of Minnesota,” she recalled telling them, adding that the alleged plagiarism was “known among the whisper networks” in public health circles nationwide. “I want you to know that this makes it look like the University of Minnesota doesn't really care about plagiarism or research integrity issues.”
On April 10, nearly a year after Widome filed her initial complaint, Davis went public with her accusations against Hardeman. She did so shortly after Jé Judson, who had also worked under Hardeman, shared a slideshow online highlighting the similarities between the documents.
Four days later, School of Public Health Dean Melinda Pettigrew emailed faculty to say Hardeman had resigned. Neither the U nor Pettigrew explained the departure. A spokesperson for Hardeman said that it had been planned for a year and was unconnected to the allegations.
Hardeman, who last year was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people, is set to leave the university May 14. She declined an interview request; Pettigrew did not respond to one.
Davis said she confronted Hardeman, and in a February 2023 email, Hardeman apologized, telling Davis she “f---ed up.” Hardeman explained that she had intended to edit the material and consult with Davis before submitting the application, but ran out of time and then forgot about it. “I want to be clear it was not me acting in evil but being sloppy and thoughtless.”
Davis said that Pettigrew, the public health dean, later “nudged” her to keep quiet about Hardeman.
The university declined to answer questions about how the allegations against Hardeman were handled, citing the confidentiality of personnel matters.
‘That’s weird’
Hardeman’s star started to rise in 2021 when the U put her in charge of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity, a new multimillion-dollar initiative focused on understanding racial disparities in health.
The center was flush with cash. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota had donated $5 million to get it started. The National Institutes of Health pitched in nearly $2.3 million more to support its research.
Hardeman hired Davis, who’d recently earned her Ph.D., to work on it. “It felt like a good fit for where I wanted to go,” Davis said in an interview. “It just felt like this is the opportunity that I need.”
As part of Davis’ new job, she had access to the application Hardeman had submitted to the federal government to get the money. She recalled that parts of it were eerily familiar.
“The first thing that I see are my equations,” she said. They looked just like the formulas Davis had used in her dissertation proposal, which she had shared with Hardeman years earlier. Even the typeface was the same: Garamond.
“That's weird,” she thought.
A few weeks later, Davis started looking at other parts of the grant application. She found passages from her dissertation proposal were included nearly word-for-word.
“This feeling was like finding out that my boyfriend had cheated on me,” Davis recalled.
Hardeman is known for hiring and mentoring young researchers of color, said public health professor Katy Kozhimannil, who has worked with Hardeman for years. Kozhimannil sympathizes with both her and Davis. She said Hardeman told her she had struggled with the pressures of launching an ambitious new research center.
“She expressed that she was overwhelmed with a lot of the very fast growth of the responsibilities related to her leadership, and that part of that was the situation that came up with Brigette,” Kozhimannil said.
‘No way that any part of this is an innocent mistake’
Widome’s first complaint was actually the third one university officials received about the alleged plagiarism. The first one came in the fall of 2023, filed anonymously using an online form on the university’s Ethical Advocate website. Kimberly Kirkpatrick, an associate vice president in the U’s Office of Academic Clinical Affairs, led the investigation.
In a Zoom call, Davis said she showed Kirkpatrick all the work Hardeman had used from her dissertation proposal.
A few days later, Kirkpatrick advised Hardeman to personally notify the National Institutes of Health in case the “complainant decides to contact NIH to escalate the case.”
Over several days in late October and early November of 2023, Hardeman, Kirkpatrick and a university lawyer workshopped language to send to the federal agency, according to emails reviewed by MPR News.
The resulting message said Hardeman had been “made aware of a critical oversight in which I adapted a design and analysis method … from a collaborator without appropriate attribution and citation.”
It did not mention that the correction originated from a plagiarism investigation — or that blocks of text had been copied verbatim. Federal regulations require the university to tell the NIH if there's even suspected plagiarism involving one of the government’s grant-funded projects.
Kirkpatrick didn’t return a call seeking comment, but in emails to Davis and Hardeman she described the copied language as an “honest error.”
But many of Hardeman’s colleagues found that conclusion hard to understand. They say that the volume of material Hardeman had taken from Davis was reason enough for more action.
“There's no way that any part of this is an innocent mistake,” said Claire Kamp Dush, a professor in the sociology department at the U.
Early last year, Kamp Dush was about to take an interim position in Hardeman's center while Hardeman was on sabbatical. Kamp Dush sat down for a routine phone meeting with Davis, who she said told her everything and showed her the documentation.
“I was in a complete state of shock,” Kamp Dush recalled. “I immediately got off the phone and emailed Rachel and said, ‘I just talked with Brigette. I cannot do this job.’”
Kamp Dush also filed a complaint with the university. A few weeks later, she did the same with the National Institutes of Health.
After hearing nothing from the university, Kamp Dush said she eventually filed a formal data request with the U to learn if Hardeman had been disciplined. “The answer was ‘We can't tell you anything,’ which told me everything,” she said.
A professor at the University of Pittsburgh spoke up as well. Sirry Alang had been working on Hardeman's grant but gave up in protest over the plagiarism allegations. She also filed a complaint with the National Institutes of Health.
Alang declined an interview. But in a lengthy account posted online, she accused the university of a cover-up — something she said was common in academia, “when any offending faculty brings grants to the university.”
‘We don’t want to feed the sharks’
The situation underscores a double standard for students and faculty, said Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism expert who has written about the Hardeman case on his website Plagiarism Today.
He points out that earlier this year, a Ph.D. student was expelled from the U after faculty accused him of using artificial intelligence on an exam.
“It is pretty much ubiquitous at all schools,” Bailey said. “We've seen students getting held up for relatively minor things that their professors probably will get away with. … I believe you should be seeking outside people to investigate this — another professor, another school.”
Davis left the U in 2024. During her exit interview, she said Pettigrew, the public health school dean, encouraged her not to tell people what Hardeman had done. She said Pettigrew told her white supremacists could use the story to attack the field of studying racial health disparities.
“I just remember her saying, ‘We just don't want them to be giddy,’” Davis recalled. “‘We don't want to feed the sharks.’”
Davis is now a staff scientist at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis. Last year, she filed her own complaint about Hardeman with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She's told it's still being evaluated.
“NIH takes research misconduct very seriously,” the agency’s Office of Extramural Research wrote in a statement emailed to MPR News. But the agency declined to discuss “whether or not research misconduct may have occurred” in any specific case.
Hardeman also sent a written statement. “I worked to make amends and did my best to support any parties involved,” she wrote. “That is not downplaying. That is accountability.”
Correction (April 28, 2025): An image caption incorrectly stated the year Rachel Hardeman submitted a grant application. It was submitted in 2020 and awarded in 2021. The story has been updated.