Star Academic Behind Million-Dollar Antiracism Center Races For Exit As Plagiarism Allegations Pile Up

A star academic behind an influential but unsound study arguing that black infants die more often with white doctors has for years been privately beleaguered by plagiarism charges from her own subordinates and will soon depart her university, leaving the multimillion-dollar antiracism center she founded in jeopardy.

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. 

Hardeman secured a landmark National 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.”

A third researcher who worked on the NIH project said on LinkedIn that she could corroborate the claims, sharing that Hardeman struggled to implement the proposal she said she had authored.

Hardeman will leave the university on May 14, at which point the antiracism center she founded, the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity (CARHE), may shutter, according to an email sent to staff Monday and obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The email does not address the plagiarism accusations.

“Rachel Hardeman, Blue Cross Endowed Professor of Health and Racial Equity and Founding Director of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity will conclude her faculty appointment and center leadership at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, effective May 14, 2025,” the email reads.

The now completed $1.8 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development was announced by the university in April 2021. Two months earlier, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota had donated $5 million in seed money to create Hardeman’s center. The center now faces an uncertain future.

“In light of Dr. Hardeman’s departure, School of Public Health Dean Melinda Pettigrew, in consultation with other key stakeholders, will make a determination regarding CARHE in the near future,” the email states.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota did not respond to a request for comment.

A high-impact study coauthored by Hardeman finding black newborns die more frequently with white physicians due to the doctors’ “spontaneous bias” generated enormous media coverage and social media chatter, Altmetric shows. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson prominently cited it as evidence for the benefits of affirmative action in her dissent in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

But the study’s findings proved irreproducible in a 2024 replication study. Internal communications between Hardeman and her coauthors obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demonstrated a key data point had been buried in the paper’s annex because it “undermined the narrative,” the DCNF reported in March.

Hardeman does not have a medical degree, her CV shows.

Washington University in St. Louis Senior Scientist Brigette Davis said in a LinkedIn post on April 10 that Hardeman copied her dissertation proposal when Davis was early in her career and seeking guidance from the famous academic. Davis was later recruited to work for Hardeman’s Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity from November 2022 to March 2024.

Hardeman has excused the apparent replication of her mentee’s research proposal by saying she had intended to cite the unpublished work, the two employees allege. The employees also claim that two internal investigations by the University of Minnesota Office of Research Integrity dismissed the alleged plagiarism, calling it an “honest error in attribution.”

The University of Minnesota and the School of Public Health would not comment beyond the internal email. Hardeman and her center did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The Office of Research Integrity did not respond to a request for comment.

‘I Was Being Emotionally Manipulated’

Davis initially viewed Hardeman as someone willing to help her “navigate the hellscape that academia can be for Black women,” she wrote. Davis shared a dissertation prospectus with her informal mentor for feedback in November 2019.

The central premise of Davis’s dissertation was a hypothesized link between infant mortality and police brutality: Did the August 2014 shooting of Mike Brown by St. Louis police have ambient effects on the survival black newborns in the city?

Davis said that Hardeman “plagiarized verbatim” the premise of her dissertation in January 2020 while tweaking it to suit her Minneapolis focus. Hardeman simply retrofitted the same research question to focus on the August 2016 death of Philando Castile, she said.

“When I say ‘verbatim’ I mean, she performed a find+replace in my document, and replaced all instances of ‘Mike Brown’ with ‘Philando Castile,’ and all instances of ‘St. Louis, Missouri’ with ‘Minneapolis, Minnesota,’ and submitted this to the NIH as if it were her own,” Davis said.

Side-by-side comparisons of two documents — documents that Davis claims are Hardeman’s research proposal to the NIH and her own earlier dissertation prospectus — indicate that their central hypotheses were nearly identical.

“I hypothesize that infants conceived or born in the St. Louis Region during the civic unrest in Ferguson were at increased risk of low birthweight and prematurity compared to those who became pregnant in the year prior,” Davis’s dissertation prospectus reads. “I hypothesize the effect will be strongest among all women living closest to the civic unrest (spatial proximity) and among black women, regardless of physical proximity to the unrest (social proximity).”

A document identified by Davis as Hardeman’s grant proposal echoes that wording almost verbatim.

“Our working hypothesis is that infants conceived or born during the civil unrest were at increased risk of [preterm birth] and [low birthweight] compared to those born in the year prior,” the document reads. “We hypothesize the effect will be strongest among all women living closest to the civil unrest (spatial proximity) and among black women, regardless of physical proximity to the unrest (social proximity).”

Davis said that her career is “in freefall” because she refused to co-publish on the grant she alleges was plagiarized from her work.

Repeated requests to Davis by the DCNF to view the original documents and for interviews did not receive a reply.

However, two other researchers who worked with Hardeman on the NIH project — Jé Judson and Naomi Harada Thyden — claimed in LinkedIn posts and blog posts that their experiences with Hardeman lent credence to Davis’s account, saying that Hardeman had surprisingly little direct involvement with and knowledge of her own research.

Judson, who coauthored two of the papers underwritten by Hardeman’s NIH grant, said in a blog post that she had struggled to implement the center’s grants without guidance from Hardeman or her top aides. A plagiarism checker revealed that Hardeman’s grant proposals included ideas from multiple sources cobbled together, she said. Judson said she believes this is why she received little help with the research.

“Each grant had several paragraphs that were verbatim copied from other papers, that although she cited, she didn’t even attempt to reword, which is still plagiarism,” she wrote. “I finally understood why I couldn’t implement the grants I was in charge of – why the methods sections didn’t make sense. Each paragraph was plagiarized from a different qualitative paper using different methodologies that wouldn’t be used simultaneously, and they were combined into one section.”

Judson, who worked for Hardeman’s center from June 2022 to September 2024, likened the approach to baking a loaf of bread by stitching together two disparate recipes.

“It would be like trying to include directions for making sourdough and focaccia into one recipe – and saying they’re both bread, what difference does it make?” Judson wrote in the blog post.

Thyden also received little guidance from Hardeman or her top aides about how to conduct the research. Thyden was a researcher at the Minnesota Population Center from August 2021 to July 2022, and again from August 2023 to March 2024. The Minnesota Population Center helped to implement the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity’s research proposals.

Thyden said that she worked on the NIH grant (sometimes referred to as an “R01” in reference to the three characters that begin every NIH grant number) but that Hardeman could not execute the “Aim 1 analyses” of her own research proposal.

“I can personally corroborate Dr. Davis’s account regarding the plagiarism of her work,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “I joined the R01 in question and was perplexed when not a single person who officially contributed to the grant could explain the Aim 1 analyses to me or point me to someone who could.”

By late 2022, Hardeman and her center’s leadership had recruited Davis to execute the very research aim plagiarized from her work, she said.

Davis, still a new hire, immediately recognized the ideas, the proposed equations, the wording, and even the arbitrary formatting decisions.

“I had been told by Rachel that the ‘work was too important,’ and that if I said anything it would cast doubt on the empirical study of racism overall,” Davis said. “Over time it became clear that I was being emotionally manipulated.”

A presentation compiled by Judson of the alleged plagiarism includes four pages demonstrating identical wording and methods.

Hardeman encouraged staff to delete emails that could be subject to the Freedom of Information Act, Davis also alleges.

‘An Honest Error’

Davis wrote that when she attempted to raise the issue with university leadership and research integrity officials, the university sided with the high-profile researcher.

“The University of Minnesota Office of Integrity—on two separate occasions found that there was no plagiarism but rather an ‘honest error’ on Rachel’s part,” Davis wrote. “The UMN [School of Public Health] Dean nudged me to remain silent.”

Davis expressed confusion at how someone could cite an unpublished proposal submitted as a PhD requirement.

Meanwhile, Hardeman and the center’s leadership blamed Davis and Judson for the center’s problems, Davis said.

“She and her leadership team … began to use the words ‘hostile’ and ‘difficult to work with,’” she wrote.

Amid the effusive external praise but serious internal concerns, Hardeman encouraged her staff to delete emails in violation of records retention law, Davis alleges.

“On occasion she encouraged us to delete emails because UMN is subject to FOIA (I’ve confirmed she has no more emails that mention me in her inbox), and before we knew it, Rachel went on leave and all other CARHE leadership had quit,” she wrote.