When Harvard Became the Place Where Bullshit Thrives
Friday, October 3, 2025. This is for Jenny, a gentle reader who needs to understand me a bit better.
Once upon a time, Harvard was supposed to be the place where bullshit goes to die.
That’s what I believed when I was 17, clutching a number two pencil in 1970, sitting in a lecture hall in Cambridge to take my SATs.
I could have taken them closer to home, but no — I wanted Harvard. I wanted to breathe the air of the place.
This was the Vatican of intellect, the citadel of seriousness. You didn’t cut corners at Harvard. You didn’t lie with data at Harvard. You didn’t serve up sloppy casserole and call it haute cuisine.
And yet here we are, fifty-five years later, and the dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health has been caught doing just that.
The Dean’s $150,000 Lasagna
Andrea Baccarelli is not some anonymous academic.
He’s the dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He’s a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He’s a highly cited researcher in environmental health. His work on how pollution and chemicals leave molecular scars on our DNA is real and valuable.
But in 2023, he pocketed about $150,000 to serve as a paid expert in the federal acetaminophen litigation, submitting written testimony that prenatal Tylenol “can cause” autism and ADHD — not “might be associated,” “can cause” (STAT; Harvard Crimson).
That’s not just a scientific claim — that’s a legal grenade. When you pull the pin, you’d better have more than observational associations to back you up.
Judge Cote Wasn’t Buying It
Those cases landed before Judge Denise Cote in the Southern District of New York. Under Daubert/Rule 702, her job was to decide whether the plaintiffs’ experts — including Baccarelli — met the standard for reliable scientific testimony.
In December 2023 and again in July 2024, she said no.
In detailed opinions, she excluded Baccarelli and other general-causation experts as unreliable (First & Second Daubert Opinions, S.D.N.Y. PDF; concise summary at FindLaw; overview from the Washington Legal Foundation).
Her criticisms were surgical: cherry-picking supportive studies while discounting contradictory evidence; bundling autism and ADHD as if they were one analyte; minimizing confounding explanations; and brushing past regulators.
That is federal-judge-speak for: don’t hand me your bullshit casserole and swear it’s lasagna.
Meanwhile, the scientific and medical consensus still does not support a causal claim.
Even as politics exploded around the topic in September 2025, organizations from WHO to ACOG and FIGO reiterated there’s no conclusive evidence of causation and urged clinicians to stick with evidence-based guidance (Reuters; AP; ACOG FAQ and practice advisory; FIGO statement here).
Yes, U.S. agencies floated label-change steps amid the political storm, but the fundamental causation bar remains unmet; see contemporaneous reporting in the Washington Post and STAT.
From Associations to Panic
Environmental epigenetics is legitimate — and messy. Associations matter. They point the way forward. I’ve always been a fan of emerging science.
But they are snacks, not entrées. They are by no means causal proof!
Baccarelli knows this.
Yet he packaged associations as if they were courtroom-ready causation. The fallout was predictable: political grandstanding, headlines screaming certainty.
But most importantly, anxious pregnant women calling their doctors in tears — all vastly out ahead of the evidence (Washington Post; STAT). Shame on you, Harvard.
Harvard’s Reputation on the Table
When you’re the dean of Harvard Public Health, your words sorta carry the Crimson Seal of Approval .
If a federal court brands your testimony unreliable, it doesn’t just dent you; it kinda splashes onto the institution like a homicidal chain saw..
For someone like me, who went out of his way to take the SATs in a Harvard hall in 1970, it feels like an utter betrayal. Just sayin.’
The place that my younger self believed to be our last fortress against bullshit now has a dean seemingly slinging it in federal court. Yikes.
A Pattern of Hubris
This isn’t Harvard’s first stumble. The rot comes in cycles, dressed up in academic robes.
Lawrence Summers (2005): Harvard’s president mused publicly about innate sex differences as an explanation for the underrepresentation of women in science — and later apologized (transcript & statement; apology; also covered by the Crimson).
Marc Hauser (2010–2012): Harvard psychologist found to have committed research misconduct; papers retracted; ORI confirmed findings in 2012 (NIH/ORI notice; summaries in Harvard Magazine and contemporaneous coverage in Wired).
Claudine Gay (2024): The shortest-tenured Harvard president resigned amid plagiarism controversies and post-hearing backlash over campus antisemitism (Washington Post; the Crimson).
Implicit Association Test (IAT): Once sold to HR departments as the freaking Rosetta Stone of unconscious bias, meta-analyses show little predictive validity and trivial links to behavior, with ongoing debate even among IAT proponents (Oswald et al., 2013, JPSP; Forscher et al., 2019); see proponents’ counter-analysis acknowledging very small effects: Greenwald et al., 2015). The extreme right is having a field day with this one.
Stanley Milgram (Harvard PhD; experiments at Yale): Iconic obedience findings persist in textbooks, but serious scholars have raised doubts about participants’ belief in the setup and the standardization of prods — a messy history that complicates the tidy “65% obey” bullshit (Gina Perry overview; APA interview with Perry here). Classmates and colleagues recalled that Milgram had an unusual drive to be noticed.
He wanted not just to publish but to make an impact. He was different from the more restrained academics around him at Harvard in the 1950s, which valued a more quiet rigor. Milgram, even then, leaned toward the headline-making result. he was a Crimson trend setter for the hubris yet to come.
Francesca Gino (HBS, 2023–2025): Data manipulation findings led Harvard to place the famed “honesty” scholar on leave, revoke tenure, and fire her; her defamation claims against the data sleuths were dismissed in 2024 (ongoing contract claims aside).
Harvard later sued her for defamation as well. There was a ridiculous circus of news coverage; Science, Volokh/Reason, Data Colada summary, and the tenure revocation reporting in the Washington Post. What an epic shit show for all concerned.
Piero Anversa (HMS/Brigham): The once-celebrated cardiac stem-cell story unraveled into one of the biggest biomedical retraction cascades of the decade.
Brigham and Partners paid $10 million to resolve allegations that data were used to obtain federal funds; later Harvard and the Brigham called for 31 retractions (DOJ press release; STAT; Retraction Watch; deep-dive from Reuters Investigates).
Different situations, same apparent dynamics: a persistence of pride, arrogance, and intellectual mysticism.
Harvard seems to keep treating prestige as a substitute for rigor, assuming the crest on the letterhead will carry more weight than proof. And over and over, the cracks in the shortcuts show and grow. .
How Institutions Rot
Andrea Baccarelli is certainly no fool. But in court, he certainly risked being perceived as one.
He took a six figure fee, overstated flimsy associations, and waved away regulators, as if they were of little consequence..
I wonder if he was all that surprised, when he got hammered — in writing — by a federal judge?
Institutions don’t die from ignorance; they die from hubris. They rot when leaders decide their prestige and pontification can comfotably bullshit their way through anything.
Harvard doesn’t lack geniuses. It lacks genuine gravitas.
And so, little by little, integrity is chipped away until we find deans and research savants serving up even more soggy bullshit and calling it hard science.
Judge Cote, bless her relentless appetite for intellectual rigor, sent this hot, filthy mess straight back to the kitchen!
If only Harvard still had the good sense to do the same.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Yap, A. J. (2010). Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21(10), 1363–1368. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610383437
FactCheck.org. (2025, September 24). Trump administration’s problematic claims on Tylenol and autism. https://www.factcheck.org/2025/09/trump-administrations-problematic-claims-on-tylenol-and-autism/
Foley & Lardner LLP. (2024, January). Acetaminophen MDL Daubert ruling. https://www.foley.com/insights/publications/2024/01/acetaminophen-mdl-fre-rule-702/
Gibson, S. (2019). Rethinking obedience in Milgram’s research. Theory & Psychology, 29(5), 639–656. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354319864904
Golden, D. (2005, January 17). Harvard chief defends his remarks on women. The Wall Street Journal.
Hartocollis, A., & Saul, S. (2024, January 2). Claudine Gay resigns as Harvard president. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/claudine-gay-harvard-resignation.html
In re: Acetaminophen—ASD/ADHD Products Liability Litigation, No. 22-md-3043 (S.D.N.Y. 2023 & 2024 Daubert Opinions). https://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/MDL/22mc3043/22md3043%202nd%20Daubert%20Opinion.pdf
Kahneman, D. (2017). A proposal to deal with questions about priming effects. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-016-0021
Marcus, A. (2018, October 14). Harvard, Brigham call for 31 retractions of cardiac stem cell work. Retraction Watch.https://retractionwatch.com/2018/10/14/harvard-brigham-call-for-31-retractions-of-cardiac-stem-cell-work/
Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., & Tetlock, P. E. (2015). Using the IAT to predict discrimination: A meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(4), 562–571. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000025