The University of Minnesota–Twin Cities is closing its Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity, which star professor Rachel Hardeman founded in 2021 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

The closure comes after Hardeman, who is accused of plagiarism, left her tenured faculty position last week. The main allegations have come from other Black female scholars. In a February 2023 email published by Minnesota Public Radio, Hardeman wrote to one of her accusers, Brigette Davis, saying, “I fucked up.”

“I moved quickly and thoughtlessly in throwing together a proposal,” Hardeman wrote. (Davis said Hardeman was referring to a grant proposal to study the connection between police violence and negative birth outcomes among Black women, which Hardeman submitted to the National Institutes of Health.)

“I threw your stuff in thinking I’ll edit, I’ll talk to Brigette and see what she thinks, gauge her desire to be involved in this or future iterations, etc and then failed to do so getting swept into the momentum of a deadline and then fully forgetting where it all came from,” Hardeman wrote to Davis.

Hardeman confirmed the authenticity of this email to Inside Higher Ed. But she denied plagiarizing Davis, saying what was investigated by the university “was deemed an honest error.”

“She and I were working on very similar things,” Hardeman said.

Davis went public with her allegations last month on LinkedIn, saying she already “tried all the ‘proper channels.’” She wrote that she attempted to work out the problem internally with Hardeman, to no avail, while “UMN led a cover-up and the NIH has its hands busy.”

“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 wrote.

(The NIH, which funded the grant, told Inside Higher Ed in an email Friday that it “does not discuss potential cases of research misconduct related to individual grant applications, awards or supported principal investigators, or whether or not research misconduct may have occurred.”)

Davis wrote that Hardeman plagiarized from her dissertation prospectus, which Davis had asked Hardeman, who was her mentor, to review. Davis said she discovered the copying after Hardeman hired her to work at the center on the same grant for which Hardeman had plagiarized her.

In Hardeman’s resignation agreement with the university, she generally gave up her right to sue the institution, and the university agreed to provide her with a reference letter. The university also pledged not to give potential future employers or others further information about her employment without her permission.

That agreement, dated late March, allowed her to spend “work-related University funds” up until her May 14 resignation date on three things without further approval: work travel, “executive/leadership coaching” and “media and crisis management training.” The university also agreed to “send a communication to all of its School of Public Health employees reminding them of its policies relating to the limits of free speech, and specifically noting that University employees are prohibited from engaging in any defamatory or otherwise unlawful communications in the course and/or scope of their employment with the University.”

Hardeman, who was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2024, said Friday that she wasn’t fired.

“I decided well over a year ago to begin planning my exit from the University of Minnesota, for a variety of reasons,” she said, saying that university leadership had resisted her efforts to build a sustainable center, including by not financially supporting it. (Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota said it gave $5 million to found the center.)

“I could no longer do the work in a place where I wasn’t getting the support, where my ideas and my thoughts around radical change and innovation—not only were they not respected, they didn’t want to hear it,” she said.

“I was the center,” she said, and “there was no bench” of people behind her to move its work forward.

But Jé Judson, a postdoctoral associate at the university who formerly worked at the center, wrote in a long narrative on her blog that others had conducted the center’s research and other work with essentially no help from Hardeman. Judson left the center in September.

“We kept her research enterprise running for 18 months while she was off collecting honoraria and awards talking about her pain and her innovation,” Judson wrote.

Judson wrote that Hardeman ran the center “into the ground, abusing, exploiting, and neglecting many early career scholars along the way. Most of the staff is gone, waves of resignations and callous contract terminations has rendered CARHE a research center without researchers or research to do.”

Judson said that when a New York Times article came out about Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, “it was like reading an in-depth look into what was happening in our own center.” (Kendi is leaving BU, and his center is closing, after he faced public criticism from ex-employees about his leadership and academic record, and his own center faced employee turnover.)

At the Minnesota center, “Everything was about appearances first, research second,” Judson wrote.

Judson also alleged other instances of plagiarism by Hardeman, though her narrative didn’t provide details. “I finally understood why I couldn’t implement the grants I was in charge of—why the methods sections didn’t make sense,” Judson wrote. “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.”

Hardeman denied this to Inside Higher Ed. In response to Judson’s post, she said, “Everywhere you go there are disgruntled employees.” Hardeman said there’s a strong feeling of scarcity in academia that gets “weaponized,” and there are people who can’t “reconcile my visibility with their own sense of scarcity.”

“I wasn’t just doing the work, I was the work, and for some people I suspect that that was hard to reconcile,” Hardeman said.

Judson wrote on her blog that Hardeman “worked us up into believing that our silence [regarding her plagiarism] was necessary for the sake of the collective. But she is not the field, and telling the truth about her doesn’t mean the end of health equity or antiracism research.”

The university didn’t provide an interview for this article or answer multiple written questions, including whether the center staff will lose their jobs. In an email Thursday to employees at the School of Public Health, where the center was based, Dean Melinda Pettigrew announced the center would close May 30 and mentioned an “organized transition of roles and continuing research.”

“We are currently assessing and reimagining the important work of health equity research and action as we also work closely with our funding partners to align priorities and strategic direction,” Pettigrew wrote. “The School of Public Health remains strongly committed to health equity.”