A Star Professor Dings Stanford For Denying A Colleague Tenure

Michal Kosinski is being called a “once in a generation scholar” by Jeffrey Pfeffer but Kosinski was recently denied tenure

One of the most famous professors at Stanford Graduate School of Business is dissing the school he has made home for nearly 46 years. The reason: Stanford denied tenure to a colleague who is an associate professor.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, who has pioneered the field of power and influence, is so upset with a decision to not tenure Michal Kosinski, an associate professor of organizational behavior, that he published a heavily critical essay on his LinkedIn feed. Kosinski, who earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Cambridge, has been at Stanford’s business school for ten years, joining as an assistant professor in July of 2015. Pfeffer calls him “a once in a generation scholar.”

He will have little difficulty finding a new home because he specializes in an academic area that is red hot in business education today: artificial intelligence. By applying AI, machine learning, big data, and psychometrics, he has been able to model and predict human behavior while addressing the ethical and privacy challenges of these technologies. His familiarity with large language models (LLM) dates back to well before AI became common and popular, including a four-year stint as a researcher with Microsoft in 2010 to 2014. Kosinski has also distinguished himself as a scholar in computational social science and psychometrics.

STANFORD ‘MAKES DECISIONS INCONSISTENT WITH INNOVATION AND THEORETICAL DIVERSITY’

Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business

Pfeffer, named to the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame for his work on resource dependence theory and on evidence-based management, lambasted Stanford for its decision. “Michal will find another job at a place that doesn’t just say it values innovation and theoretical diversity, but actually makes decisions consistent with those values,” wrote Pfeffer.

The OB prof, who has academic disciples scattered through all the top business schools, noted that the decision came down two weeks ago. “My colleagues at Stanford University Graduate School of Business voted to NOT tenure Michal Kosinski–notwithstanding his 18 papers published in the most prestigious social psychology journals, his seven papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, numerous other publications, and with more than 24,000 Google Scholar citations, more than most of my full professor colleagues with careers three times as long as his,” wrote Pfeffer.

What Pfeffer did not mention is that Kosinski’s work directly informed privacy regulations and resulted in a record $5 billion fine levied on Facebook. He was the first to warn against Cambridge Analytics, the micro-targeting firm that harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission. That work was used by President Trump’s 2016 campaign to help him win election. Kosinski’s research has inspired a cover of The Economist on facial recognition software, a 2014 theatre production titled “Privacy,” several TED talks, and a video game. 

‘HE HAS NOT HAD SEX WITH STUDENTS’

“No, he has not had sex with students,” added Pfeffer. “No, he has not engaged in research misconduct or made up his data. In fact, a long investigation from an unfounded allegation cleared him of precisely this charge. No he has not embezzled money. Although some of my colleagues will deny this, his sin is much, much worse. He is different, not a traditional social psychologist.”

Pfeffer then quotes from a New York Times article that maintains that similarity is the most fundamental basis of interpersonal attraction “Michal,” he says, “had the audacity to use different methods, with a different focus on theory. Similarity as a basis for interpersonal judgment applies in many contexts, not just academia. Watch out if you seem ‘different.'”

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