May 21, 2025
Following Hardeman’s May 14 resignation date, University of Minnesota announced its Antiracism Center will close by May 30.
The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities is closing operations at its Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity after founder Rachel Hardeman resigned from her tenured position last week following plagiarism allegations.
Founded in 2021, the center approaches its May 30 closure after nearly four years of operation. Hardeman has already reached her May 14 resignation date, which was confirmed in her resignation agreement with the university in March. Hardeman found herself at the forefront of a plagiarism scandal after being accused of copying and pasting from a dissertation in 2019. Social Epidemiologist Brigette Davis blasted Hardeman, who was her mentor, in an April LinkedIn post for allegedly plagiarizing verbatim from her “dissertation prospectus paper entitled: ‘The impact of prolonged sociopolitical conflict on birth outcomes.’”
“I was not made aware of this until Rachel and CARHE leadership convinced me to leave my postdoc early and join the team in late 2022,” Davis wrote. The alleged plagiarism was discovered in Hardeman’s “Community Events and Pathways to Inequities in Birth Outcomes.”
The educator addressed her accuser in a February 2023 email obtained by Minnesota Public Radio. “I f***ed up,” Hardeman wrote. “I moved quickly and thoughtlessly in throwing together a proposal,” which Davis explained, Hardeman submitted to the National Institutes of Health for a grant to study police violence and its connection to adverse birth outcomes for Black women.
“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 in 2023.
According to Inside Higher Ed, Hardeman said the university deemed her action as an “honest error.” However, Davis said in her LinkedIn post, “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.”
Hardeman’s resignation agreement with the university removed her right to sue the institution, which agreed to issue her a reference letter and permitted her to spend university funds on work-related travel, executive and leadership coaching, and any media and crisis management training. Funds were available to Hardemen until her 14 May resignation date.
Hardeman reportedly planned to exit her tenured faculty position with the university over a year ago. She cited several reasons, which included university leadership pushing back against her efforts to build a sustainable center that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota donated $5 million to open. “I wasn’t just doing the work, I was the work, and for some people, I suspect that that was hard to reconcile,” said the resignee.
Although Hardeman claimed she “was the center,” postdoctoral associate Jé Judson begged to differ. The former Antiracism Center worker, who joined in 2022 along with Davis, spoke out on her blog and accused the professor of running the center “into the ground, abusing, exploiting, and neglecting many early career scholars along the way,” Judson stated, “We kept her research enterprise running for 18 months while she was off collecting honoraria and awards, talking about her pain and her innovation.”
The School of Public Health informed employees via email that the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity would be closing this month. It noted an “organized transition of roles and continuing research.”
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