Not only was the job offer that Nidhi Razdan had from Harvard for seven long months completely fake — it turns out that such a role doesn’t even exist.
Harvard has no school of journalism or professors of journalism the Director of the Niemann Journalism Lab at Harvard following the Nidhi Razdan fiasco, in which the NDTV journalist had been scammed into believing she’d received an offer to be an Assistant Professor teaching journalism at the university. “Wow — this is awful. For the record, @Harvard has no school of journalism, no department of journalism, and no professors of journalism,” wrote Joshua Benton, who is the founder and Director of Harvard’s famous Niemann Lab. “It does have Niemann Lab! But we have no faculty and no classes. And it does have the Shorestein Center, but no journalism-specific faculty,” he added.
In June last year, Nidhi Razdan had said that she was quitting NDTV after 21 years to be an “Associate Professor teaching journalism” under Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
This had been repeated by NDTV, which had been billing her an as an Associate Professor, Harvard.
In another media appearance, Nidhi Razdan had been specifically called an “Associate Professor, Journalism at Harvard University”.
She had also joined the Advisory Board of the Kautilya School of Public Policy as an Associate Professor at Harvard.
Even until today, Razdan appeared to believe that she was an “Associate Professor of Journalism at Harvard”. “In June 2020 and after 21 years at NDTV, I decided to move on and said that I would be joining Harvard University as an Associate Professor of Journalism,” she’d written in her message.
But as it turns out, there are no Associate Professors of Journalism at Harvard, which is something a simple Google search could’ve told Nidhi Razdan. But for a full seven months, she continued to believe she’d be an Associate Professor of Journalism at the prestigious university, until she realized she’d been scammed. This is an alarming episode, but perhaps is for the best — if this is how a veteran journalist can be duped, NDTV’s viewers now know the kind of rigour and fact-checking that goes into the news its regularly broadcasts on its platform.
