NEW DELHI: Nidhi Razdan, who seven months ago announced on social media that she was leaving NDTV to join Harvard University as associate professor of journalism, said on Friday that she had been the “victim of a sophisticated and coordinated phishing attack", and that she had “not in fact” been offered any such position.
Joshua Benton, the director of Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, responded to Razdan’s statement saying, “Wow — this is awful. For the record, @Harvard has no school of journalism, no department of journalism, and no professors of journalism.”
Ashoka University said in a tweet: “In a few Tweets/ Posts we have introduced @Nidhi as Associate Professor Harvard. Pending further cross-verification we are withdrawing these links.”
In her statement, Razdan said she had filed a complaint with the police and provided them with all the relevant documentary evidence. She wrote that the attackers ‘used clever forgeries and misrepresentations to obtain access to my personal data and communications and may have also gained access to my devices and my email/social media accounts.”
Her post soon became a talking point on Twitter with Harvard and NDTV being the top trends on the microblogging platform; there were over 90k tweets on Harvard.
Razdan had announced her resignation from NDTV as an editor and anchor on June 13, 2020 on Twitter. “Some personal and professional news: after 21 years at NDTV, I am changing direction and moving on. Later this year, I start as an Associate Professor teaching journalism as part of Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” she wrote from her verified handle @Nidhi.
On Friday, Razdan said she had been asked to join the university in September 2020, which was postponed to January 2021 because of the ongoing pandemic. “Along with these delays, I began noticing a number of administrative anomalies... As a result, I reached out to senior authorities at Harvard University for clarity,” she said. That is when she discovered that Harvard not made her any offer, she indicated.
Benton said Harvard just has the Nieman Foundation where journalists from around the world come for a year of study. The university also has a Shorenstein Center for media, politics and public policy, but no journalism-specific faculty, he added.
Razdan said that the attackers ‘used clever forgeries to obtain access to my personal data and may have also gained access to my devices and my email/ social media accounts’.