As John Griffin was casually opening his work email on a Saturday morning in August 2021, he found a threatening letter from a Fintech lawyer. The lawyer had sent it directly to President Jay Hartzell at UT Austin, with a cc to Griffin. He sensed a fight ahead. The Texas McCombs finance professor, along with associate finance professor Samuel Kruger, was preparing to release a study of potential fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program, a government program that lent money to businesses during the COVID pandemic. The study focused on Fintech — short for financial technology — a group of lenders who operated mostly online. They competed with traditional banks by touting faster approvals and more flexible credit standards. A couple of Fintech lenders had gotten word of the study from reporters planning to break the story. Now, these Fintechs were insisting that UT Austin officials halt the public release of the study. The letter attacked the researchers’ data and methods, warning the...