Three graduate students are suing Harvard University over its handling of sexual harassment allegations against a star professor, and it’s causing major controversy among other Harvard faculty. It’s not just about Harvard, though, or even about academia. The court filing for the graduate students, and the immediate response by a group of Harvard faculty, show how power works to protect power.
Lilia Kilburn, Margaret Czerwienski, and Amulya Mandava are suing Harvard for what, based on their lawsuit, appears to be egregious mishandling of allegations against a longtime, repeat sexual harasser. Harvard’s anthropology department hired John Comaroff and his wife, Jean Comaroff, from the University of Chicago in 2012, despite at least one warning about John Comaroff’s pattern of harassment.
According to the lawsuit, “The result was predictable. Shortly after he arrived at Harvard, the University received repeated complaints of sexual harassment, including forced kissing, groping, and offensive—even violent—sexual comments by Professor Comaroff.”
The plaintiffs allege that Comaroff didn’t just kiss and grope and make unacceptable sexual comments to women over whom he had power. He explicitly threatened people’s careers if they objected to or reported his behavior. And Harvard, after hiring him despite knowing about this pattern of behavior, allowed him to continue.
Complaints to a university official responsible for handling sexual harassment were useless, even though in one case, the official was able to guess who a complaint was about before the accuser named Comaroff. The same official discouraged one woman from pursuing an official complaint. In another instance, an unnamed student’s complaint against Comaroff was read aloud to her by Comaroff himself in a successful effort to get her to withdraw it. He also threatened the career prospects of a postdoctoral fellow who had encouraged that student to report the harassment.
And Comaroff was absolutely in a position to threaten people’s careers. His recommendation letters would be key for the job prospects of many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, while he was well-connected in his field, and able to tank people’s careers through informal conversations, if he so chose.
When students complained and didn’t immediately get intimidated into dropping their complaints, Harvard predictably acted more in the interests of its abusive star than in the interests of his victims. In perhaps the most horrifying part of the lawsuit,
[Harvard’s Office for Dispute Resolution, (ODR)] contacted Ms. Kilburn’s psychotherapist, a private therapist unaffiliated with Harvard, and obtained the psychotherapy notes from her sessions with Ms. Kilburn. ODR did not obtain Ms. Kilburn’s consent for the release of those records.
135. After obtaining the notes without Ms. Kilburn’s consent, ODR then withheld the
full notes from Ms. Kilburn, redacting swaths of the notes and refusing to disclose the redacted portions even as ODR’s investigator grilled her about the redacted contents during an interview.
136. ODR then provided the notes to Professor Comaroff as part of its draft report.
Professor Comaroff, in turn, deployed the notes to gaslight Ms. Kilburn, claiming that she must have imagined that he sexually harassed her because she was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder—a condition that she developed as a direct result of his conduct.
Ultimately, after excluding much of the evidence for Comaroff’s pattern of groping, sexual comments, and retaliation, and only after reports of sexual harassment by Comaroff and others in Harvard’s anthropology department appeared in The Harvard Crimson and The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard concluded that the single thing he had done wrong was to have “’over the course of approximately five minutes’ repeatedly described how Ms. Kilburn ‘would be raped’ in certain parts of Africa. ODR found that these unprompted and graphic descriptions constituted ‘severe’ sexual harassment against Ms. Kilburn.”
That decision then formed the basis for 38 Harvard faculty, including some of the university’s biggest names, writing a letter insisting that Comaroff had acted reasonably because he was warning Kilburn that, if she traveled with a same-sex partner in parts of Africa, she might be subject to gender-based violence. “We the undersigned know John Comaroff to be an excellent colleague, advisor, and committed university citizen who has for five decades trained and advised hundreds of Ph.D. students of diverse backgrounds, who have subsequently become leaders in universities across the world,” the letter said. “We are dismayed by Harvard’s sanctions against him and concerned about its effects on our ability to advise our own students.”
He’s really nice! He never sexually harassed us!
The letter was framed as if Comaroff had merely warned a student about a possible danger in the field, without any acknowledgment of the campaign of groping and kissing and isolation and retaliation that Kilburn and other students had alleged—a lack of acknowledgment that Harvard’s broken investigation process had enabled. While such a warning might have been in order as Kilburn was making concrete plans for fieldwork, Comaroff issued it on her first day of graduate school, and, she told The New York Times, did so in “a tone of enjoyment.”
Another 73 faculty members signed a letter rebuking the signers of the first letter, writing, “We are dismayed that these faculty members would openly align themselves against students who have lodged complaints about a tenured professor” and highlighting the fact that, “As is evident from the letters written in his support, Professor Comaroff is a scholar with a powerful network of friends and colleagues. This raises the question of why three graduate students would go public with their complaints against him and willingly subject themselves to protracted, grueling, and potentially career-ending investigations. In lauding Professor Comaroff’s reputation while failing to consider the complainants’ perspectives, the signatories imply that the students have fabricated their accounts of harassment and retaliation.”
As of this writing, 34 of the 38 signers of the original letter have retracted, acknowledging that they had “failed to appreciate the impact that this would have on our students, and we were lacking full information about the case.” But dozens of academics outside of Harvard who signed another letter in support of Comaroff have not yet retracted. And the instinct of these faculty to protect one of their own shows exactly how Comaroff’s threats and retaliation against his victims’ careers had power. John Comaroff has allegedly been groping and harassing students for decades at two of the most elite universities in the country, and despite it apparently being an open secret, he was able to get a fancy new job and has been able to continue doing so in part because he is in a position of power that allows him to threaten people into silence.
Power operates in layers, including institutions—like Harvard University—that protect the powerful, and other high-status individuals who reflexively defend their peers. Lilia Kilburn, Margaret Czerwienski, and Amulya Mandava are laying bare how John Comaroff has used that to continue harming his subordinates. And there’s a reason they are suing Harvard University (aside from that the university has an enormous amount of money): Harvard as an institution should be responsible to its students, not just its star faculty, and it has allegedly failed them in grossly abusive ways.