Harvard settles lawsuit claiming it did not protect students from serial sexual harasser John Comaroff. Was Claudine Gay collateral damage in the case?
Almost all of the stories about retired Harvard anthropologist and accused sexual harasser John Comaroff were broken by the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, and the latest news was no exception. On Wednesday, August 14, the paper reported that the university had settled a lawsuit filed against it in early 2022, by three female graduate students who claimed that Harvard had taken little or no action to protect them even after it learned of the allegations against Comaroff in 2020 (after a Crimson investigation.)
(The New York Times followed up yesterday with a story that provided few additional details.)
Since “Words for the Wise,” and “Balter’s Blog” before it, has been a venue for reporting on such cases, including ones that we have investigated ourselves, we have continued to follow the Comaroff matter, even if the #MeToo movement and press interest in it seem to have waned over the past few years.
We began commenting on the Comaroff case soon after this lawsuit was filed, in stories in February 2022, March 2022, and September 2022. The latest news was that Comaroff, who had not been fired by the university despite the allegations, retired in June of this year, although apparently without being granted emeritus status.
At least one Harvard official took the issue seriously, however: Claudine Gay, former university president and before that, former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In her role as dean, Gay did put Comaroff on paid leave in August 2020, and then eventually on unpaid leave. When Comaroff returned to teaching, in the fall of 2022, there were protests on campus and even in his classroom.
While this is admittedly speculative, we have heard through the academic grapevine that one of the reasons Gay was not able to hold onto her job as president of Harvard after being grilled by right-wing Congress people over alleged anti-Semitism issues was that wealthy donors still held a grudge against her for trying to enforce sexual harassment guidelines at Harvard. In this view, the plagiarism charges against her, which came to the fore in a campaign against her led by billionaire William A. Ackman and others, were a cover for a history of antagonism against her earlier principled stand against harassment.
The settlement between the three graduate students and Harvard is confidential, and so we may never know the details. We can hope, however, that this very rich university, so easily influenced by very rich donors, was made to pay a healthy sum to Comaroff’s victims.
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