The case of Harvard anthropologist and sexual abuser John Comaroff: Views from afar, and from nearby.

In a searing opinion piece, Sean Jacobs, editor of Africa is a Country and a New School faculty member, comments on a second letter of support for Comaroff, signed by South African colleagues.

Sean Jacobs/ The New School

One of the functions of this newsletter is to try to bring things to the attention of its readers that they might not yet have seen. I think (or hope) that most here have been following recents events at Harvard University, where 38 illustrious academics signed a letter in support of anthropologist John Comaroff, only for 34 of them to quickly retract it when three Harvard graduate students filed suit against the university for ignoring (read: enabling) years of reported abuse.

A lot has been written about this “rush to judgment” by the 38, who included some pretty big names, including Paul Farmer, Jill Lepore, Caroline Elkins, Jay and Maya Jasanoff, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jamaica Kincaid, and Randall Kennedy.

(The fact that the last three are Black has fostered some embarrassed murmurings, especially on social media, to the effect of “how could they?” Please see below.*)

Whether it really was a “rush to judgment,” given previous reporting on Comaroff’s misconduct in the Harvard Crimson back in 2020 (the Crimson also reported allegations against Harvard anthropologists Gary Urton and Theodore Bestor more than a year ago), or rather a rush to protect and enable a colleague, has been the subject of much discussion. In my view, it is enabling, which is routine in academia and other walks of life, as I have recently discussed here, here, here, and here.

Today, from one of my Google alerts, I came across an opinion piece about the Comaroff affair by Sean Jacobs, Editor of Africa is a Country and a faculty member at the New School in New York. The piece, which was originally published on the Africa is a Country Web site, was republished by news24.com, a publication based in South Africa. This was appropriate, for two reasons: First, Comaroff is a South African born anthropologist, and has many colleagues in the country. Second, as Jacobs reported, the day before the Harvard letter in support of Comaroff was published, many international colleagues published a letter of support in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jacobs describes this letter as follows:

This one was signed by 50 academic luminaries. Similar to the Harvard letter, most of them were well known in anthropology and all work in African Studies. A number of them work on questions of power and gender. A few were at American universities, such as Adam Ashforth, Nancy Hunt, Louise White, and Kenda Mutongi. (Interestingly, Mutongi is the only black woman who signed the Chronicle letter.) Also, a signatory is Ann Stoler from The New School, a scholar of Dutch and French colonialism.

Another group was from European universities; among them were Peter Geschiere of the University of Amsterdam and Birgit Meyer at Utrecht University.

But the most significant group of signatories to the Chronicle letter are or were based at South African universities. Among these are Max Price, Dennis Davis, Deborah Posel, Hylton White, Jane Taylor, Robert Morrell, Mike Morris, Neil Roos, Mugsy Spiegel, Imraan Coovadia, and Steven Robins.

Jacobs comments that for various reasons, including the Chronicle’s relatively strict paywall policies, this letter got much less attention. I suspect a major reason is that it was signed by non-U.S. academics, many from South Africa, and—I hate to say it—Americans just pay too little attention to what goes on outside the United States, a provincialism that does not serve our country nor our culture well. But that is a discussion for another time.

As Jacobs writes, this is all the more surprising since this second letter (actually it was the first) was much more aggressive than the one signed by Comaroff’s Harvard colleagues.

Jacobs comments:

The Chronicle letter was more strident than the Harvard letter. It minimized the accusations against Comaroff, referring to the process at Harvard—which is hardly favorable to victims of sexual abuse—as "a Kangaroo court" and "a show trial."

I will leave it to readers to check out the rest of Jacobs’s piece, which I consider mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand how academia handles (or refuses to handle) sexual harassment that can destroy the careers of younger, especially female, students—and which has caused untold misery to women who are simply seeking an academic career. (I also want to stay within the boundaries of fair use quoting.) But I do wish to flag one very key passage:

John and Jean Comaroff trained generations of professors who went on to populate various disciplines all over the globe. They sat on countless dissertation defenses, had a say in what work was good and important, what topics are worthy of study (as someone asked in exasperation, "Why was witchcraft such a thing for so long in anthropological studies of Africa?"), and through it, bred all sorts of loyalties with former students.

Former students who were "in their favour" were given all sorts of awards and positions. Those who spoke out or made noises were not. As the lawsuit implies, the discipline of anthropology is now populated by Comaroff loyalists. Many who opposed them or who spoke up against them, ended up with their careers stalled or quit altogether in a field where there was a shrinking number of academic positions already.

Harvard students speak out.

Margaret Czerwienski, Lilia Kilburn and Amulya Mandava / New York Times

Some of the most eloquent commentary on the Comaroff case and what it means for Harvard and academia has been published in the Crimson itself, Harvard’s student newspaper. These opinion pieces demonstrate that, at least when it comes to #MeToo issues and the university’s responsibilities to investigate them, Harvard students are often much smarter than their professors.

In one Editorial, entitled “On the Unnecessary Comaroff Letter,” the Editorial Board pointed out that the 38 faculty singers had “endorsed an account rooted almost exclusively on a press release authored by Comaroff’s lawyers,” who had greatly distorted the allegations against the anthropologist and portrayed his actions as just some kind of wise advice to a graduate student who has planning to travel in Africa. The student journalists added: “Suffice to say, our esteemed Harvard academics, professional thinkers, failed to critically engage with the source of this description — the accused’s lawyer! — and its inherent bias.”

Another op-ed piece, by Crimson opinion writer Annabelle J.L. Finlayson, tracked the long history of Harvard’s tolerance of sexual harassers, naming several—including Jorge Dominguez, Roland Fryer, Jr., and Lawrence Summers of women-aren’t-smart-enough-to-do-science fame—who only got their just desserts after long campaigns by anti-abuse activists. A key point: Harvard knew about Comaroff’s long history of harassment at the University of Chicago, long before it hired him, but after all, a star is a star.

As a reporter, I was particularly happy to see yet another Editorial by the Editorial Board, “We Are Not a Title IX Substitute.” As a journalist who has been reporting on #MeToo cases in academia for more than six years now, I can really relate. Here are some key passages:

Yet among all the disturbing allegations, amid the descriptions of harassment-themed brunches and retaliatory blacklisting, one detail stands out. High-level Harvard affiliates — including a Title IX Coordinator, a department chair, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Dean for Faculty Affairs and Planning — allegedly encouraged the complainants to talk to the press, not University investigators, if they wanted to see results. In the words of the lawsuit, faculty and administration members alike consistently relayed the same twisted message: “Only a public article” would give Harvard “cover to take action” against Comaroff.

That paradigm is beyond shameful. For one, it forces complainants going through scarring events to publicly reopen their wounds for the press, exposing them to public scrutiny. More egregiously, it subcontracts a crucial university duty to nearby newsrooms — including The Crimson, as noted in the lawsuit.

We closely follow, and certainly respect, the invaluable work done by our peers on the news side of the aisle. They have proved, over the years, their personal tenacity and professional commitment to collegiate journalism. But they are still — we are still — collegiate journalists: full-time, sleep-deprived undergraduates with overdue assignments and limited experience. Our reporters are not professional sexual harassment investigators or mediators. We are not, and we cannot be, a replacement for Title IX or other institutional complaint processes.

And yet, according to one of Harvard’s own Title IX Coordinators, that’s exactly what we’ve become.

How true. Journalists should not be investigating #MeToo cases on college campuses. That’s the job of any administration that is concerned about the welfare of its students. Journalists should, rather, be reporting on what universities are doing to stop abusers and change their cultures.

But, as Sean Jacobs concludes in his excellent piece—which I really must insist everyone read from top to bottom—there are signs of hope that students are finally getting fed up with the status quo (he suggests that the terrible job market in academia might have led many to think they have little to lose by speaking out.)

The lawsuit by Czerwienski, Kilburn and Mandava and the open support of their comrades may present an opportunity for this generation to begin to forge a new model for academia, in which solidarity isn’t just about protecting one’s powerful friends.

*Parenthetically, re Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jamaica Kincaid, and Randall Kennedy:

I will write more about this in a later post. For now I will say, knowing it will cause me some trouble, that one of the features of liberal racism is a superstition that Black people are magical beings whose wisdom is mystically superior, rather than fellow citizens with whom whites can and should engage in normal discussions and whose experiences—while they often do make many Blacks more clued in, more “woke” if you will, than many whites—do not make them any more immune than anyone else from being clueless in certain situations. In the Comaroff matter, the three named above acted like typical academics.