A Year After a Sexual-Harassment Crisis, Has Harvard Kept Its Promises?

When The Chronicle first reported that Jorge Domínguez, a prominent Harvard professor and former vice provost, had been accused of sexually harassing 18 women over several decades, the university promised a thorough investigation. The provost, Alan Garber, wrote in a campuswide email that Harvard “will promptly and fairly pursue any claim of sexual harassment or assault brought forward to the full extent of our policies.” Michael D. Smith, then the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, assured the community that there would be a “full and fair process of review.”

A year later, that process has not reached a conclusion. Nor is there any indication when it might be wrapped up, or whether any of its findings will be made public. It’s not clear whether one comprehensive investigation is tracking Domínguez’s alleged pattern of wrongdoing, or if complaints are being handled individually.

It’s a situation that has left many of the women who accused Domínguez frustrated at what they see as the university’s foot-dragging and lack of transparency. Some say they’ve lost faith in Harvard’s process for investigating complaints filed under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination based on gender. They have been calling for an external review — though it remains unclear whether such a review will take place, or what it would entail.

A Harvard spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the university would consider an external review or on other matters pertaining to its continuing investigation.

It’s not uncommon for people who have filed complaints about being harassed to express concern about how universities investigate those complaints. They often say that the investigations take too long, lack transparency, and expose complainants to possible retaliation. In the past two years, some universities have said they will amend their processes to try and remedy those problems.

For Terry Karl, who accused Domínguez of harassment in the early 1980s when they were both professors, it all feels like a replay of the institutional indifference she experienced nearly 40 years ago. “It’s the same kind of silence,” Karl says. “It makes me think that Harvard is still arrogant enough to believe that it can suppress these stories, isolate the victims, and return to business as usual.”

‘She Left Harvard. He Got to Stay.’

Read The Chronicle‘s full report from February 2018 on the accusations against Jorge Domínguez, and how Harvard handled them.

Domínguez, who was placed on administrative leave by Harvard after the Chronicle report, subsequently retired. He has denied making “sexual advances” and said that there might have been “a terrible misinterpretation” of his behavior. Via email, he declined to comment on the progress of the Title IX investigation.

A Push for Transparency

Last week, exactly one year after the first Chronicle article about Domínguez was published, dozens of students held a rally at the gate to Harvard Yard, demanding that the university publicly commit to an external investigation. They stood in their winter coats, holding signs that read “Time’s Up” and “External Review Now.” They plastered dozens of copies of the article on a wall in the government building.

Graduate students in the government department, where Domínguez worked, say they’ve heard from faculty members that the Harvard administration is considering an external review, but that it would begin only after the Title IX investigation is complete. The students don’t see the need to wait and have begun to grow skeptical of both the faculty and the administration’s assurances.

“How could we take the administration’s word on this?” asked Sophie Hill, a third-year graduate student in the department, who helped organize the rally. “The subject matter is the administration failing its basic responsibilities.”

In recent years, other universities in the midst of major scandals, such as Penn State and Baylor, have hired law firms to investigate and produce reports outlining what went wrong. While those investigations have sometimes been met with criticism, they have become a way for institutions to demonstrate that they are serious about finding and solving the problems that led to scandals. Such a review could identify a historical pattern of institutional failings rather than adjudicating a single accusation. Many of the women who say they were harassed by Domínguez believe that kind of comprehensive investigation is necessary.

Meanwhile, some women who have had contact with Harvard’s Title IX office came away from those interactions with little confidence that the process would be worth their efforts. They worried that outing themselves not only to Domínguez but to other Harvard professors would damage their careers. Others were discouraged when Harvard officials refused to commit publicly to sharing the outcome of the investigation and warned them that they could not speak about certain aspects of it. It felt, they said, as though the university was pushing the matter further and further from the public eye.

Last March, 15 former Harvard students, faculty members, and staff members who said they had been harassed by Domínguez explained their conditions for participating in a Title IX investigation in a letter to Smith, the faculty dean. They asked for a commitment that the findings be made public and an assurance that the complainants and witnesses would not face repercussions for sharing information about the investigation. Harvard’s harassment policy forbids sharing information “learned solely through the investigatory process.”

The condition that Harvard release the results of the investigation was particularly important. Not doing so, they feared, would leave people wondering whether filing a complaint actually prompts the university to take action. “Silence speaks here,” said Nienke Grossman, a 1999 graduate and one of the 15 women who wrote to Smith. “It speaks in a way that is counterproductive to the university’s goals of providing an equal education to everyone on campus.”

In response to the women, Garber, the provost, wrote in an email that “the university does not publicly release” its reports stemming from sexual-harassment complaints. People involved in those complaints, he added, are asked not to share information they learn during the process because doing so might discourage people from participating. “This does not stop people from recounting their experiences,” he wrote. “They are free to speak publicly about the underlying events and they are free to speak about their views of the University’s process.”

Garber argued that “working through this system is currently our strongest option,” but acknowledged that on the question of whether people are comfortable coming forward with complaints, “there is more work to be done.”

‘Basically You Out Yourself’

Last summer Grossman, Karl, and two other women hired Debra Katz, one of the lawyers who recently represented Christine Blasey Ford, a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University who testified before Congress that Brett Kavanaugh, then a nominee for the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her in high school. Through Katz, the women requested a meeting with university administrators to discuss the Title IX process. They were told that while a meeting could be arranged, certain topics would be off limits, such as the prospect of an external investigation and the specifics of the Domínguez investigation. Talking about the continuing investigation could have a “chilling effect” on the people who are already participating, a Harvard lawyer wrote.

There may be a chilling effect, but the women did not believe they were the ones causing it. “Confidentiality is being used as a shield to protect the university’s reputation and liability,” said Suzanna Challen, one of the women who requested the meeting. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2011. “In the end it serves to protect the perpetrator.”

The women decided not to meet with Harvard administrators under those guidelines, which has effectively ended their communication with the university. Katz said that her clients do not want to be litigants, but that they haven’t ruled out going to court. “When you have an institution of the international importance of Harvard not acting, it’s disgraceful,” she said. “We’re a year out and we have no idea where they are with this investigation.”

As for a possible external investigation, the Harvard lawyer wrote back to Katz saying that the university’s Office for Dispute Resolution, which investigates sexual-harassment complaints, is up to the task. The investigators have “extensive experience conducting civil rights and criminal investigations,” she wrote, and “they approach every investigation as neutrals.”

Some women have decided to participate in the Title IX process. One former Harvard graduate student who participated as a complainant said that when she filed her complaint last spring, she expected it to take a few weeks at most. The former student, who asked not to be named, spent hours answering questions posed by an investigator about her interactions with Domínguez. “I had thought about doing this while I was a student, and I’m so glad I did not,” she said. “Basically you out yourself and all the witnesses, who are your friends, to the faculty.”

She said she became convinced that the process “is not the way to handle a sexual-harassment complaint if you want people to come forward.” Last month she got a report about her case, which she said was thorough and fair. She still doesn’t know what actions, if any, the university will take.

Another former graduate student, who also asked not to be named, said she is still considering whether to file a complaint, but what she’s heard from other women about the process — the number of witnesses who might be involved, the length of time it might take, the fact that professors, including Domínguez, would learn that she filed the complaint — has given her pause. “I didn’t feel that the privacy or the anti-retaliation protections were strong enough,” she said.

For Terry Karl, the situation — multiple women choosing not to participate, those that have wondering whether it was worth it — is disappointingly familiar. Karl accused Domínguez of relentlessly harassing her when she was an untenured professor in the early 1980s, and an investigation found him guilty of “serious misconduct,” though in the end it was Karl who felt forced to leave the university. Karl has not been contacted by anyone at Harvard since The Chronicle stories came out, with the exception of a professor in the government department, she said. She’s heard nothing from Harvard’s Title IX office.

Yoshiko Herrera, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who previously taught at Harvard, hasn’t heard from Harvard investigators either. Herrera’s story and name appeared in the first Chronicle article last February. “I have doubts about the process and what the goals of that office are,” Herrera said. “I don’t feel like I really know what’s going on. “

A Reeling Department

The revelation last February that Domínguez had been accused of sexually harassing numerous women prompted calls for action. An open letter, signed by nearly 1,000 members of the Harvard community, was sent to the university’s then-president, Drew Gilpin Faust, urging her to take “a strong and unambiguous lead on this issue.”

The news about the allegations hit the government department like “an earthquake,” according to Steve Levitsky, a government professor. The consequence, he said, was a devastating blow to trust within the department. It hit him personally too: Domínguez was a mentor and close colleague at Harvard, and Karl had been Levitsky’s adviser at Stanford. Soon the professor started hearing from former students. “Right after the crisis broke, a lot of us, myself included, were asking, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell us?’” Levitsky said. “After a few conversations, it became crystal clear that that was a naïve question.”

He heard many reasons why students decided not to tell him about the harassment, including the fear that professors’ loyalties lie with their senior colleagues, and that students who come forward would be retaliated against, possibly without their knowledge.

The department held several town-hall-style meetings with students and formed a committee to examine and reform its approach to dealing with harassment and related issues. Last month the committee released a 106-page report that included the results of a survey that found that 35 percent of the female graduate students in the department were dissatisfied with the overall climate. Of the 355 respondents, nine had experienced harassment and 29 had experienced discrimination. “There’s clearly a strand of dissatisfaction,” said Jennifer Hochschild, the department chairwoman.

The committee has also called for an external review. “We need to know what we did wrong,” Levitsky said.

Karl has been pushing for an external review, too. In an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson last year, she called for “a full and fair investigation of how decades of harassment could occur,” even after her case had received national publicity in the 1980s. “If you don’t change that pattern, make examples of people, and say, ‘If you do this, you will be punished,’ what you’re basically establishing is a system of impunity,” Karl said. “Until the administration draws a line and says, ‘It stops here,’ it’s not going to stop.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.

Tom Bartlett is a senior writer who covers science and other things. Follow him on Twitter @tebartl.