Students Protest Harvard’s Comaroff Again
Understandable outrage at administrative complicity.
When Memeorandum pointed me to a Harvard Crimson article from earlier in the week, “More than 100 Students Walk Out of Embattled Harvard Professor Comaroff’s First Class of Semester,” my first reaction was bemusement. After all, if one doesn’t want to take a class with a given professor, it’s not hard to avoid doing so.
But the situation is a wee bit more complicated:
More than 100 students walked out of embattled Harvard professor John L. Comaroff’s class Tuesday afternoon, protesting his continued presence on campus after he was placed on leave last year for violating the University’s sexual harassment and professional conduct policies.
Students flooded Comaroff’s classroom in Northwest Building classroom B108 — overflowing into the hallway — to protest the first lecture of his class African and African-American Studies 172X: “Colonialism and its Postcolonial/Decolonial Afterlives: Critical Readings.”
As Comaroff began to speak, students rose from their seats and filed out of the classroom, chanting, “Justice for survivors,” and “No more Comaroff, no more complicity.”
As the walkout begin, Comaroff, a professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology, broke into a smile and nodded at the protesters. As the last students left the classroom, one told the professor, “Smile in hell, asshole.”
The walkout was organized by members of Our Harvard Can Do Better and the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers’ Feminist Working Group. Students associated with Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard and the Student Labor Action Movement also attended the protest.
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean and University president-elect Claudine Gay placed Comaroff on unpaid administrative leave for the spring 2022 semester after two internal investigations found that Comaroff violated Harvard’s sexual harassment and professional conduct policies.
Comaroff returned to the classroom for the fall 2022 semester, and his first class faced a similar walkout and protest.
Gay first put Comaroff on paid leave in 2020 after an investigation by The Crimson found that at least three female graduate students had contacted Harvard’s Title IX office with complaints of harassment and professional retaliation against the professor.
Comaroff’s class — which began at 3 p.m. — was nearly empty within 10 minutes, with only two other individuals remaining. Three students were enrolled in the course as of Tuesday morning, per the FAS Registrar’s office. The other course that Comaroff teaches, African and African American Studies 190X: “The Anthropology of Law,” has one student enrolled.
Protesters chanted, “Time’s up,” and “Shut it down,” as they marched to the Barker Center, where several taped posters and pages from a 2022 lawsuit filed against Harvard to his office door. The lawsuit, filed against the school by Anthropology graduate students Margaret G. Czerwienski, Lilia M. Kilburn, and Amulya Mandava, alleges that Harvard ignored and mishandled allegations of sexual harassment against Comaroff.
The little I can glean from the linked articles makes it unclear to me why Comaroff wasn’t simply fired rather than placed on two years’ administrative leave and then allowed to return to teaching elective courses. Certainly, students have a right to protest that fact, even if there are sound legal and/or administrative reasons that decision was made.
It is true that this wan elective class, meaning no student is required to take it to fulfill degree requirements, and Comaroff’s name was listed as the professor in the course catalog. It was hardly sprung on students. Indeed:
Austin Siebold ’23, who said she was the first to flag Comaroff’s courses to the walkout’s organizers, said she learned he was teaching this semester after scrolling through Harvard’s course catalog.
“I saw this class, it was on colonialism, postcolonialism and decolonialism, and I thought that sounded really interesting and it fit on my schedule,” she said. “And then I clicked on it and it was taught by John Comaroff and I was like, ‘Holy.’”
Siebold then reached out to activist groups to help plan the event.
“I enrolled in the class and used information I was able to gather from that to help me plan this,” she said. “I was the first person in that room.”
But, of course, the average underclassman would likely have no idea of Comaroff’s past behavior.
The 78-year-old Comaroff has an incredibly distinguished career even by Harvard standards. Still, it boggles the mind that a private university of Harvard’s status has allowed him to remain on the faculty. Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the situation:
A May 2020 investigation by The Harvard Crimson determined that several students had raised concerns with the university’s Title IX office, making allegations of “unwanted touching, verbal sexual harassment, and professional retaliation” against Comaroff.[4][5] University administrators initially placed Comaroff on “paid administrative leave” in August 2020 amid a review of the allegations.
The investigation concluded in January 2022, and based on the findings, Harvard placed Comaroff on unpaid leave.[6] The investigation did not substantiate the allegations of “unwanted sexual contact”, but found Comaroff responsible for “verbal sexual harassment”. According to Comaroff’s legal team, Comaroff had claimed to an LGBT student planning to conduct fieldwork in Africa that she “would be raped”.[7] His legal team argued that this was a mere ethical warning that was misconstrued as sexual harassment and characterized Harvard’s investigation as a “kangaroo court process”.[7] In support of Comaroff, 38 Harvard scholars signed an open letter condemning the sanctions and review process. 73 other Harvard faculty reacted to the letter with another open letter, criticizing their colleagues for defending Comaroff too quickly without knowing the details of the internal investigation.[8]
On February 8, 2022, three students initiated a lawsuit against Harvard University, challenging the results of the Title IX investigation and claiming that Harvard had failed to respond to years of sexual harassment allegations against Comaroff.[9] They also claimed that Comaroff had “threatened retaliation against them”.[10] One student detailed in the lawsuit the alleged nature of the verbal sexual harassment, claiming that Comaroff had, with a “tone of enjoyment”, described how she might be forced into “corrective rape”.[9][11] The student alleged that this was only part of a broader pattern of physical sexual harassment, of which Harvard’s investigation failed to find sufficient evidence.[9]
As the details of the lawsuit came out, many Harvard scholars who had signed the original letter in support of Comaroff retracted their signatures. As of February 9, 35 of the original 38 professors had retracted their signatures, and released a statement admitting they “were lacking full information about the case” and that they agreed with the counter-letter.[9][12][13]. [emphases mine]
That complaints were apparently made for years and no corrective action was taken is deeply disturbing. Comaroff is an old man whose formative years were spent in apartheid South Africa so one might excuse misogynistic leanings the first time and subject him to some remedial training on what constitutes appropriate behavior toward one’s female students in 21st Century America. It shouldn’t have taken long for leadership to sense a pattern of behavior that created a hostile environment and start procedures to remove him from the faculty. This wouldn’t be permitted at a regional teaching college; why would the most renowned institution in American higher education allow it?
Eh, it might be permitted at a regional teaching college. (Do they still exist?) But professors in similar situations have been fired or not hired, yes.
As to the question clause: Because he is an elderly white man who probably has many friends on the faculty and Board. “He has done such distinguished work.” “Nobody else can teach those courses as he does.”
We still have a long way to go.
I can’t remember if I shared this in the past or not, but the Comeroff’s were still at the University of Chicago when I was a Master’s student there. I took a lot of classes in the anthro department and their reputations (both John and Jean) for “fraternizing” with students were well known back then (this was in the mid 2000s).
This was in particular the case with grad students and it was literally talked about as a potential consideration for having one of them on your committee if you were a member of the opposite sex.
So any claim that Harvard only recently found out about the Commeroffs’ behavior is absolute BS as this was a pretty open secret in elite circles of the anthro community. They are brilliant scholars and their connections could make a career. And without a doubt some of those relationships were consensual to one degree or another (both were attractive folks at the time), but the power dynamic was deeply screwed up.
Sadly this type of kinship was all too common in Anthro at the time. Some big thinkers developed cult-like followings. I’ve heard similar things about the Modern Language Association (MLA) as well.
@Cheryl Rofer:
They do.
@mattbernius:
Everything you’ve heard about the MLA is true.
The worst place was, I’m sorry to say, the University of Edinburgh.
@mattbernius:
Where I attended school, this behavior was well known in my college days (70s) that it was shrugged off by faculty and administration and discussed openly in the student union building. There were instructors who you simply never alone with, ever.
@CSK & @Flat Earth Luddite:
Part of the reason “who afraid of virginia wolfe?” is so good is that Albee grew up with academic parents and he was tapping into something very real.
And, CSK, thanks for that confirmation. FWIW, my understanding is that the AAA’s (the American Anthropological Association conference) was pretty similar. There’s a potentially apocryphal* story of an aged Margaret Mead getting into a packed elevator at an AAA in the early 70’s and loudly announcing “Christ, it smells like sex in here!”
* – Mead was a bit of a libertine. She once helped get her husband at the time a year-long field research grant in part so she could have private times with the person who would ultimately become her next husband. Her journals, when they were finally released, were pretty spicy.
@mattbernius:
At Edinburgh, a good friend of mine was raped by one linguistics professor while the other held her down. Then the profs changed places.
She never reported it. No point.
@CSK:
There are no good words to respond to that beyond what you describe is the triumph of evil. That is not intended to be victim blaming in any way. More and indictment of a broader system that protects those people.
@Matt Bernius:
One of the many awful things about the whole incident was the fact that there was no point in reporting these two guys because the victim’s account would have been dismissed or covered up. She would have been believed, because these two guys had a reputation for that sort of thing. But they were allowed to get away with it.