We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  Iva’s perception of Karl flipped on its head. What she had thought of as charming became too slick. That he was well dressed began to signal that he was hiding something. She moved from the front row of class to the back for the rest of the semester. “You did not want him to single you out. You did not want to be memorable to him. Any idea of going to office hours? Gone. Any ideas of taking other classes? Gone.” Karl still seemed like a god in the department—untouchable, invincible—but now that power felt ominous.

  The second time was a year later. Iva was telling the story of Jane to a friend who was working in the Middle East. They were in the Peabody student lounge, and though Iva was speaking very quietly, another student interrupted her when she qualified that the story might not be true. “Oh, no. It’s a real story,” the student said.

  And then the third time she heard it was in a group setting. One girl was working in the Middle East and people asked her how she was going to operate in that place, by which Iva understood that the students were asking, How are you going to deal with Karl? The student said that her work was going to have nothing to do with him. Iva was struck by her maturity: “She was just like, ‘I get it, and I’m just not going to be a part of it.’”

  Listening to Iva, I saw that Jane’s story, one about a girl disappeared by her adviser, was still so alive in the community because it was an exaggerated, horror-movie version of a narrative that was all too common.

  “I have something like eight friends who left academia because of some gossip or something political,” Iva said. She told me about one person who had to leave his postdoctoral program for another solely because he went to a conference and interacted with someone his adviser didn’t like. When the student escalated the problem to the department’s administration, he was told that the professor was too high up for them to do anything, so the student had to make a decision: He had to make it work with this person or leave. He ended up being forced out.

  “That happened to be a male,” Iva told me, but most of the people disenfranchised in these stories are women. The stories almost always go something like this: “This person made me feel uncomfortable; this person wasn’t cool with me when I got married, when I had a baby.”

  Archaeology, she said, hasn’t done a good job of confronting the inequities that have always existed in academia. There’s a subfield of the discipline called Gender Archaeology, dedicated to studying the ways in which our implicit gender bias colors the way we reconstruct the past. (For example, is it true that the men did the hunting and the women did the gathering? Probably not according to the latest evidence.) Also studied are the ways in which gender dynamics shape the experience of the archaeologists themselves. But Gender Archaeology is still not considered mainstream.

  Instead, the field prides itself on a masculine tough-it-out mentality. Richard Meadow, she said, was one of the only people in the department who provided a sympathetic ear for students, particularly the female ones. Though he seemed standoffish, in reality he was the complete opposite. “He was basically our Oprah. We’d go to him and cry.” She said I should do everything I could to speak with Richard for the story. He wouldn’t be forthcoming, but he would know everything.

  Iva thought about it all once more. “It’s horrible what happened to this particular person,” she said, again not quite remembering Jane’s name. “But, you know, I hate to say it. I think I was shocked and now, after being in this field for going on a decade, I’m not surprised. If I had heard this story tomorrow, I would have just shook my head and said, yeah. I think it’s symptomatic of a much more horrific disease that we don’t want to realize that we have.”

  * * *

  And just like that, Iva, as she had done all those years ago, upended my thinking about Jane’s story. As definitively as she had once moved it from lore to truth, this time she elevated it to the status of myth.

  If Iva was right and Jane’s story functioned as a kind of cautionary tale, then perhaps it was less about the literal truth of what happened to Jane than it was an allegory about the dangers that faced women in academia. The idea reminded me of what Karl had said in that first class: that the past is often appropriated to suit the demands of the modern era. In this case, reporting abuses of power rarely results in meaningful change, and often causes problems for the person bringing the complaint. Jane’s story existed, perhaps, to voice injustices that otherwise couldn’t be easily raised.

  It followed, then, that the elements of Jane’s story might just be symbols. Jane stood for every woman in the department. Her killing represented a kind of academic silencing. And the professor who killed her, a symbol of the abuse of power and the institutional oppression of women in academia.

  Viewed from this angle, Karl wasn’t the murderer at all. He was an imperfect man ensnared in a living myth, but no criminal. We had cast him in a role that he did not deserve, both because––in the absence of answers as to what happened to Jane––we needed it filled, and because with his edginess, charisma, and flair, he could play it so well. Is it ever justifiable, I wondered, to trap someone in a story that robs them of their truth, but voices someone else’s?

  The idea dovetailed with something else I was slowly beginning to admit. For all the avenues of conjecture I’d unearthed about Karl, nothing had led anywhere concrete. Everything was circumstantial, much of it was gossip, and none of it pointed more than elliptically at a motivation for murder. I had dismissed the affair angle long ago. And the academic blackmail one had less and less steam the more I looked into it. For example, the idea that there was an urgency for Karl to get tenure in 1969 because there was something exceptional about that year didn’t withstand examination. I spoke to David Mitten, an art historian who had been tenured as a junior professor that same year. He remembered absolutely nothing about some window threatening to close for junior faculty.

  But if Karl didn’t kill Jane, then who did?

  She’d Have to Not Be a Woman

  IN 2014, MIT PROFESSOR OF biology Nancy Hopkins delivered a speech for the occasion of her fiftieth Radcliffe reunion. She began: “Women who came to Radcliffe in 1960 arrived at the start of a gender revolution.” Then Radcliffe president Mary Bunting had filled the students with the expectation that they would surpass the professional achievements of all the women who had come before. And it seemed to be coming true for Nancy: She graduated from Radcliffe in 1964, went to graduate school, and accepted a faculty position at MIT in 1973.

  If you had told me then, in 1973, that there was such a thing as gender discrimination, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. It didn’t occur to me that a profession in which half the people on the planet could not participate equally and also have children is discriminatory.

  Plus, I assumed the only reason there were no women professors was because all other women chose to be mothers. I would have been shocked to learn that as recently as 1960, women could take classes at Harvard, but essentially, we could not get faculty jobs in America’s great research universities.

  The 1964 Civil Rights Act made such discrimination illegal. And then, when universities still dragged their feet, Affirmative Action laws and regulations in the early 1970s required them to hire women or lose their federal funding. By 1973, when I was offered faculty jobs, I assumed that gender discrimination was a thing of the past.

  But slowly—despite neither looking for it nor expecting it—Nancy began to see that she had been mistaken. “Gender discrimination did exist—even for women who didn’t have children. It took such a surprising form that it took me 20 years to recognize it. […] By then I was 50 years old.”

  * * *

  When Cora Du Bois arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1954, she was only the second woman to receive tenure at the institution. She had to take the side door to the all-male faculty club and eat in a separate area so she didn’t contaminate the atmosphere of the dining room. And when she retired in 1969, she left Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences without a single
female professor, at either the tenured or the associate level.

  An excerpt from the March 9, 1970 “Preliminary Report on the Status of Women at Harvard.”

  Later, Alison Brooks, who had been Jane’s roommate at Les Eyzies, confronted Irven DeVore, a tenured professor of biological anthropology, about the lack of women in the department. DeVore replied, “For a woman to be good enough for Harvard, she’d have to not be a woman.”

  * * *

  When Sally Bates, the woman who would eventually help arrange Jane’s abortion, arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1965, the semester began with a mandatory meeting with Professor Douglas Oliver, the chair of the department. Sally knew that Professor Oliver had given each of the men a version of the same pep talk. “We have invested a lot in you. We expect you to get a PhD.”

  But when Sally walked into the professor’s office and casually mentioned how pleasantly surprised she had been about the number of women in her incoming class—about half her cohort—Professor Oliver replied, “You’re all looking for MRS, aren’tcha. The Mrs. degree.”

  Sally dropped out before the end of her spring semester. Eventually, only two or three of the original women in her cohort remained at Harvard, including Alison Brooks, whose adviser told her: “I’ve never given the PhD to a woman, and I’m not going to start now.”

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for Mary Pohl, who started her PhD in 1967, to become aware of the discrimination at Harvard—the “imbalance,” she called it. Her adviser Gordon Willey inducted his students as doctoral advisees by inviting them to lunch at his social club. The club only allowed men.

  But when we spoke, she was adamant that I understand that her experience at Harvard wasn’t all bad—Jerry Sabloff, a junior faculty member who took over for Willey as her adviser, was a great champion of hers. And she also needed me to know that the discrimination at Harvard was far from anomalous; it was “only a warm-up” for what she would face in her career. For example, at Florida State, where she is now an emerita professor, one of the senior males in her department took exception to her and “would throw angry fits” about her in the front office. When that professor became the department chair, he bestowed overt favoritism on her male colleagues, such as giving only them salary raises. Mary filed a grievance and requested a review of her salary (one of several she would file over the years). A female university faculty member, selected by the administration, reviewed her case and denied her grievance. When Mary went to her office to discuss the findings, she was told, “Your salary is unfair, but life is unfair.”

  * * *

  When Elizabeth Stone, the student who felt misled into forfeiting the promise of UPenn funding, arrived in the department in 1971, she was appalled by the atmosphere. Years later, she’d call Harvard “the most sexist place I’ve ever been.” The other women in the department dressed “sexlessly” in order to de-emphasize their gender. Elizabeth refused, and as a result, she was the only person in class who professors didn’t call by her first name. Instead, she was “Miss Stone.” When Elizabeth arranged with the University of Chicago to get out of Harvard as quickly as she could, she went to say goodbye to the secretaries, who were all women. One congratulated her: “One of you is getting out of here!”

  * * *

  When Sally Falk Moore was tenured in Anthropology at Harvard in 1981, she was the only tenured woman in the department and one of only sixteen tenured women in the entirety of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Professor Moore felt like she was standing alone in the wind, accepted in the department as a friend, but not as a weighty instrument in policy making. She felt used by the administration who promoted her to dean of the graduate school and faculty dean of Mather House, one of the undergraduate dorms. The administration’s idea was to elevate the position of women in the university by making them as visible as possible. But those administrative jobs consumed her time and gave her even less voice in the direction of the Anthropology department.

  Moore quickly understood that it was going to be a “waste of time and emotion” to struggle against the prevailing culture, and she focused instead on her teaching, research, and writing. She found that there was enough to satisfy her in her professional life without needing to win the departmental battles. She was not unhappy.

  Years later, the ninety-three-year-old Professor Moore would say, “I never found being a woman to be completely an impediment. It was a great asset in many ways. I got an awful lot of attention because very little was expected, and instead they got a full human being.”

  * * *

  When Alison Brooks visited her daughter at Harvard in the mid-’90s—she was an undergraduate, class of ’97—she attended a meeting where Harvard was very proud to announce what they were doing to combat sexual harassment, including trainings with freshman men about inappropriate behavior. Alison interrupted to ask what the administration’s plan was for harassment by the faculty.

  * * *

  Winding to the end of her talk at that 2014 Radcliffe reunion, Nancy Hopkins told her audience that the pattern of gender discrimination in academia eventually became undeniable in 1994 when she discovered that only 8 percent of the MIT science faculty were women. At Harvard, it was 5 percent. The discrimination was finally quantitative. When she told her colleagues at MIT what she had discovered, she realized “the women faculty at MIT had figured it out, but we had each been afraid to say so. In a meritocracy, if you say you’re discriminated against, people will think you aren’t good enough.”

  In 2005, Nancy Hopkins walked out of the room when then Harvard president Larry Summers said, at a conference about diversity and the sciences, that men do better than women in math and science careers because of innate biological differences. While Summers recognized the role of socialization, he downplayed its significance. Even after furor erupted over his speech, he defended his position to the Boston Globe: “Research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialization weren’t due to socialization after all.” According to the Guardian, during the first three and a half years of Larry Summers’s presidency, the number of tenured jobs offered to women fell from 36 to 13 percent. Summers stepped down in June 2006; I arrived at Harvard the following semester.

  Nancy concluded her reunion speech: “Progress for women in our lifetimes was amazing—thanks to visionaries like Mary Bunting. But equality, at the top? Not yet.”

  Sadie Weber

  IVA HOUSTON WASN’T ALONE. SADIE Weber, the girl with the braid who had been in Karl’s class with me all those years ago, had also received Jane’s story as a warning. A lecturer of hers at Stanford, a former student of Richard Meadow, had told her as a way to say, Watch out for Karl. And Sadie, like Iva, had also come to see Jane’s story as part of a bigger picture about gender dynamics in the department. She told me so without prompting at a café in Harvard Square. Her take was that “it’s almost this trope of…slightly predatory older professors taking advantage of their academic [advisee who] can’t say no but also maybe wants the thrill.”

  I asked Sadie about her experience in the department. She searched for the right words. She wanted me to understand that she’s not the kind of person who goes out looking for examples of mistreatment. But, over the years, the accumulation of slights had made it hard to ignore. Professors commented on how she looked. She found that she and the other female students had to work twice as hard to get noticed.

  It was university policy, she told me, to have each department evaluated by a committee of academics outside of Harvard every five years or so, and a few months ago this visiting committee “reamed” Harvard’s archaeology program for not having any female faculty. She said Harvard has never had a tenured woman in archaeology.

  I quickly ran through the list in my head. Cora Du Bois was social anthropology, not archaeology. Cynthia Irwin-Williams, who co-led the expedition in Hell Gap, Wyoming, that trained many of Harvard’s best archaeologists, was never given tenure. Ne
ither was Ruth Tringham. Tatiana Proskouriakoff, the Maya scholar with the motorized ashtray, didn’t even have an official department position.

  Sadie qualified her statement. Never, except once, briefly. Professor Noreen Tuross had been in the department for five years before she moved to Human Evolutionary Biology when it split from the Anthro department in 2009. Sadie was under the impression that Noreen had been kicked out. (When I spoke to Noreen, she said it was her choice to join Human Evolutionary Biology, but in her ideal world, she would have also stayed a part of Anthro. “I did ask for a joint appointment when this split happened, and it was denied by Anthropology. Why that is you’d have to ask them. I have no idea.”)

  I asked Sadie if she saw any way for it to get better.

  “No? I think this is just the disease of academia…It won’t get better until the idea of tenure is reviewed…Richard, I will say, is never like this.”

  I told her how much I would like to speak with him. Five years after our first encounter, it finally felt like time. She said the best way was probably just to corner him in his lab, and she gave me directions: “The Zooarchaeology Lab is on the third floor of the Peabody Museum. Next to the decapitator god.”

  We both laughed.

  “Seriously.”

  Richard Meadow

  I LOOKED FOR THE “DECAPITATOR GOD” mural. I turned and walked and turned and walked until, in a corner of the archaeology of the Americas section, I saw it: a giant red monster against a mustard-yellow background, with a knife in one hand and a severed head in the other. “You’d think gods would have neater ways of offing someone,” my friend responded when I texted him a picture from the bench in front of the mural.