by Becky Cooper
My meeting with Richard did not go as planned.
It wasn’t that Richard was unwilling to speak with me. He was willing, for the most part, despite caveating his memories with turns of phrase that would make a fact checker’s heart sing, like “I can’t give you a verified account because I just don’t remember.” He disclosed that he tried pot for the first and last time at a party at Karl’s house. And he admitted that it was “disgusting” that it took almost fifty years for another person to be tenured from within the program after Karl. Though Richard unequivocally denied telling police that Jane and Karl had had an affair, and he refuted the alleged decades-long rift between the two of them, he added, “Karl was no angel.”
It was then that my conversation with this man, about whose reticence everyone had warned me, flowed freely for the next hour. The bulk of our conversation, once again unprompted by me, was not directly about Jane at all, but about the experience of women in archaeology. The two seemed as tied for him as they had become for me.
The future of archaeology, he believed, was as a female-dominated field, and the department recognized that it had a long way to go to reflect that in its faculty. When I asked him whether the visiting committee really took the archaeology program to task for not having female professors, he said, “That’s been in every visiting committee report for I don’t know how long.”
I knew that Harvard’s program suffered from a perfect storm of problems. It was in a small, fractious department, so there were few tenured positions to begin with and very little big-picture planning. The fact that Harvard’s assistant professorships were not, by default, tenure track until 2005 meant that it let go of a lot of candidates who would have diversified its faculty. And the federal law banning mandatory retirement age since 1994 compounded the problem by slowing turnover. The department also felt “burned,” Richard said, after Professor Tuross, the first and only female professor tenured within Harvard’s archaeology program, left the department. “When it comes to the next person, who are you going to hire?”
But understanding it as a Harvard-specific or even archaeology-specific problem would be shortsighted. Based on the statistics I had been reading, the low number of tenured women wasn’t due to a lack of female undergraduates or graduate students. Instead, as women climbed higher in the academic echelons, more and more of them silently dropped out. By the time you got to full tenured professors, the numbers were grim.
A recent report produced by a junior member of Harvard’s Anthropology department offered quantitative insight into this silent attrition. Women were disproportionately selected as head teaching fellows, which required significantly more “invisible labor” than a standard TF position. Women also had lower publication rates than their male counterparts in archaeology. (Other studies conducted nationally suggest that women spend more time on teaching, administration, and committee responsibilities, and take more time preparing their manuscripts.) In addition, it found that female graduate students consistently took longer to complete their degrees, suggesting that they received less effective mentorship than the male students. The cumulative effect was clear: Of the withdrawals in the program over the past three decades, 87 percent were female.
Experiences of sexual harassment and assault might also be a significant contributing factor. According to the first systematic study of sexual harassment and assault on field sites, published in 2014, 70 percent of the five hundred women and 40 percent of the 140 men surveyed reported having experienced sexual harassment. More than a quarter of the women experienced sexual assault. But while the majority of the men had been harassed or assaulted by their peers, the majority of women’s experiences were at the hands of their superiors. Other research has shown that sexual assault and harassment by a supervisor resulted in significantly greater psychological distress and job dissatisfaction than harassment by a peer.
It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Statistically, the most effective way to decrease sexual harassment and assault in the workplace is to promote more women. But if women are leaving the field in part because of this toxic aggression, how then do you diversify it?
I asked Richard how we were going to get there.
“I think everyone’s united on the fact that we need women colleagues,” Richard said. “But it’s not going to be easy.” The women—and single men with children, and people of underrepresented communities, he added—who succeed in this system are very tough, very strong, really special people. “I don’t know how they do it. It really takes a toughness of spirit.”
Richard was right. The old boys’ network was a mechanism of social reproduction along class and racial lines as well. The most micro example: The first African American graduate student to complete his PhD at Harvard in Anthropology graduated in 1961.
But Richard’s insight left me all the more surprised, then, by his apparent blind spots. “We’ve had any number of very good Black social anthropologists. They’ve always gone elsewhere because they’re very, very rare commodities.” The brazenness of the word commodity caught me off guard, but I didn’t want to interrupt his thought. “It’s their decision in the end what they’re going to do. But there are very, very few of them, because they just don’t go into the field. It’s not that we’re discriminating against Black people at all. The reason we don’t have them is because they don’t stay in many cases. And I don’t think it’s necessarily because of Harvard. Although it could be, in the sense that because there’s not a lot of Black people, they don’t have a community, and therefore they go someplace they think they might have more community. Which is fine. But you can’t blame the university for that.”
I wondered if Richard’s word choice was deliberate––a sign of resignation to the current dynamics in academia, in which students are seen as clients, and universities, corporations. Or perhaps Richard, who was so close to seeing through these mechanisms of social reproduction, stopped just short of seeing the full picture. The latter possibility reminded me of Professor Sally Falk Moore who had found a way to navigate her isolation at Harvard that sidestepped the larger structural problems at issue. As she told me, “[If] one has the wit to avoid quarrels…it can be very benign.”
On one hand, I was sympathetic to how long it takes to develop systems-level thinking about a problem. I was only beginning to see what I hadn’t had the capacity to recognize as an undergraduate: that even if the members of a system were good people, the system to which they belonged could still be destructive. It was only because I was talking to all these women in the department, studying this amorphous pattern of unhappiness, that I was beginning to realize how corrosive institutional habits could be. On the other hand, Richard and Sally were professors in the Anthropology department. It struck me that anthropologists, despite focusing their professional lives on observing the patterns of human behavior, might be no better than the rest of us at applying that lens to themselves. As Iva Houston once told me, “It’s hard to admit you belong to the world you’re studying.”
Professor Karkov
THE PERSON WHO HELPED ME connect with the most women in the department was a medical anthropologist named Mel Konner who had been a graduate student at Harvard at the same time as Jane. He had written a book called Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, and he spoke at length about the complicated legacy of his adviser Professor Irven DeVore. DeVore had been a champion of his female students, but some also saw a misogynistic side; Don and Jill Mitchell, I later learned, called him “Irv the Perv.”
(Some of DeVore’s students would also dispute the notion that their careers were facilitated by him. Sarah Hrdy, DeVore’s first female graduate student, went on to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to win a Guggenheim, but she felt that it was despite DeVore’s mentorship, rather than because of it. DeVore had once told a committee that she should not be hired for a position because she was married. It was no surprise, she said, that DeVore’s main field of study was pa
tterns of male dominance in primate societies. Kathryn Clancy, who published that 2014 study of sexual harassment on field expeditions, credited DeVore, with whom she studied as an undergraduate, as the reason she became an anthropologist––but she stopped short of saying that DeVore championed her.)
But when we got on the phone, Mel surprised me with something else he’d written. In 1981, he said, he published a fictional story inspired by Jane’s murder. In his story, a Jane-like character named Evelyn—a student in the Classics department at Ulster College—has been bludgeoned, and her professor, an invented character named Gregory Karkov, comes under suspicion.
Inspired by the atmosphere of mistrust following Jane’s murder, Mel’s fiction reflects the rampant speculation in the wake of Evelyn’s:
What animated their ‘vague,’ if not exactly ‘smutty’ minds, was not an authoritative original source for the rumor, nor a series of logical inferences from fact, nor even a clumsily linked together chain of circumstance, but a simple, animal dislike. The students detested Professor Karkov with a vividness and clarity of feeling that, in the young, is rarely reasonable, and yet not always wrong. Their arrogant tribunal of the spirit pronounced him unattractive, cowardly, dishonorable, disloyal, callous, self-elevating, hypocritical, calculating—guilty in general of conduct unbecoming a young professor, whose age-old role, precious in tradition, was to intercede for the students with the senior faculty. The rumor, then, in which he was depicted as a murderer, was not so much an allegation of crime as it was the punishment they meted out to him for the subtler crime of being what he was, or what, at any rate, they thought he was: a severe, frenetic, icy, driving man.
The rumors, in other words, about Karkov being involved with Evelyn’s death were more of a smear campaign than an actual articulation of suspicion. Exactly what I had come to suspect about Karl after talking with Iva.
Mel agreed with my line of thinking, at least as far as his made-up character was concerned. “In a way the only person who takes the rumors seriously is Karkov himself. He’s guilty of arrogance, he’s guilty of self-absorption, he’s guilty of having a temper…he’s guilty of basically [being] a jerk,” Mel told me. “But he’s not guilty of murder.”
As I thought more about Mel’s assertion that the rumors were a form of punishment, I found myself reading scholarly work on the social functions of gossip. I eventually worked my way to Chris Boehm, a former classmate of Jane’s who studied how gossip works in small-scale societies. He had, in fact, used Jane’s murder as an example in his paper about gossip as a form of social control.
According to Boehm, social groups necessarily have a certain amount of “leakiness” built in. These are the whisper networks; these are the stories that get swapped in the field and passed quietly between graduate students. Their job is to limit outlier behavior and to keep members of the community safe when what can be said out loud is constrained. Gossip, in other words, is punishment for people who move outside the norm.
Juxtaposing Boehm’s theory of the social function of gossip with Karl’s larger-than-life persona and the bigger picture of systemic inequality in academia, one thing became abundantly clear: Karl’s apparent role as a suspect was both product and reflection of the Harvard bubble.
* * *
It takes until the end of Mel Konner’s short story for Karkov to realize that he couldn’t have possibly been the killer, because he was giving a talk at the Bolton Public Library at the time of the murder. It was the police who needed to remind Karkov of his alibi, who responds, stunned:
“But you don’t understand, Sergeant. I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours agonizing over whether l would be going on trial for murder. And the perfect alibi, which I had all along, never even entered my mind. Why didn’t I think of it? Why?”
“I don’t know, Professor. Guilty conscience, maybe?”
The Grand Jury
THE GRAND JURY CONVENED FOR Jane’s case almost exactly one month after her murder. Richard Conti, a twenty-nine-year-old MIT graduate and the jury’s foreman, sat at a desk directly in front of DA John Droney, and near Droney’s first assistant, John Irwin Jr., who ran the proceedings. Conti had been randomly selected like the other twenty-two people on the jury. But Conti, who normally worked for the government contractor Raytheon designing “weapons of limited destruction,” had a secret. Some of his closest friends were in the Harvard Anthropology department. He went on vacations with them. His wife’s sister had been college roommates with Sally Bates, who helped arrange Jane’s abortion. And though he had never met Jane, he and his friends had talked so much about her, he felt like he knew her.
When he finally confessed his connection to the DA’s first assistant, Conti was relieved and a little surprised that Irwin didn’t care at all. Conti reasoned that perhaps Irwin believed having an insider in the department would be an asset to the investigation, because as the weeks wore on, he had the distinct sense that the grand jury was being used as a “sharpened saber” against the Anthropology department—to get testimony on the record, and to put these professors through the rigor of a grand jury performance, but to do so out of the public view.
Conti took pleasure in watching the stars of the department be paraded into the proceedings, vacuumed of their power and privilege. The suffocating academic politics, the incestuous intradepartment relationships, and the decades of grudges and slights revealed by the interrogations lent the whole thing a strange, “cloistered, gothic” feel. Everyone, he said, seemed to have something to hide.
Most of the questions were handled by the assistant DA, but some of Conti’s favorite moments were when one of the old ladies would look up from her knitting and ask something totally out of left field. Conti, enjoying the moment, would say, “Please answer.” The person would stammer, “No, I’ve never knitted a sweater for my granddaughter.” What was great was how unnerving it was for witnesses. Afterward, sometimes they’d stumble.
When Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky took the stand, he struck Conti as “the closest equivalent Harvard had to a British twit.” He sweated profusely, behavior the DA interpreted as “a consciousness of guilt.”
But Karl eventually satisfied the jury of his innocence. What had made the DA suspicious, the jury came to find, had no bearing on actual guilt.
* * *
While the proceedings continued on for the next six months, the formerly cocooned world of Harvard exploded at nauseating speed.
The extremes of 1969—it was the year of both the moon landing and the Manson family murders—were so opposite that they pulled the world apart at the seams, and that intensity had firmly lodged itself in the campus psyche. In February, discussions for the Radcliffe-Harvard merger began, as did talks about co-ed living arrangements. Later that semester, Harvard finally relented and approved the establishment of a degree-granting program in Afro-American Studies. Anti–Vietnam War protests, which had been escalating all year, came to a head in early April. A group of student activists pinned a list of six demands on the door of the Harvard president’s house. Their primary petition? The abolition of Harvard’s ROTC program—military-funded scholarships for students in exchange for years served. More than anything, it was a symbol of Harvard’s complicity in the war. As Carol Sternhell, class of ’71, explained, “We felt that we would be the equivalent of the good Germans in the Nazi era if we didn’t stop this war…We felt that we were the bad guys.”
Jane’s death is mentioned in the fifth demand on that list: “University Road apartments should not be torn down for construction of Kennedy Memorial Library. The building where Radcliffe graduate student Jane Britton was murdered last Fall is adjacent to the library site and expected to be demolished.” But Jane’s murder was about to be sidelined by history.
The following day, at noon on April 9, 1969, about seventy students occupied University Hall, the administrative building in the heart of the Yard. They kicked out deans and administration officials and rifled through files as busts of old whi
te men looked on.
The next morning, at dawn, at Harvard president Nathan Pusey’s request, Cambridge cops and state troopers stormed University Hall. The troopers wore visored helmets and wielded batons. The image of riot cops throwing protesters down the stairs and holding clubs above bloodied heads seared itself into the public consciousness. What had been the concern of a small, radical minority was suddenly transformed into a campus-wide cause.
April 9 quickly became enshrined as a dividing line between the before and the shattered after. A campus-wide strike was called, and ten thousand galvanized people gathered in Harvard’s stadium the following week to discuss how to move forward. At the height of the strike, which pitted faculty against teaching fellows against students, class attendance was less than 25 percent. Some conservative members of the faculty appointed themselves protectors of Widener Library and stationed themselves inside the building, ready to thwart any would-be arsonists. Dean Franklin Ford, the man who had a month earlier informed Karl that his bid for tenure was finalized, suffered a minor stroke. The feeling on campus was a genuine uncertainty about whether the institution was going to survive the unrest.
By the summer, Stephen Williams had steered his department through the investigation unscathed, but he still looked back on the year like a man staring out the window of his ivory tower, terrified to come down. He published his reflections in that year’s Peabody Museum newsletter: “In Winter I hoped for Spring, and now in Summer I am apprehensive of the Fall. […] A confident ‘Never at Harvard!’, may be replaced by a bemused and questioning ‘What again at Harvard?’ I am not taking any bets this time.”
* * *
More than six months after the first hearing, the grand jury members had to admit that despite their investment, all avenues of investigation had fizzled. The jury never came to a vote about anyone. Conti understood it as only an engineer could: “The response was strong but the signal from all this noise was somewhat meager.” The newspapers, which had been so obsessed with Jane, didn’t even bother to report on the fact that the jury dissolved without an indictment.