We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  Even at the time, the assistant professor knew that she wasn’t alone in her experiences with Domínguez. She claimed that he had already harassed at least two students and one other assistant professor, including an undergraduate whose senior thesis he graded unfairly when she rejected his advances. (Her grade was later changed after review by an outside party.) Karl warned the university that he was a “repeater.”

  Harvard took some action. It found Domínguez guilty of “serious misconduct,” stripped him of his administrative responsibilities for three years, and removed him from a position of reviewing Terry Karl’s work. (In a comment to the Chronicle, Domínguez denied allegations and stated he “sought to behave honorably in all my relationships.”) Karl was given three semesters of paid leave, and her tenure clock was put on hold for two years.

  But when the Crimson and the Boston Globe published their stories in the fall of 1983 about the disciplinary action against Domínguez, they didn’t have access to this information. Harvard had refused to disclose the precise nature of the assistant professor’s “grievance” and the measures taken against Domínguez. “There are a lot of us who feel that in some ways, the University is more concerned with its reputation than with the proper adjudication of a very serious matter,” a Harvard professor told the Crimson.

  Terry Karl also felt that the university was not taking the matter seriously enough. There was still no clear grievance procedure for faculty members, and no guarantee of protection against retaliation. The administrative sanctions also did not keep her insulated from Domínguez. Her lawyer wrote to the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who replied that additional restrictions wouldn’t be appropriate: “It was specifically not our intention to lock Domínguez away.”

  Eventually the assistant professor felt like she had run out of recourse. Filing a complaint, she would later write, “pits a person against an institution that is predisposed to defend the accused.” Terry Karl felt she had no choice but to leave. It was the same pattern that Iva Houston had identified all those years ago: The women disappear, and the men get to stay.

  Karl went on to get tenure from Stanford, and she tried her best to keep this period of sexual harassment from defining her.

  In the meantime, Domínguez kept getting promoted at Harvard. In 1995, he was selected as the director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. In 2006, he became a Harvard vice provost. In 2014, he traveled to Mexico with Drew Gilpin Faust, then president of Harvard, as part of the university’s outreach efforts. In 2016, a dissertation prize was set up in his honor after the opportunity had been refused by the Latin American Studies Association, which knew of his disciplinary history. (The Harvard plan was later changed when some raised similar concerns.)

  Then, in November 2017, Professor Karl got a call from a number she didn’t recognize; two women were on the line, each had allegedly experienced sexual harassment by Domínguez, and they were ready to come forward. Eventually fifteen other women would join the three of them, with accusations that spanned forty years.

  The Chronicle story roiled the campus, prompting student groups such as Our Harvard Can Do Better and the Women’s Cabinet to host meetings and town halls. Cover stories splashed across the Crimson. Alan Garber, the university’s provost, emailed the Harvard community to say that it was “heartbreaking” to read the victims’ accounts in the Chronicle story, and underscored: “To those who are thinking about coming forward, please know Harvard will support you.” Harvard president Faust also reaffirmed the university’s commitment to combatting sexual harassment in a faculty meeting. “It remains the case that very clearly there is more to be done.”

  Harvard placed Domínguez on administrative leave, and, two days later, Domínguez announced his decision to retire at the end of the semester. At the conclusion of the Title IX investigation, which substantiated the claims, Harvard stripped Domínguez of his emeritus status and banned him from campus.

  Nonetheless, Professor Karl told me, she does not see this moment as a reckoning. She maintains that Harvard has still refused to talk to any of the women in this case, apologize to anyone, or take any action to “make whole” the women who suffered. Looking back, she feels that Harvard’s complicity through inaction had allowed for even more victims. By repeatedly promoting Domínguez, despite warnings about his behavior, the university sent the signal that speaking up does nothing but harm the accuser.

  As Professor Karl told the Chronicle, she calls Harvard’s encouragement of a culture of silence “the great enabling.”

  August 17, 2018: Tell No Man

  THE MORNING AFTER I LEARN Sumpter’s name, I call the DA’s office, but they don’t pick up or return my call. I check in with the Boston Globe’s Todd Wallack, but he hasn’t even heard the rumblings about a development in the case. And when Wallack tries his own luck with the DA’s office, the press office denies any upcoming press conference. Instead, they want to know who’s spreading this misinformation. He doesn’t give my name.

  I tell Boyd that I can’t get a straight answer about Monday. He says he doesn’t know the story, either, but he can’t stay on the phone to speculate. He has to race off to prepare for the weekend’s sermon. By an absolute coincidence of the Anglican liturgical calendar, he’ll be delivering a sermon called “Tell No Man,” about the episode in the Gospel where Jesus facilitates miracles and demands that witnesses don’t tell anybody.

  “Things have changed since the Resurrection,” Boyd says. “There are obligations to tell everybody.”

  September, October 2018:

  Waiting and Waiting and Waiting

  THE PRESS CONFERENCE DOESN’T HAPPEN on Monday. Or that week. Or that month. There are no further updates from Sennott or from the DA’s office.

  In the meantime, the students come back to school, and the dining hall comes back to life.

  Don, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the spring, is in his final weeks of radiation treatment.

  Richard Conti, who had served as foreman of the grand jury, passes away. He dies never knowing that the case was solved.

  Don, Boyd, Elisabeth, and I wait and wait and wait and wait. We’ve gone from the maddening silence of not knowing to the stifled silence of knowing but being able to tell no one.

  * * *

  In mid-September, Elisabeth gets in touch with me. She says she would have accepted law enforcement’s story unquestioningly—that she would have been happy to think that investigators finally did what they had promised all those years ago—if only they had announced their results weeks ago. But in the pause that followed, questions began festering again, like: Hadn’t the cops been sure that Jane wasn’t raped? She wants to know if I have any insight into what’s taking so long.

  I give her my best guess: that detective work takes time and that maybe they’re trying to coordinate the announcement with DA Marian Ryan’s reelection campaign. But I admit that I, too, can feel the vines of speculation climbing again. Isn’t it a little too convenient that the suspect is dead and Black and can’t defend himself? But I don’t know if I can trust that feeling. Still burned from my years-long investment in stories that turned out to be untrue, I worry my reluctance to believe is less an indication that something is amiss than it is the return of my desire to construct a story to hide behind.

  But unlike Don and me, Elisabeth says she actually finds the police’s version somewhat comforting. It transforms the red ochre from a sadistic clue to the vestige of Jane kicking the shit out of a stranger. She even finds a bit of dark humor: “It’s like a Hercule Poirot story with a postmodern ending,” she says, where Poirot combs through suspect after suspect only to discover on the last page: “It was a brick. Sorry guys.”

  And more than anything, Elisabeth finds solace in knowing that Jane, who had had such bad luck with men throughout her life, didn’t have to look into the eyes of her killer and feel betrayal as her last waking feeling.

  Kimberly Theidon

  IN
THE MIDST OF THE apparent reckoning that was happening in the fall of 2017, a number of friends had confided in me about their experiences with harassment by faculty at Harvard. I couldn’t tell whether I was stumbling across all these stories because of what I was writing about, or because the floorboards were finally being lifted.

  And then a Crimson story caught my eye. A former anthropology associate professor had sued Harvard for failing to give her tenure on the basis of her gender and her outspoken advocacy for victims of sexual assault. Her name was Kimberly Theidon. It took me a second to realize why her name sounded so familiar. I had seen her present at the Social Anthropology Day all those years ago, talking about the mute woman repeatedly raped inside her own home, and the community, hearing her gurgled screams, that did nothing.

  Professor Theidon, a scholar of structured silences, had made no secret of speaking out against sex discrimination and of defending victims of sexual assault. In 2010, she had complained about the disparate treatment of women in Harvard’s Anthropology department to the university’s senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity, Judith Singer. In 2004, Theidon relayed, when she started at Harvard, there was only one tenured woman in her department. That professor had warned Theidon that, as a woman, she would be expected to do more administrative tasks and advising, and that she would be held to a higher standard than her male counterparts. If Theidon wanted to succeed at Harvard, she shouldn’t complain about the extra workload. Be a “dutiful daughter,” the professor had advised Theidon.

  Theidon didn’t exactly heed the advice. She blogged and tweeted about sexual assault and wrote letters in support of student victims, complaining about Harvard’s lack of adequate protections for them. In 2012, Theidon allowed a student to distribute leaflets after class on behalf of Our Harvard Can Do Better, a student group dedicated to “dismantling the rape culture on campus.”

  Even so, until spring 2013, as Theidon later told a Crimson reporter, “There was never a moment when I was given anything other than positive indications about where I was headed at Harvard.” She had been promoted to associate professor in four years, and then appointed to an endowed position reserved for tenure-track faculty, which the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences called an “honor richly deserved.” In February 2013, the Anthropology department voted in favor of offering Theidon tenure.

  Then, less than two weeks later, with the final steps of Theidon’s tenure bid still pending, the Crimson published an article about Harvard’s lagging sexual assault policy and the working group established to assess the sexual assault resources on campus. The comments section of the article had become a hotbed for fears of false accusation. A Men’s Rights Activist (MRA), not affiliated with the university, vehemently questioned the claims of one of the accusers in the story, “Julie.” Theidon knew that “Julie” had read the comments and that they made her feel violated all over again, so she stepped in and launched a volley that went on for pages.

  In the wake of the Crimson article, a former graduate student who now worked for the department confided in Theidon about inappropriate behavior by a senior male Anthropology professor named Theodore Bestor. Theidon advised her to speak with two senior members of the department—the woman who had given Theidon the advice to be a “dutiful daughter,” and the then head of the department, Gary Urton—because they were the formal channels to file a report. Professor Urton told the former student not to involve Theidon any further because she had “enough on her plate” with her tenure review, and assured her, “I can take care of this.”

  In late May 2013, Harvard convened Theidon’s ad hoc committee—nine people, including Judith Singer, the person Theidon had warned about the gender bias in the Anthropology department. The final stages of getting tenure at Harvard are, famously, some of the most shrouded proceedings on campus. The ad hoc committee’s deliberation––the seventh step of Harvard’s elaborate eight-step process––takes place behind closed doors, no notes are typically taken, the identities of the experts are concealed, and the candidate receives no report or explanation besides the binary outcome: yes or no. The tenure decision-making process “is an invitation to abuse,” Howard Georgi, a Harvard physicist who has served on tenure committees told Science magazine in 1999. “There’s no question this has affected women.”

  In Theidon’s case, however, Judith Singer did take notes. She felt compelled to when Professor Urton––the first of four departmental witnesses called on behalf of Theidon––provided the opening statements. Singer was surprised by the “unenthusiastic tenor” of Urton’s comments, particularly in contrast with the letter he had submitted to the tenure review committee earlier that year.

  After hearing from the departmental witnesses, the committee members considered Theidon’s materials, including the statement prepared by the Anthropology department, which reflected letters solicited from external reviewers. Even the most positive of these letters came with commentary about her productivity, but they had been prepared by scholars who had not been sent copies of Theidon’s articles about Colombia, which were to form the basis of her third book.

  A Harvard dean, who had read previous drafts of the statement, realized this omission and admonished the Anthropology department for failing to include the Colombia articles for consideration. The omission constituted, in the dean’s words, a “major mistake,” and he advised Professor Urton to revise the statement. (According to one member of the department, this omission was simply the result of “miscommunication.”) They revised the statement twice, but for some reason, still unknown, the less favorable penultimate draft of her statement made its way to the ad hoc committee rather than the more glowing final one.

  The ad hoc committee recommended against giving Theidon tenure, and, in late May, President Drew Faust agreed with that recommendation. (At Harvard, all tenure decisions rest with the president.)

  In response, Theidon set up a meeting with Judith Singer, who, according to Theidon’s notes from the time, explained that the committee concluded Theidon’s “unusual career” did not align with the work being done within Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Also, according to Theidon, Singer described her “activities” as the “sort of activities scholars postpone until they have tenure.”

  Theidon appealed her tenure decision, and then filed a complaint and eventually a lawsuit. Contending that her tenure denial was retaliation for refusing to stay quiet, Theidon told the Crimson, “This is about silencing a problem on this campus.” The school responded through its spokesperson: “The University would never consider a faculty member’s advocacy for students who have experienced sexual assault when making a tenure decision. Instead, tenure decisions are based on the quality of a faculty member’s research, teaching, and University citizenship.”

  Theidon left Harvard when her contract expired in 2014 and was granted tenure at Tufts in 2015. On March 26, 2018, in the article that caught my eye, the Crimson announced that Theidon had lost her suit.

  When I tried to reach Professor Theidon for comment, I was met only with silence. But on the day it was publicly announced that she lost her appeal, Theidon issued a statement that urged readers to see her struggle in its larger context:

  On college campuses nation-wide, senior professors—frequently male—wield tremendous power over their students and junior colleagues…These gatekeepers operate with virtual impunity, administering silences, humiliation, and career-ending decisions. The black box of tenure, lacking transparency, is precisely how silencing and impunity work to the disadvantage of those who would speak up and unsettle the status quo.

  Though her specific battle was over, the fight, she argued, must continue on behalf of what she called the “missing women” of academia—those driven out of their careers of choice because “they [had] been ground down, groped, sexually harassed.”

  Four months later, in May 2020, the Crimson published an explosive article with allegations of sexual misconduct by three tenured anthrop
ology professors at Harvard: John Comaroff, Theodore Bestor, and Gary Urton, who allegedly was having an affair with a former student at the time that Theidon directed the complaint about Bestor. According to a sealed affidavit in the Theidon case, the affair allegedly began when he pressured the student into “unwanted sex” in exchange for a recommendation letter. Other than one incident in 2017 for which Bestor takes full responsibility, all three men deny the allegations.

  As Theidon had noted at the end of her January statement: “My journey illustrates why women do not come forward; and, this is why we must.”

  September 9, 2018: The Tree

  THE DAY AFTER I SPEAK with Elisabeth, Don tells me that he’s decided he can’t wait any longer. During the weeks of silence, Jane’s tree—the plant that he bought the day after Sennott first called him—was getting root-bound waiting to go into the ground. He had chosen an ‘ōhi‘a, a flowering tree that figures prominently in Hawaiian mythology and popular culture—the same kind he had planted for me after my visit. Ruth had wanted a stately white one, but Don opted for one with limbs rebelliously shooting out all over. To Don, this plant said, I don’t give a shit about anything. Seeing Jane’s defiant plant stuck in its pot made him sad.

  He tells me a hurricane is coming for the Big Island, and Jane’s plant will be safer in the ground than top-heavy in its pot. After years of living in limbo, waiting for others to give him closure, Don thinks of this act as a reclamation of power.

  The next day, he records the ceremony and sends the video to me so I can be a part of the ritual.

  He scrapes the topsoil away, revealing a tongue of hardened lava to the air for the first time in thousands of years. Over time, exposed to the elements, it will deepen to black, but for the moment, it is a beautiful red. He fills the hole with layers of volcanic cinders and compost and potting soil and hoses it down to make sure the mixture is moist.