An Open Letter to Harvard President Lawrence Bacow
An Open Letter to Harvard President Lawrence Bacow
February 27th, 2019
Dear President Bacow,
Today, February 27th, marks the one-year anniversary of the publication of the Chronicle of Higher Education article which detailed 36 years of sexual harassment by Professor Jorge Domínguez of the Harvard Government Department.
On October 19th, 2018, 124 Government graduate students sent a letter (attached) to you and our own department faculty, requesting an external review. The external review is intended to provide an independent examination of the institutional policies, practices, and cultures that allowed harassment to occur while repeatedly promoting the perpetrator. Among the conditions stated in the letter was that this review commence no later than February 27th, 2019.
We were not the first—or the last—to call for an external review. In March and April of last year, 15 women who were sexually harassed by Domínguez (including Professor Terry Karl) requested that an “outside commission” be appointed to investigate “the conditions that allowed a professor to mistreat undergraduates, graduate students, staff and faculty over the course of forty years.” On October 24, the Government Department Faculty joined in calling for “an external review of Harvard University’s institutional performance with regard to the Jorge Domínguez case.”
We, the students, received no response from the Harvard administration to our October 19th letter. We were informed by Government faculty members that you responded positively to the prospect of an external review but insisted that it could not begin until the confidential Title IX/ODR investigation had concluded.
We have waited, hoping that the Title IX/ODR investigation—which has now gone on more than three times longer than the average Harvard Title IX/ODR investigation—would conclude and that an external review would commence within a reasonable time frame. Yet a year after this egregious pattern of abuse was revealed, we continue to have little hope of understanding the institutional and cultural factors that made Domínguez’s actions possible, and therefore little prospect of identifying what must change for justice and accountability to prevail in the future.
With this message, we reaffirm our call for an external review into the institutional failures surrounding the Domínguez case. Justice and accountability for survivors, as well as the safety of future generations of students, faculty, and staff, demands it.
Moreover, we ask you, President Bacow, to publicly affirm Harvard’s commitment to an external review, and to specify a feasible timeline for the initiation of such a review.
In your installation address, you said that Harvard must “embody and defend truth.” We could not agree more. Like you, we are committed to building a safer and more inclusive Harvard. To do so, we must confront openly and honestly the failures of the past.
We look forward to your response.
Best,
The External Review Working Group of the Harvard Government Department Graduate Student Association
[CC: Alan Garber, Provost of Harvard University; Peggy Newell, Deputy Provost; Claudine Gay, Dean of FAS; Emma Dench, Dean of GSAS; Lawrence Bobo, FAS Dean of Social Sciences.]