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Anthropology grad students sue Harvard over blind eye towards allegedly groping, sexist professor
By adamg on Wed, 02/09/2022 - 10:18am
WCVB reports on the lawsuit, which focuses on actions of Professor John Comaroff.
Read the whole complaint:
Neighborhoods:
Free tagging:
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
 Complete complaint | 679.73 KB |
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Comments
The most amazing part of this
Is that a few dozen distinguished Harvard faculty wrote an open letter (always a fantastic idea), the gist of which was that "he never sexually harassed ME, and Harvard faculty are above reproach, so please stop persecuting him" and then as more evidence and more stories have come out, many of them are desperately trying to get their names off that open letter.
“Amazing” is an understatement
Stunning that these intellectual giants, in the era of MeToo, assumed they had all the facts based only on the word of their accused colleague. To quote Michael Hobbes(via Twitter):”Schools generally don’t put professors on leave for giving safety briefings!”
And yet not uncommon
This happens ALL THE TIME with racism, ableism, queerphobia, etc., though it's certainly not unheard of with sexism either. Someone is one of the few marginalized folks in a space, says to people in the privileged group that someone else in the privileged group behaves in a biased way toward them, and the others in the privileged group honestly have no idea. It isn't even necessarily a matter of them consciously covering for the person; it's more that the person doesn't display these biases toward them, so they've never received them. Though, much of the time, it's also the case that the person is making microaggressive comments all the time, and people who aren't in a marginalized group just don't have the life experience to recognize them.
When someone of a marginalized life experience that we don't hold tells us someone has been biased, we need to listen and trust their life experience. And if we want to be allies, we should also be doing more listening, reading, immersing ourselves in people sharing their experiences so we do recognize these things. No one should be writing letters saying "of course he wouldn't do that."
Counter letter
And now there's a letter against the letter of support. It's letters all the way down!
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/2/9/letter-73-faculty-response
piece(s) of work
him and his lawyers
"attacks based on gossip and fantasy".. wow.
it's depressing how effective it is to imply that (largely) women bring behavior like this to light and seek justice because hey, it's just a fun thing to do.
men are lucky we purposefully try to forget about every time we've been harassed or accosted or assaulted...
Right?
She probably is just pulling the gender card doncha know.
Do they know about the database?
They probably don't know about the database.
Oh it gets worse
In the course of investigating this, it is alleged that Harvard obtained Ms. Kilburn's private therapy records and disclosed them to Prof Comaroff.
That's just a seven layer dip of 'nope' right there. While it's hard to believe any institution would be that dumb, it's within my ability to imagine that Harvard would try to pull that sort of nonsense.
Looks like the Anthropology dept. needs thorough cleaning
This is not the first faculty member to get into trouble. Sounds like a viper pit.
Maybe arrogant rather than dumb
Harvard isn’t dumb, but it sure is arrogant. And vicious toward its perceived enemies.