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. Neither 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.”