IT HAD BEEN A LONG fall and spring in Cambridge. Nearly a year separated my talk with Alice Kehoe about Lee Parsons and Don’s news of a break in the case.
Just a few days after I’d talked with Alice, the New York Times and The New Yorker published their stories about Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual predation, harassment, and intimidation. The distance between my world and Jane’s had already become hallucinatorily thin in spots, but the #MeToo movement felt like 1969 had come crashing fully and completely into the present day. What had, for years, felt like a secret confined to the halls of archaeology was suddenly what everyone was talking about: whisper networks, the need for rumor to tell stories with no other outlet, the corrupting influence of power, the silencing, the erasure. It felt inevitable that the conversation would wend its way to academia.
In February 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a long article about Jorge Domínguez, a tenured professor in Harvard’s Government department. The arc of the story was deeply familiar. Terry Karl alleged that Domínguez made unwanted sexual advances on her when she was an assistant professor in the same department. She said he made it clear to her that, as a full professor in her discipline, he controlled her fate in the institution. He allegedly said one night, as he tried to kiss her and slide his hand up her skirt, that he would be the next department chairman and would decide her promotion. And according to Terry Karl, he also stalked her and made her feel physically threatened.
For two years, she reported this behavior to Harvard, but nothing changed. Though the then dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences adjudicated in her favor, he allegedly indicated that she would be the one to have to leave. Karl felt that she had no choice but to file a formal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
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.”