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 anthropology 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.”