By now you’re probably read about the the dismissal of Ronald Sullivan and his wife from their posts at Harvard College’s Winthrop House:
The story begins last January when the African American Law School Professor Ronald Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s defense team…
…[Sullivan’s] decision to represent the man at the centre of the #MeToo scandal proved too much for some radical students, who began organizing protests in Harvard Square. The chant heard most often at these rallies is ‘Believe Survivors’, the same phrase that activists used when campaigning against Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. The implication is that the presumption of innocence should not be extended to men accused of rape or sexual assault.
Initially they wanted to get Sullivan fired from Harvard Law School, but the law school stood firmly behind Sullivan. Law schools still seem to understand the importance of allowing attorneys to defend unpopular clients without losing their teaching jobs. But then the college was approached with a different tactic by the activists:
Sullivan’s critics, perhaps realizing they weren’t going to get very far arguing that Harvey Weinstein wasn’t entitled to due process, focused instead on trying to get him removed as a dean of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s undergraduate dorms, where he has served for 10 years. This position, which Sullivan shares with his wife Stephanie Robinson, a law lecturer at Harvard, is a pastoral one and, as such, gives him some responsibility for students’ mental health and well-being. This, then, was his Achilles heel.
This is an important point that gets somewhat lost in some of the articles on the issue—the approach of the anti-Sullivan activists was definitely tied to his defense of Weinstein, but it had a psychological twist involving his position as Winthrop dean:
To date, the only half-decent argument that’s been made against Sullivan being able to combine these two roles is one put forward by the feminist intellectual Catharine MacKinnon, also a professor at Harvard Law. For her, the issue turns on whether ‘sexually abused students can feel comfortable confiding in’ a dean who’s representing ‘a credibly accused multiple perpetrator of sexual assault’. She doesn’t categorically say they can’t, but she thinks it’s ‘an equality question’ for him and Harvard to consider…
But the Dean of Harvard College, a sociology professor named Rakesh Khurana, said after a meeting with Sullivan that he took ‘seriously’ the concerns expressed by the activists and said ‘more work must be done to uphold our commitment to the well-being of our students’. Those were no empty words, either. A few days later, he announced Harvard would carry out a ‘climate review’ of Winthrop House, an example of bureaucratic gobbledygook that didn’t bode well for Professor Sullivan. As he pointed out in the New York Times: ‘Never in the history of the faculty dean position has the dean been subjected to a “climate review” in the middle of some controversy.’
Sure enough, Khurana announced the outcome of the review on Saturday: Sullivan and his wife’s employment as faculty deans of Winthrop House would end on June 30.
‘Over the last few weeks, students and staff have continued to communicate concerns about the climate in Winthrop House to the college,’ he wrote in an email to students and staff at Winthrop. ‘The concerns expressed have been serious and numerous.’
Not only does this constitute a capitulation of the dancing bears (see *NOTE below) at Harvard to sensitive students over the right of a law professor to defend unpopular clients (and, connected with that, the right of that defendant to even have an effective defense with a lawyer of his/her choice), but it also represents Harvard’s placing the needs of the #MeToo crowd over its championing of a minority group professor as well as a profound break with its own law school, as describe here:
According to The New York Times, “They were the first African-American faculty deans in Harvard’s history.”…
The Harvard Crimson reports that over 50 law professors at Harvard, including Dershowitz, are standing behind Sullivan.
There’s still another aspect of the story, covered heavily in the Harvard newspaper the Crimson, which is that the “climate” in Winthrop House concerning Sullivan and Robinson seems to have a history prior to this incident. I read the whole Crimson article (it’s long) and found it not the least bit evident what they’re talking about, except that it seems that some people complained about the couple and had some trouble with them earlier. A commenter at the article wrote this, and I agree with it: “There are a lot of adjectives [in the Crimson article], like ‘toxic’ and ‘antagonistic’, but a paucity of specifics. All they really add up to is, ‘something I dislike.’ What did Robinson supposedly do or not do?”
At any rate, it’s fairly clear that these previous complaints were about other things, and that Sullivan and Robinson’s dismissal as deans would never have occurred but for the prospect of Sullivan defending Weinstein and the pressure from students worrying about being triggered. In an irony, Sullivan has actually quit the Weinstein defense team because of a scheduling conflict, but I doubt that would have put a dent in the students’ demands. He had already been branded as evil and insufficiently nurturing.
A lot of things are going on here, none of them good. But I’d like to discuss one thing that I don’t think has been emphasized enough in the Sullivan controversy, and that is the idea of what students should expect from universities as well as what universities should expect from students.
Are students to be considered adults? And if the university is still in loco parentis, does it need to be consistent in this regard?
When I was in college it was pretty clear: students were not adults. For the most part, we couldn’t legally drink. We couldn’t vote. Women not only didn’t live in men’s dorms and vice versa, we couldn’t even go upstairs in each other’s dorms. Women had curfews every single night; men did not.
Obviously, much of this was for the protection of women from sexual predators and pressures. It’s not that the rules couldn’t be circumvented—they could, and they sometimes were. But the colleges weren’t saying okay to a lot of sex among college age students, and for the most part society itself wasn’t saying okay, and therefore it was also easier for young women to learn how to say “no” to pressure, something a lot of compliant and people-pleasing (and love-seeking) women had trouble doing even if they really wanted to say “no.”
Simply put, society was strongly reinforcing women’s right to wait till they were ready to have sex. What that meant for each individual woman was different, but the general trend was quite different than now, when pressures are quite the opposite.
At the very same time, we college students were all treated as adults in that we weren’t given the impression that the world of the college was there to conform to our emotional needs and/or demands. If something made us uncomfortable—if a professor was insufficiently warm and fuzzy, or was defending a murderer or rapist, or whatever might upset us but was within the law—well then, it was pretty much suck it up, buttercup. That had its problems, too, but it had the distinct advantage of teaching us something about the world, which is that the world wasn’t going to cater to our vulnerabilities, and that it was up to us to try to get stronger and tougher and deal with it.
Not a bad lesson, really.
Today’s students probably have more to contend with, really—although they also have more resources in terms of counseling available if they need help dealing with the pressures. It’s not just the hookup culture, which I think is profoundly tension-producing. It’s social media, whipping them into a frenzy. It’s more instability at home—more divorce, for example, and more drug use. But in particular it’s that way too many adults have failed to teach them that no, the world doesn’t function around you and your PTSD, difficult and upsetting though this may be.
[*NOTE: The term “dancing bears” is one I’ve used several times before. It comes from a quote from Allan Bloom’s 80s classic on the university and its students, The Closing of the American Mind:
[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.
As I wrote in the post I just linked, in response to that Bloom quote:
Well, now that the universities have been purged of just about all remaining conservative professors and administrators, campus activists don’t have to listen to all that blather about academic freedom. Or if they do, it’s all about freedom for the left, freedom to threaten anyone and everyone who disagrees with them.]
