What do you think about how Harvard U has treated Prof. Ronald Sullivan and his wife?

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161

“is it anything that some non-zero number of students determine is traumatic to them?”

This is the part that concerns me. Let’s say a professor performs research on stem cells, a major area of inquiry at Harvard. Is that professor disqualified from being a faculty dean because some members of the House community will have sincere and deeply held conviction that this research is morally equal to the murder of infants? How could you ever feel safe around a person if that’s what you believed of them?

PTSD following trauma isn’t the only kind of anxiety disorder that the women of Winthrop are likely to have. The prevalence of anxiety disorders in adolescent women is extremely high, in the range of 30%. What about other kinds of associations or trauma that are triggering to undergraduates? Let’s say a professor conducts research on spiders or snakes. Could someone with the (very common and quite serious) phobia of spiders or snakes feel safe discussing this problem with that faculty dean? What if the students are having panic attacks every time they walk into the House because the professor might have brought some work home? Should the faculty dean be removed from their post if they won’t give up that research?

162

OK, what percentage of students come to deans because they’ve been raped, and what percent come to deans because they’re afraid of snakes and spiders? You can’t seriously think those two issues are comparable.

Moreover, Weinstein’s strategy is to attack his accusers, whereas the snake researcher (presumably) doesn’t attack and deride people who are afraid of snakes. People know that others have fears they themselves don’t have. I don’t like heights, but my rock-climbing friends don’t attack and deride me for it; they just accept that different people like different things.

If there were a potential dean who derided students with phobias or anxiety disorders, then I’d say, yeah, that person shouldn’t be a dean. But studying something that some others fear is not the same as attacking people with phobias.

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@“Cardinal Fang” If Sullivan has been on the record deriding all victims of sexual assault I’d say this is sufficient grounds for removal. However, it’s not the case as far as I understand.

164

Yes, people are just stretching to support Harvard administration’s decision. Sullivan had already appointed a woman to handle women who were not comfortable talking to a male about sex related trauma or anxiety. The two mob leaders did not even live in that house. It had everything to do with Sullivan joining the Weinstein defense team and nothing to do with Sullivan’s legal history or all the years he and his wife were in that house and Harvard chose to support the students in their mob tactics. It is really that simple.

165

Do these heads of houses have much of a role in handling rape accusations? Sure, they’re mandatory reporters, but I would assume the Title IX office and campus police completely handle the investigation and the university disciplinary process makes the determination of what actions to take or not to take in response.

166

I don’t think any students go to dean’s because they were raped. Why on earth would they? Therapists, health centers, or the security/police would be contact points.

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They go to the Title IX Coordinator, who often is a dean.

168

They go to the dean of their house to report sexual assault? And based on the info provided by the Dean and other posters Harvard has a huge problem and includes the worst kinds of assaults. Wow.

I spoke to my d today and asked honestly about her school. She said that she wasn’t aware of single case within her friend group the entire year. I was very relieved. But half the women being assaulted should be grounds for the school being closed in my book. Period. Harvard or not.

Why would they go to housemaster for this type of report. It should be 911!

And what if the dean is not at not home. Or it happened in another dorm.

No call the police and your parents.
Or go to hospital.
Or campus security.
Or your friends.

The desn of the residence seems to be there to talk about things or dinner with other students and friends. Or roommate issues.

But sexual assault initial reports? Ok. Even if this is the case, who says this professor wouldn’t immediately call the police and administrator. He’s an officer of the court and a senior official in the dorm.

169

Sullivan resigned from the legal team. We have no idea what his actual role was, if he was even interviewing witnesses nevermind ‘deriding’ them and he was still removed as Dean, so that was clearly NOT the sole reason for his being removed. As far as I could tell, his public role to date has involved showing up at a hearing beside Weinstein. We don’t know if Sullivan was given the option of resigning from the case and keeping his Dean job or if his resignation was his own attempt at keeping his Dean job. We don’t know if his co-Dean, his wife, was given any options such as taking over the lead role; she is listed as a lecturer not as a professor, so having her named as dean may not have been an option. But it begs the question what if it was his wife who was on the Weinstein legal team? Could he have lost the Deanship based on his wife’s career, on her outside clients?

Harvard is presenting this as a non-renewal based on issues within the House, such as large personnel turnover compared to other Houses, requesting personal tasks be performed by the tutors in the house, bad reviews from the students in the House, and then adding on the Weinstein stuff as the death dagger. If the other reasons were sufficient for non-renewal, adding the Weinstein stuff just muddied the removal process.

There is danger in hiring the Deans based on their outside lives or basing continued employment on it. Do you require the Deans to be married and how traditional must that marriage be? Does the spouse have to participate in the Deanship or can he/she just live there and have his/her own life? Can the dean be/not be religious, and what if it’s a controversial religion like Scientology? Can the Dean be related to criminals? Whitey Bulger’s brother was President of U Mass system and if Whitey hadn’t been in hiding for 30 years, could he have come over for dinner? Can the Dean be a member of the military (Reservist? retired but collecting benefits?), in a pro-life organization, working with foreign countries (friends of the US or foes)?

Slippery slope.

170

After meeting today with my “dream team” lawyer of one, lol, (recommended to me by my mother’s hospice social worker) so I can salvage a semblance of my very elderly parents meager assets bc I’m getting to the end of my rope with my mom’s ever-increasing care needs, I am going to answer the OP’s original question bc this thread has gone waaaaay off topic! And, since dissenting opinion seems to garner much animosity - don’t understand the Constitution, dumb and weak, whiny, snowflake, etc. - I’m hoping that my fellow CCers can be a little more civil in their discourse.

How do I think Harvard treated this guy and his wife? He didn’t lose his job as a professor! The House Dean role seems to be more than just a perfunctory role where the Dean interacts on a more personal level with the occupants of the house. S’s primary employer appears to be Harvard and, perhaps, after hearing all the uproar surrounding S’s sidelight job of defense for HW, they felt it wasn’t in their best interest to allow him to continue in that roll. IOW, he lost a luxury bennie but NOT his primary job.

Did Harvard cave? I don’t know. Who’s the ringleader of the so-called witch hunt? I don’t know. More importantly, if MA is an at will state, Harvard will do what Harvard thinks is in their best interest, period. If he’s tenured and how that plays a role in things, I don’t know but I’m sure the powers-that-be at Harvard talked to their “dream team” before doing what they did. Oh the irony in that.

Also, S is NOT a public defender where he has no choice in who he defends and HW is not some poor shmuck who needs a public defender. The earlier analogies in this thread that referenced Atticus Finch (S) and Tom Robinson (HW) in To Kill a Mockingbird and the other one that compared this issue to MLK - all I can say is wow, just wow! HW is most certainly not some poor shmuck who’s in desperate need of a lawyer to defend him! He’s assembling a dream team of the finest lawyers his money can buy - yeah!, good for him. Nowhere, however, in the Constitution does it say you are entitled to a “dream team” of lawyers to represent you and that they all should accept your offer. HW is entitled to retaining the best defense his money can buy and those lawyers can either accept or decline his request. Obviously, we’ve seen this show before (OJ). The one with the most money and the best dream team usually wins. The average Joe, good luck to you!

In the end, S will still be making plenty of money as a Harvard professor doing better than the majority of us plebes and HW will have his dream team and, hopefully, justice will be served.

171

Seems like there is a lot of Harvard bashing going on in this thread. Look at this in some other ways. Sullivan was trying to hold three jobs at once He was trying to keep his 500k professor job and his 100k or so dean job while also working full time for HW for probably 500k. You can’t hold three jobs at once.

How many insurance defense lawyers do some PI plaintiff work in their free time? How many US attorneys do state court criminal defense work or consulting? How many administrators at liberty university spend their free time helping the ACLU? The answer to all these questions is probably none. So why should Harvard be treated any differently?

172

Many law professors have private practices, think tank jobs, appear as commentators on TV, write text books, etc.

Insurance defense lawyers probably don’t do PI work on the side, but they do teach law school classes, do pro bono work, and some even serve in the military reserve where they do a little of everything. When I worked for a government agency, many of the other attorneys had second jobs that did involve law. They had to get permission to do that, and we had a requirement to report our outside earnings (and other stuff) every year. One guy was a law professor, but he’d taught the same class for years so he didn’t need a lot of prep time.

Harvard knew Sullivan had an outside practice before they hired him as a law professor and later as a House Dean.

173

If that’s the case, then I’m sure they were fine with him having his practice on the side. When his private practice decisions started to affect Harvard, however, the controversy must’ve compelled them to do what they felt was in their best interest. Whether we agree with Harvard or not is a moot point bc they are his employer and they have their own business to run and the controversy gave them plausible just cause. He still has his job as a professor.

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STEM professors routinely perform external consulting work, as do many social science professors. And of course so do many professors of the graduate professional programs (medicine, business, and yes, law). This is not remotely new or unusual.

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“Sullivan was trying to hold three jobs at once He was trying to keep his 500k professor job and his 100k or so dean job while also working full time for HW for probably 500k. You can’t hold three jobs at once.”

You can definitely do that and it’s done by many professors. As others have noted, it’s common for professors to spend one semester teaching, the other semester and summer consulting. It’s possible the dean position could mean that he’d have to take local cases, but there’s nothing wrong with Sullivan holding those positions at the same time.

176

“OK, what percentage of students come to deans because they’ve been raped, and what percent come to deans because they’re afraid of snakes and spiders?.”

Are you saying that the rape-survivor issue is only so significant because of the number of affected people? If we found out that it was 2% of the women in the house, then the Weinstein representation would be no big deal?

“You can’t seriously think those two issues are comparable”

I do. I do think that people’s diagnosable anxiety, whatever the cause, should be treated with equal seriousness and compassion. I EXPECT the world to be dismissive of psychiatric suffering that doesn’t connect to some arbitrarily defined external trauma. But I think they should not be.

177

Yeah, I am saying that. I think that we should put more weight on a potential disadvantage if it would affect a lot of students.

178

To be clear, no one is actually unsafe because a professor is also a defense lawyer. It’s just that these people allegedly can’t distinguish between the role of a person as an advocate in court and the role of a person advocating for the underlying crime. Do we usually cater to the way people believe something is, even when that belief is both not grounded in reality and affects other people?

179

But wouldn’t the logic of removing Sullivan from his dean position imply he should be removed from his teaching position? If the theory is being in the same room or worse having a conservation with HW’s attorney causes a devastating emotional impact, then doesn’t that apply in the classroom? What if one of his law students feels unsafe around him?

180

I don’t actually think so, roethlisburger. The role of a law-school professor does not involve personal interactions with the students in the class, and the topics are academic. The role of the Faculty Dean of a Harvard House does involve personal interactions with the students. I referred earlier to a column in the Harvard Crimson by the Faculty Dean of another Harvard House, explaining the role of the Faculty Dean. The Faculty Dean typically does a lot to “humanize” Harvard for the students.