"Queer Exodus" from Harvard Subject of Facebook Discussion

After a going-away party for an openly gay College administrator last month, Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Timothy P. McCarthy ’93 came to a disturbing realization: Seven prominent faculty members, administrators, and staff who identify as gay or lesbian have left the University in the last two years.

Openly gay undergraduate chaplain Jonathan C. Page ’02 left Memorial Church in the summer of 2010.

In the spring of 2011, Susan B. Marine, an openly lesbian College administrator who served as assistant dean of student life and the director of the Harvard College Women’s Center, announced her resignation.

Last summer, Paul J. McLoughlin, who is openly gay, stepped down from his post as senior adviser to the Dean of the College.

Openly gay History and Literature lecturer Ian K. Lekus left the University at the end of last summer when his teaching contract expired.

After 21 years at Harvard, Bradley S. Epps, director of undergraduate studies in Romance studies and director of graduate studies in women, gender, and sexuality, who identifies as queer, will not return in the fall.

Neither will openly gay Divinity School professor Mark D. Jordan, whose work focuses on ethics, Christianity, and sexuality.

And this August, Associate Dean of Student Life Joshua G. McIntosh, who is openly gay, will leave University Hall.

“I kind of woke up the next day [after McIntosh’s going-away party] and thought, ‘Wow, we've lost a lot of folks,’” said McCarthy, who is openly gay. “These aren't just people who happen to be gay or lesbian—they were incredibly visible, incredibly dedicated, incredibly talented, and incredibly important to the University.”

That day, June 20, McCarthy posted a status update on his Facebook account that listed the many departures.

”This queer exodus is a terrible thing for Harvard, its students, and its intellectual, political, and moral orientation,” McCarthy wrote.

Eight of McCarthy’s Facebook friends, including several of the gay and lesbian administrators he had named, posted comments on his status update that expressed concern or frustration.

Two of those former administrators who commented on McCarthy’s post, Marine and McLoughlin, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article. Epps, also a participant in the Facebook discussion, declined to be interviewed for this article.

But interviews with five of the participants in the Facebook discussion and others largely suggest that as Harvard’s first-ever permanent director of bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer student life starts work this week, all is not well according to gay and lesbian employees at Harvard.

Vanidy “Van” Bailey–who was tapped for the position last month after the original appointee, Lee Forest, turned it down just days before she was supposed to start last fall–is charged with becoming the face of a community that has recently lost many of its most prominent leaders.

Current and former Harvard employees say that these departures are compounded by the University’s shortcomings in promoting the academic discipline of LGBTQ studies. They predict that the LGBTQ campus community may suffer if Harvard does not actively recruit LGBTQ faculty members and administrators to replace the ones who have left.

“This was not meant to imply some grand conspiracy about Harvard's support for LGBTQ faculty members or staff or LGBTQ studies,” McCarthy said of his Facebook post. “My concern here is that we've lost these people, and so far we haven't replaced any of them with folks that are similarly equipped to do the work that they did for LGBTQ students and for LGBTQ studies.”

‘AN AFFIRMING PLACE’?

Campus Pride, a nonprofit advocacy group for LGBTQ life on college campuses, gave Harvard a 4.5 rating out of five stars on its most recent LGBT-Friendly Campus Climate Index, which evaluates institutions of higher learning.

Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds points to this rating and recent College initiatives as evidence of Harvard’s commitment to fostering LGBTQ life on campus.

In the fall of 2010, Hammonds convened a working group to assess the undergraduate LGBTQ community’s needs. A year and a half later, that committee of administrators, faculty, and students produced a report that included five recommendations for improving resources for LGBTQ students on campus. Based on that report, Hammonds announced plans to open a new Office of BGLTQ Student Life and to hire a full-time director to oversee the office.

Those plans hit a road bump when Forest abruptly turned down the job. In her absence, Emily J. Miller, a student at the Divinity School, oversaw the grand opening of the office as interim director this past spring.

None of the gay faculty and administrators interviewed for this article said they felt personally oppressed or persecuted on campus, and several who attended the College said they thought Harvard has become a significantly better place to be gay since their undergraduate years.

“I could not have chosen a more inclusive and supportive community in which to work,” McIntosh said of his experience as a gay Harvard administrator in an email.

But Lekus said that he did not always feel supported as a gay faculty member during his three years at Harvard.

“My gut feeling is that Harvard is the gayest place I’ve ever been either as a student or a teacher, but I wouldn't ever say it's an affirming place,” Lekus said. “Given how many committed LGBTQ allies there are in the University leadership, there is a failure to translate that to direct support, continuing to hammer home the impression that we are second-class citizens of the Harvard community.”

Divinity School professor and Lowell House Co-Master Diana L. Eck, who is openly lesbian, said she has always felt valued as LGBTQ faculty member. But she said she thought more work could still be done to make Harvard a welcoming place for LGBTQ employees.

“I’m sure we can do more to support gay faculty,” Eck said. “That's something that really has to come from a broad consensus of faculty throughout the University.”

Lekus said he thinks the recent establishment of a BGLTQ director and an Office of BGLTQ Student Life was long overdue–“the sign of a campus that is a follower, not a leader” on LGBTQ issues, he said.

The University of Pennsylvania hired its first-full time director for its program for gay and lesbian faculty, staff, and students in 1989; Princeton tapped its first full-time LGBT student services coordinator in 2001; and in 2006, Yale hired a special assistant to the dean for LGBTQ affairs.

Lekus also commented on McCarthy’s Facebook post, “When it comes to queer issues, it seems clear that Harvard is ready to make a bold leap into the early 1990s.”

Page echoed Lekus’ sentiment. “There’s not that sense of Harvard standing up and saying, ‘We want to be the best, we want to be the poster child of making this a supportive place,’” he said in an interview.

‘NO ONE TO WORK WITH’

McCarthy, Lekus, and Page all said they think Harvard does not do enough to promote the academic study of LGBTQ culture and history.

In 2001, Epps and Heather K. Love ’91, then a lecturer on literature, launched an effort to push for the establishment of a committee on studies of gender and sexuality, which was incorporated in the existing women’s studies program in 2003.

Since then, professors in the renamed Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality have unsuccessfully clamored for full departmental status.

In 2009, Harvard established the F. O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality, the country’s first endowed professorship in LGBTQ studies, funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus, an organization independent of the University.

This fall, Henry Abelove, an English professor emeritus at Wesleyan University, will teach two courses as the first recipient of the professorship.

But Lekus said he was not satisfied with this effort. “You have to wonder if this visiting scholarship absolves the University of actually hiring a senior scholar permanently in LGBTQ studies,” he said.

Even history professor Nancy Cott, who teaches History 1462: “History of Sexuality in Modern West,” said she does not consider herself an expert in LGBTQ history.

“It’s an area that I'm interested in and aware of,” said Cott. “But I would never call myself an LGBTQ specialist.” Instead, she describes herself as a historian of gender.

And though Harvard recently recruited LGBTQ scholar Michael Bronski from Dartmouth as a senior faculty member, his contract–though renewable–is not tenured.

FAS Dean of Arts and Humanities Diana Sorensen, who said that she and other University leaders highly value LGBTQ scholarship, pointed to the financial crisis and the subsequent hiring slowdown in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to explain why there are not more tenured LGBTQ scholars at Harvard.

WGS lecturer Caroline Light, the program’s director of undergraduate studies, wrote in an email that “the University has been supportive of the development of our program’s LGBT track and our LGBT secondary field.”

But McCarthy said that many WGS courses are taught by lecturers or visiting faculty members, leading to rapid turnover in the course catalog.

“You don't have courses that are offered year in and year out that would help establish LGBTQ studies as a legitimate subject of academic study at the University,” he said.

Lekus, who studies post-World War II LGBTQ movements, said he does not recommend Harvard to prospective graduate students seeking advice on where to pursue a degree in LGBTQ history.

“At least in the field of history, there would be no one to work with,” Lekus said. “It would be a waste of [graduate students’] time. It would be a waste of their money.”

One of the recommendations made in 2011 by the Working Group on BGLTQ Student Life called for “a thorough review of curricular offerings related to BGLTQ topics.”

Eck, who co-chaired the working group, and McCarthy, a member, both said they have yet to see any changes resulting from that recommendation.

In an emailed statement, FAS spokesperson Jeff Neal wrote that the College’s first priority following the release of the recommendations was to find a director to oversee the new Office of BGLTQ Student Life.

“With those recommendations enacted, the College and the Director now have the opportunity in the coming year to focus on the report’s other recommendations,” Neal wrote.

Both Lekus and Page also said they encountered resistance to LGBTQ studies among scholars of more mainstream academic disciplines at Harvard.

“Within Harvard academic departments, there’s some degree of suspicion and perhaps a lack of respect for queer studies,” Page said.

For Lekus, promoting LGBTQ scholarship at Harvard was “just plain exhausting.”

“You’re not fighting–by and large–the open bigotry of raging homophobes,” Lekus said. “You’re fighting the quiet, don’t-rock-the-boat complacency of the people who have made it at Harvard.”

FILLING THE VOID

None of the departed or outgoing Harvard affiliates interviewed for this article said they left Harvard because they were dissatisfied with the University’s progress on LGBTQ issues.

“I am not concerned about the departure of a number of LGBTQ friends and colleagues,” McIntosh wrote in an email. “As I see it, these friends have had opportunities for professional advancement and have taken advantage of these opportunities.”

However, in the Facebook discussion, McLoughlin wrote to his colleagues “continuing to fight the queer fight within the Ivy Gates” that part of his reason for leaving Harvard was that he “knew the grass had to be greener” after years of frustration. After McLoughlin was contacted by The Crimson for this article, his comment has been removed from Facebook.

And Epps commented on Facebook, “I'm leaving Harvard not just because I'm delighted with my new job in Britain but also because after 21 years of struggling to have the administration support LGBTQ Studies--beyond the generosity of the HGLC and the Open Gate--, Latino Studies, Spanish, WGS, and so much more, I found myself increasingly exhausted.... I've gotten old at Harvard and I damn well didn't, don't, want to die there with the eternal promise of ‘some day, some day.’”

Also on Facebook, Marine voiced concern about her former colleagues’ departures, writing, “I’m sad too, mostly because it takes a village of queers (and allies) to make incremental change in any institution.”

But on a more upbeat note, McIntosh wrote in his email that he took solace in the fact that “there are several new and long-standing faculty and administrators who identify as LGBTQ who are still at Harvard.”

But McCarthy, Lekus, Page, and Blaine G. Saito ’04–an openly gay proctor who left Harvard this month–all said the departures worried them.

Saito, who said he had many conversations with LGBTQ freshmen during his time as a proctor, expressed concern that students grappling with their sexual identities may find fewer prominent LGBTQ mentors.

Page agreed. “If the same thing happened with racial and ethnic minorities, I think the University would see this as a red flag,” he said.

He said he hopes the University will recruit new LGBTQ faculty and administrators to replace those who have left.

“The question is, has it gone unnoticed? If it’s gone unnoticed, then that's a problem,” he said.

Hammonds, who is lesbian and is the University’s highest-ranking official who openly identifies as LGBTQ, declined to comment on whether she had noticed a recent rash of departures of LGBTQ faculty and administrators but reiterated her commitment to promoting a vibrant LGBTQ community on campus.

“I’m pleased to hear that today’s BGLTQ students, faculty, and staff expect the College to be a welcoming and affirming community. I do too,” Hammonds wrote in an email. “That concern will be top of mind for me and all the members of my administration in our search for new leaders who can extend the improvements in the environment for BGLTQ students and allies–and for undergraduates of all backgrounds and orientations–that we’ve seen in recent years.”

But for now, Harvard’s LGBTQ community counts fewer prominent faces among its leaders.

In the Facebook discussion, Marine addressed McCarthy, the only one of the nine discussion participants who will return to Harvard this fall. “Tim - I feel I have abandoned you,” she wrote.

“I’m feeling a little lonely, quite frankly,” McCarthy said in an interview. “I feel lonelier without these people, because they’re not only trusted colleagues, but trusted friends. I feel their absence very deeply.”

–Nathalie R. Miraval contributed to the reporting of this article.

–Staff writer Rebecca D. Robbins can be reached at rrobbins@college.harvard.edu.