Harvard Told to Replace Lost Files Within Week

A federal judge yesterday told Harvard that before the end of next week it must finish handing over replacements of destroyed documents involved in a sex discrimination suit against the University.

In a pretrial status conference, U.S. District Court Judge David Woodlock said Harvard attorneys must speed up efforts to produce substitutes for records of Business School tenure decisions that the University said were inadvertently destroyed last April because of an administrative blunder.

Harvard is under court-order to give the papers to attorneys of former Associate Business School Professor Barbara Bund Jackson, who contends in a 1984 suit that she was denied tenure at the Business School because of her sex.

Shortly before yesterday's conference, University attorneys delivered a thick folder of replacement documents to Evan T. Lawson, Jackson's lawyer. More papers will be turned over as the University is able to obtain them, Harvard attorney Allan A. Ryan told the judge.

"I think that Mr. Lawson will be satisfied" with the replacement documents, he said.

But after a preliminary look at the folder handed over yesterday, Jackson, who was also present at the conference, said the destroyed tenure files were irreplaceable.

"The documents are totally unsatisfactory in recreating the case," she said. "Harvard has destroyed the fundamental evidence. What do you do when that happens?"

The destroyed files contained confidentialrecommendations by members of Business Schoolfaculty subcommittees on individual tenure casesover the past decade.

Lawson said he hoped the documents would helpprove that male professors with qualificationssimilar to Jackson's had been granted tenure atthe Business School.

Commenting for the first time on the case,Jackson said she was suspicious of the destructionof documents. "It's very hard to believe. I'vetold several people about it and they immediatelystart talking about Watergate," Jackson said.

At yesterday's session, Woodlock did not ruleon whether the replacement documents are adequate,but attorneys said the judge may consider theissue when he next meets with the litigants onDecember 4.

In a letter to Woodlock a week ago, Ryan saidBusiness School staff had undertaken "anexhaustive search in an attempt to reconstruct themissing files insofar as possible." In courtyesterday, he told the judge that Harvard would beable to recreate "the essence" of the originaldocuments.

The General Counsel's office has said that itwill be able to reproduce much of thecourt-ordered information through remainingrecords and through depositions filed by membersof the faculty sub-committees.

But Jackson said most of the replacementdocuments will be summaries explaining tenuredecisions and not the recommendations bysubcommittee members on which the decisions arebased. "I wouldn't call them replacement documentsbecause they're not at all the raw material.