Two College Students Dismissed for Sexual Misconduct

UPDATED: February 4, 2015, at 1:02 p.m.

The Faculty Council dismissed two undergraduates from the College on Dec. 10 for sexual misconduct, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith said at Tuesday's monthly meeting of the Faculty.

One of those students had been the subject of three harassment complaints, while the second student was the subject of one, according to Smith. Both have been notified of their dismissals, he said.

Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 enters University Hall to attend the semester’s first meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The body voted to add a new Ph.D. program and learned that two students were dismissed for sexual misconduct in December. By Gladys M Kisela

The cases were the last reviewed under the school’s former sexual harassment policy and procedures, Smith said. FAS's interim policy was replaced Monday when new FAS procedures were released, expanding Harvard's central sexual harassment investigation office's jurisdiction to include cases of alleged sexual harassment by faculty and staff.

The Faculty Council—the highest elected body of FAS—must approve recommendations by the College's Administrative Board to dismiss or expel a student, a decision reached only in the most serious cases of misconduct. Only another Faculty Council vote can readmit a student who has been dismissed from the College—a rare occurrence.

Following Smith's remarks, the Faculty voted unanimously for a new Ph.D. program in “Population Health Sciences," the only docketed item of the meeting, which ended after approximately 20 minutes.

The new program will combine five doctorate of science programs within the Harvard School of Public Health's departments of Environmental Health, Epidemiology, Global Health and Population, Nutrition, and Social and Behavioral Sciences into a single, Ph.D.-awarding program.

The topic of the Unviersity's new health benefits policy for non-union employees, a recurrent point of contention at Faculty meetings throughout the fall semester, also surfaced at Tuesday's meeting.

University President Drew G. Faust said her office is currently compiling data on health care expenditures at Harvard. This statement came three months after FAS professors unanimously called upon Faust at their November meeting to repeal changes to health benefits plans. Faust said she will distribute the information later this week to faculty members who had raised concerns and that the data will also be published on the Harvard Information for Employees website.

As part of a series of measures Faust announced in November in response to the Faculty's vote, administrators will hold information sessions in Longwood and in Cambridge in which members of the University Benefits Committee—the group that recommended the changes to the health benefits plan—will solicit feedback from the community on the changes.

During the question period of the meeting, Government professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 asked Faust about a statement she gave to The Crimson in early December addressing grand jury decisions not to indict two white police officers who had killed unarmed black men on separate occasions.

Mansfield said the University should “be wary of reacting to events” and specifically pointed to controversies in Ferguson, Mo., and New York this summer, as well as the subsequent shooting of two police officers in New York.

In response, Faust said that issues of race and justice were central to her life as a scholar of the Civil War and a participant in the Selma marches of 1965, adding that all lives matter.

“You would see I was not making a judgment on the outcome of any particular adjudication of an issue,” she said. “I was rather talking about the great pain that is felt across the country because of the sense of injustice that prevails across our land.”

Her response was met with loud applause.

—Staff writer Karl M. Aspelund can be reached at karl.aspelund@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @kma_crimson.

—Staff writer Meg P. Bernhard can be reached at meg.bernhard@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @meg_bernhard.

This article has been revised to reflect the following corrections:

CORRECTIONS: February 4, 2015

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a vote of the Faculty is required to readmit a student after dismissal. In fact, a vote of the Faculty Council, but not the full Faculty, is required. Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article also incorrectly stated that the Faculty Council is the highest government body of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In fact, it is the highest elected body.