When It Comes to Student Safety, the Real Threat Is Inside the Gates

Our campus is, although sometimes a restrictive Harvard “bubble,” also quite safe — at least according to a University report released on September 30, which reported the lowest levels of on-campus crime in the past decade.

Harvard’s report — which suggested that crime rates fell for the fourth year in a row in 2021, with only 142 registered criminal incidents — certainly appears encouraging. Yet tethering any public discussion of safety to highly variable (as well as easy to miscalculate or misrepresent) crime statistics can be misleading. Particularly given the lingering effect of pandemic-era restrictions, we find reason to doubt that the statistical picture closely mirrors the reality of our community. The marginal swings identified by such reports, if overstated in relevance, risk flattening all nuance to alternately cause excess alarmism and undue relaxation. Student and affiliate safety should remain our priority, regardless of fast-shifting numbers.

On that front, and despite the reassuring report, our Editorial Board cannot feel at ease. Just last fall, out of concern for student safety and comfort, we praised Harvard for its policy of closing its gates to the public after 5 p.m. and argued in favor of making permanent a revised version of said policy. A year later we recognize that our reasoning was deeply misguided: The real threat to student safety on campus lies not beyond the gates in Cambridge, but within.

The call, as they say, is coming from inside the house.

No non-University Cambridge resident poses quite as acute and constant a threat to Harvard affiliates as their own peers; suggesting otherwise, and, in doing so, othering our entire local community and depicting them as an alien menace to be locked out for our safety was our grave mistake. Depictions of Cambridge — a city the US Chamber of Commerce recently deemed the second-safest city in America for trick-or-treating because of low numbers of violent crime, pedestrain fatalities and registered sex offenders — as somehow ‘dangerous’ are nothing but distracting, unbridled alarmism.

Truth is, in our quiet corner of Massachusetts, any potential external harm pales in comparison to the greatest danger students face on a daily basis: Title IX concerns, and the University’s failure to adequately address them. When we speak of a Title IX crisis on campus, as we have been forced to do with depressing frequency, we mean that there are people whom we considered members of our community that violate Title IX guidelines. Sexual assault and harassment cases do not just magically appear on a campus devoid of active perpetrators. A perverse subsector of our peers, professors and other non-Cantabrigian acquaintances represents the most recurrent and intractable threat to our safety.

But how could we feel fully secure with alleged predators, such as professors Roland G. Fryer Jr. and John L. Comaroff, among our teaching staff? How, then, can the Yard be a safe space for all, gates locked or not?

The short answer is that it can’t be — and won’t be until the University finally recognizes Title IX as a public safety concern of paramount importance, one that affects the entire campus. As we have argued before, doing so entails the University taking a proactive, not reactive, approach to Title IX issues on campus: a combination of having consistent dialogues to improve Title IX policies, fostering an explicitly and aggressively anti-harassment campus culture, and finally implementing third-party arbitration, which the graduate student union has repeatedly strived for. It might, more pressingly, also involve accepting greater institutional responsibility, perhaps by reconsidering a University-wide reading of Title IX so intent on legally distancing the University from the alleged retaliatory practices of its faculty members that it has prompted reproach from the Department of Justice itself.

Above all, the shift towards treating sexual misconduct as our chief safety concern must entail a recommitment to Title IX reform on campus and beyond. The constructive feedback that the American Council on Education, a higher education membership organization that includes Harvard, has shared with the Biden administration on its proposed Title IX amendments embodies said commitment, and highlights a prime opportunity to make strides in redefining Title IX procedures across college campuses.

The process won’t be without controversy. There are increasing fair concerns regarding reform, particularly about lackluster due process protections afforded to the accused in some proposed amendments — even if none of them are sufficiently convincing, at this time, to distract us from addressing the obstacles that lead an estimated 63 percent of rape cases to go unreported. Said obstacles, we know, stem from deep rooted cultural issues that cannot be neatly uprooted by policy: For many victims, often women, coming forward means not only confronting their attackers, but also facing up to an overwhelming culture of shame and dismissal that reinforces trauma before a path toward justice ever appears.

We are also aware that in cases involving the prosecution of severe accusations, the golden standard of innocent until proven guilty — albeit theoretically sacrosanct — tends to prove malleable. When inherent inequalities in conceived notions of deservingness — of respect, dignity, and compassion — come into play, the standard is rapidly corrupted. That much is neither new nor unique: The presumed criminality of marginalized identities (particularly racial ones, given the inflated carceral and exoneration rates of Black people), and inversely, the presumed innocence of young white men facing misconduct accusations in particular, has been well recorded.

These concocted notions of inherent innocence or guilt sway us too frequently — particularly when physical evidence is scant, as is often the case with allegations of misconduct or harassment. In those instances, the crushing burden of proof placed on victims to avoid any potential injuries inflicted upon the accused’s reputation and future prospects reveals a grotesque misalignment between the principle of ensuring justice and the real procedural hurdles to doing so. The resulting framework prioritizes the accused’s imagined bright future over the real, damning assaults that have violently derailed victims’ life courses.

Our sorely-needed Title IX paradigm shift should reflect that reality. Until it does, many of our fellow peers, especially those who identify as queer or female, will remain unacceptably fearful within a city otherwise safe enough to prove dull. It is not their exclusive obligation to painstakingly negotiate culture or policy changes that address their fears — that burden falls upon all of us within the gates.

The call is coming from inside the house — the bold, uncompromising answer must do so too.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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