Confronting Sexual Violence with Optimism & Urgency

On Wednesday, March 29, we opened the front doors of University Hall to let in around 50 students to occupy the building. For eight hours, we waited outside administrators’ offices, calling for an end to Harvard’s complicity in the sexual violence crisis on campus.

By far the largest symbol of this complicity is Harvard’s response to multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against Professor John L. Comaroff. An ongoing lawsuit by survivors of Comaroff’s alleged abuse seeks to prove that the University violated the survivors’ rights at multiple points throughout their Title IX investigations, including by illegally obtaining and sharing one survivor’s private therapy notes with Comaroff.

Harvard’s actions represent the broader failure of the University administration to take the crisis of sexual violence seriously. We occupied University Hall because of Comaroff, but also because of the myriad of cases of sexual abuse on this campus that fail to make headlines. A 2016 study found that 31 percent of all undergraduate women and 47 percent of undergraduate women involved in final clubs experienced sexual assault at Harvard; a 2019 study showed little change, with 33 percent of all undergraduate women surveyed reporting some form of nonconsensual sexual contact. To attend Harvard is to know the pain, trauma, and academic interruption that sexual violence inflicts on so many of us, especially women and queer people.

But we were not occupying University Hall just to look backwards at Harvard’s long history of injustice. In our remarks that day, our press release, and our direct conversations with College Dean Rakesh Khurana and other administrators, we outlined a vision of how Harvard could move forward. In this piece, we would like to make that vision perfectly clear. It is one characterized by optimism and urgency.

Optimism means an insistence that eradicating sexual violence is possible. Anybody involved in the fight against sexual violence — including Harvard’s administrators, employees of the University’s Office of Gender Equity, and student activists — will recognize the feeling that ending sexual violence is an insurmountable task and struggle with a sense of hopelessness.

But we contend that we must work towards a world where the number of sexual assaults is zero. We should be guided by a militant optimism, taking as our goal a complete end to sexual violence rather than a modest reduction or improved response after the fact. Anything less constitutes tacit acceptance that members of our community will experience potentially lifelong trauma and significant disruption to their education.

This is simply unacceptable. Our community needs to measure Harvard’s progress against the ambitious goal of achieving zero sexual violence, understanding that we do not yet know exactly how to get there.

While playing music, laughing, and sharing stories in the occupied University Hall, we were reminded that working towards the goal of zero can also be positive and beautiful. Ending sexual violence is an opportunity to build a better community, one rooted in care and respect. It will not be easy, nor will it be uniformly positive. But bringing our community together around this goal will generate new knowledge, new practices, and activate the creative and intellectual potential in all of us.

Abolitionist feminist Mariame Kaba has a saying: “Hope is a discipline.” Hope is not a passive feeling but an activating conviction, one we must carefully foster by taking active steps to create the world where it can be realized. Our optimism must be accompanied by urgent action.

Urgency at Harvard looks like bold, top-down leadership. During our occupation, our condition for leaving before 5 p.m. was simple: We would leave if Dean Khurana sent out a College-wide email naming sexual violence as a crisis and calling for a campus state of emergency to solve it. But by 5 p.m. and in the many days since, no email has been sent. Naming sexual violence as a crisis is a crucial first step to inspiring the urgent response it requires.

Addressing sexual violence demands a community-wide effort, with students, administrators, faculty, staff, and residential communities all actively participating in creating solutions. Strong leadership can steer such comprehensive action. During the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Harvard’s top administrators emphasized our collective responsibility in curbing the virus’s spread and transformed campus life. There is no reason why Harvard’s leadership cannot once again take decisive action to safeguard our community.

Urgency also means Harvard must accept a leadership role among universities. Harvard prides itself on leading higher education in many fields but is reticent towards leading the fight against sexual violence. Our prevention infrastructure and Title IX policies lag behind others around the nation. Universities with a fraction of Harvard’s endowment nevertheless find funds for independent rape crisis centers that provide much-needed campus advocacy in addition to resources for survivors.

Some institutions, like Antioch College, have undertaken bold, collaborative experiments in building communities to prevent sexual violence. Meanwhile, Harvard’s faculty and students are left without comprehensive recourse from the scourge of violence that happens on our very campus and to members of our own community. Those who have tried to fix the problem, like former Anthropology Department Chair Ajantha Subramanian, have left due to a lack of institutional support for their efforts.

Certainly, we must be thoughtful in the initiatives we undertake to end sexual violence. But the glacial pace of change at Harvard is inexcusable. The richest school in the world has an obligation to devote its significant resources towards leading the charge to end sexual violence on college campuses. The Harvard community, and especially Harvard’s leadership, must move with both optimism and urgency.

Rachael A. Dziaba ’26 lives in Pennypacker Hall. William M. Sutton ’23 is a History concentrator in Lowell House. Aly A. Tarmin ’24 is a Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies concentrator in Winthrop House.