Taking Back Harvard: Addressing Our Sexual Assault Culture Means Reckoning With History

Beneath Harvard’s glimmering prestige and esteemed legacy lies an unspoken, ugly reality: Generations of sexual violence, gender oppression, and institutional silence continue to shape its present.

Without acknowledging this cycle of violence, we are powerless to stop it from continuing. Sexual violence is not confined to a distant past — it pollutes every inch of this institution’s history and physical space to this day. That is why we founded Take Back Harvard — the first project documenting and contextualizing the history of sexual assault and gender discrimination at the University. And that is why we won’t stop until Harvard’s history of sexual assault is properly remembered.

Harvard only officially started conferring degrees to women in 1963, but its exploitation of and discrimination against them began long before. Some of the first women to work on our campus were enslaved by University officials and endured racialized violence. Even after the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, Harvard continued to profit from the labor of the enslaved. As recently as the 1950s, Harvard employed a maid system, which was ultimately terminated in anticipation of demands for higher wages.

The women of Radcliffe College too were constantly reminded of their perceived inferiority. They were barred from studying in Lamont Library, made to pay for sports games that were free for men, and were subjected to everyday harassment. Even after Radcliffe was fully integrated into the University in 1999, women continued to face discrimination and sexual violence on campus.

We’ve seen firsthand the material echoes of this legacy since arriving here two and a half years ago. Our freshman year, the Harvard community called for the resignation and rallied for the removal of Professor John L. Comaroff, who was still teaching despite years of sexual harassment allegations from his graduate students. This spring, Professor Eric Rentschler was put on leave for violating sexual assault conduct policies.

Yet the numbers don’t add up. These moments — and movements — represent only the tip of the iceberg that is Harvard’s epidemic of sexual violence and harassment. In 2022, more than a quarter of surveyed Faculty of Arts and Sciences members knew someone in their department who had been sexually harassed in the Harvard workplace. Students who have faced assault or harassment are up against an institution that often ignores their pleas for protection and support, forced to navigate a broken Title IX system, and live in fear of running into their assailants in the dining hall.

It’s impossible to walk this campus without passing through spaces stained by memories of silence, assault, and even murder. From Longfellow Park, where Radcliffe fellow Ethel Higonnet was raped and killed decades ago, to Annenberg Hall, where a first-year reported being groped while standing in line for breakfast, to every House and first-year dorm where students have been assaulted and raped, Harvard’s grounds are saturated with vestiges of sexual violence.

And it is women who bear the brunt of this harassment. The majority of these cases — both on our campus and beyond — involve male perpetrators and female survivors, a chilling reminder that gender-based discrimination and sexual violence are closely intertwined.

Until this year, as far as we know, there was no infrastructure in place to document this noxious network. Take Back Harvard fills this void: It is composed only of publicly accessible materials, and we have logged over 500 materials across 100 years of institutional history since its inception last February.

The term “history” may imply a separation between past and present. Yet each of Take Back Harvard’s records — drawn from student publications, national media, photographs, protest ephemera, and student surveys — reveal an unsettling truth: Gender-based violence and institutional prejudice is woven into the fabric of Harvard’s legacy and continues to undermine our vision for a more perfect Harvard.

Take Back Harvard is itself not perfect. Our archive is built upon public records, the contents of which have been shaped by an institution steeped in white supremacy, class privilege, and systemic bias. For every case reported, one (or more) goes unreported, leaving critical chasms in our understanding of the problem’s breadth.

The stories we have are therefore incomplete, and we’ve found that older documents in particular are likely to omit incidents which involved people of color, queer individuals, or members of the local community. Take Back Harvard is working to expand its bounds to account for these gaps in knowledge and history; we are currently creating two additional collections dedicated to documenting LGBTQ+ and racial discrimination to bolster research on the intersectionality of sexual violence and these identities.

As activists graduate and their insights are buried by forgotten records and leadership turnover, necessary and effective mobilization becomes difficult. Take Back Harvard aims to fill these discontinuities in our University’s collective memory. The project invites students, affinity groups, and other organizations from across Harvard’s schools to come together to reflect on and contribute their own institutional materials and memories of sexual violence. In this way, we hope our project can serve as a communal platform for discussing and chronicling this history as it occurs.

Take Back Harvard is not just about remembering; it is about reclaiming. Our University’s future cannot be built on the same unacknowledged violence and complicity that has defined its past. It must be forged, instead, through action, accountability, and a commitment to justice.

Stella Lei ’26 is a Comparative Literature concentrator in Eliot House. Jessica Wang ’26 is an English concentrator in Eliot House. They are organizers with the Harvard Feminist Coalition, formerly known as Our Harvard Can Do Better.