(Excerpts from Inside Higher Ed)

• Harvard faces a lawsuit by three graduate students who say for years it ignored their warnings and complaints about a prominent anthropologist before making minimal findings against him.
• Harvard’s anthropology department has faced multiple faculty sexual misconduct scandals in recent years, including one that led to Harvard relieving longtime professor Gary Urton of his emeritus status and banning him from campus.
• This new lawsuit sheds more light on the ongoing allegations against Comaroff, who is on administrative leave this semester for violating Harvard’s antiharassment and professional conduct policies—and who continues to vehemently deny any wrongdoing.
• Some 38 Harvard professors signed a public letter of concern about how the university has treated their colleague, saying, “We the undersigned know John Comaroff to be an excellent colleague, advisor and committed university citizen who has for five decades trained and advised hundreds of Ph.D. students of diverse backgrounds, who have subsequently become leaders in universities across the world. We are dismayed by Harvard’s sanctions against him and concerned about its effects on our ability to advise our own students.”
• The plaintiffs in the case are Margaret Czerwienski, Lilia Kilburn and Amulya Mandava, all of whom are graduate students in anthropology at Harvard. They say that Harvard has protected Comaroff since before it hired him, as it was aware of Comaroff’s reputation as a “predator” and “groomer” at the University of Chicago, where he worked from 1979 to 2012, yet “welcomed him anyway.”
• Harvard did investigate Comaroff in 2020, but only after published news reports about sexual harassment allegations within the anthropology department, according to the lawsuit.
• Russel Kornblith, the women’s lawyer,in a statement put the blame on Harvard’s shoulders, :The message sent by Harvard’s actions alleged in the complaint is clear: students should shut up. It is the price to pay for a degree,” he said. “The findings that Harvard did make in this case are the tip of the iceberg. Our complaint sets out a long history of Harvard’s failure to protect students, and we look forward to showing that pattern in court.”