Poisoned ivy

A rape controversy at Harvard stirs the student body and the media, but was the real story lost amid the hype?

Cambridge by Jason Gay

The firestorm at Harvard last week over the faculty's dismissal of a male student accused of rape -- which was followed, coincidentally, by the report that another woman had been raped in a school building that same evening -- reinforced several basic contentions. First, both events made it clear that rape is a serious issue on college campuses. They also drew new attention to the lingering, unfortunate debate over the seriousness of date rape as opposed to stranger rape. Last, they proved that bad news at Harvard is always, well, news.

None of that comes as any surprise, but something seemed a little off-key about the shouting and media attention that surrounded Harvard for much of last week. There is no question that the two reported rapes were important, that they merited coverage and concern. But so many half-truths and misconceptions filtered out into the ether that a straightforward news event evolved into a somewhat misguided controversy.

The dismissal dispute was the center of the storm. Last Tuesday night, March 9, Harvard's faculty was faced with deciding the fate of a male underclassman, D. Drew Douglas, who had previously admitted to the school's administrative board that he had sexually assaulted a female classmate. Charged in Middlesex Superior Court, Douglas had pled guilty to indecent assault and battery and was sentenced to 18 months of house arrest and five years of probation.

The administrative board recommended that Douglas be dismissed, a penalty that, at Harvard, is the virtual equivalent of expulsion -- it allows a student to be readmitted only under circumstances in which new evidence exonerates him or her. But in a March 9 front-page Boston Globe story headlined IN ALLEGED DATE RAPE, HARVARD SPLIT ON CALL FOR LESSER PENALTY, a handful of educators expressed discomfort with dismissal. Some drew distinctions between date rape and stranger rape, saying that the former should draw a less severe penalty than the latter. As a result, a few faculty members said they were prepared to recommend a different punishment for Douglas -- "withdrawal," which would allow him to reapply to Harvard after five years, new evidence or not.

Not surprisingly, members of the student body were outraged by this news. Campus activists mobilized, as did the local media. On Tuesday, the day of the faculty vote, the satellite trucks were rolling up Mass Ave, and camera crews were in Harvard Yard, trawling for angry students.

To judge from this response, one might have presumed that there was serious suspense over Douglas's fate -- that there was a real possibility of the convicted sex offender's getting the lesser "withdrawal" penalty, and winding up back on campus after five years. But it now appears that leniency was never a realistic possibility. The Boston Herald reported that the faculty voted 119 to 19 to dismiss Douglas; Harvard said only that dismissal passed by a "wide margin" of the voting faculty. "It was a lopsided verdict and rightly so," English department chair Lawrence Buell told the Harvard Crimson.

Calls for leniency toward Douglas hinged on the possibility that last spring's assault was actually an episode of consensual sex -- the basic idea being that the two students got a little drunk and fooled around, and a crime occurred, but under ambiguous circumstances. Yet court documents from Douglas's guilty plea, obtained by the Crimson, describe a different scenario, in which the woman -- who had encountered Douglas while out on a date with another man -- repeatedly told him to leave her room. "His advances continued even as she repeatedly told Douglas to leave and tried to push him off her bed," the Crimson reported.

Though not all the faculty members were privy to this information prior to last Tuesday's vote, it's fairly obvious that Douglas never had a real chance of being allowed to return to Harvard. Students, while well intentioned, were raging against a threat -- Douglas's withdrawal and return -- that didn't really exist. Sure, there were faculty members who thought the situation was cloudy. But the vast majority of teachers did not.

Additional energy was misspent on another front: arguing that Douglas should have been expelled, not dismissed. A number of students said they were angry that Harvard expelled people for academic fraud, such as cheating, but not for rape. "I think he should be expelled," one student told the Herald. "This is someone who raped a Harvard student, and Harvard hasn't shown they've taken it seriously."

Lost, however, was the basic fact that Harvard hasn't expelled anyone in more than 60 years. Indeed, school spokesperson Joe Wrinn researched the penalty and found only one instance in modern times, in 1936 -- and the expelled "student" had been a phony name admitted in a prank. In effect, then, expulsion has been out of circulation, and dismissal has been the strongest penalty in use. Rapists don't get lesser punishment than cheaters after all.

Part of the confusion was Harvard's fault, of course. The school does itself no favors with its arcane, multi-tiered system of punishment -- students themselves seem genuinely befuddled as to the distinctions between expulsion, dismissal, and withdrawal. "As long as `expulsion' remains on the books as an option . . . confusion and frustration will linger," the Harvard Crimson editorialized on March 15. As the Crimson also pointed out, the school would be well served by specifically designating dismissal as the appropriate punishment for a student found guilty of rape.

Of course, last week's controversy was also driven by the fact that Harvard, being Harvard, is always going to make the news, especially when there's trouble. There's a certain sector of the public that will never tire of hearing about scandal within its hallowed halls; as a result, a rape controversy at Harvard is going to be bigger news than a rape controversy at School X or Y.

Wrinn, the Harvard spokesperson, understands that. "It's like that with everything here," he says. "The classic good-news story is not going to get as much attention here, because the good stories are a given, while the bad stories are amplified because they are bad."

True, but it's clear that something can be gained from last week's controversy. Some activists used the dismissal debate as an opportunity to point to Harvard's shortcomings in its services for rape and sexual-assault victims. The Crimson contends that the school should require sensitivity workshops for all first-year students, and provide better-trained staff to handle sex-crime issues. As the alleged rape after Tuesday night's faculty vote showed yet again, no one on any college campus is ever totally safe.

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.