To wit: a survey conducted last year by a Harvard task force found that HBS women perceived their own school to be less woman-friendly than rival business schools. Behind those findings, some say, isn't so much a sexual-harassment problem per se as a more general decline in standards--the sort of standards that were sorely lacking when students in the class of 1992, at a black-tie HBS event at the New England Aquarium, decided to jump into the penguin pool. Or when students a few years back brought a belly dancer into the classroom. Says one female alum: "Every time I think of HBS, it makes me upset because of that kind of thing."
"This kind of behavior isn't something that came out of the blue, that just appeared last year," concedes Dean Clark, as the ping of tennis rackets from the B-school courts sounds outside his office window. "There have been situations of some sort for years." Among the more than two dozen that were reported to Inc.:
- A male student in the class of 1994 was quietly reprimanded for a pattern of conduct toward a young female professor (witnesses can't remember if he addressed her as "honey" or "sweetums") and was sentenced to write a case study about gender issues. The student, who now lives and works abroad, says he was explicitly instructed not to speak of the incident by James Cash, then the head of the M.B.A. program. Cash did not return Inc.'s phone calls.
- When a female professor played for her class what she thought was a video on leadership, she found that students had replaced it with a lewd video of their own making.
- In early 1994 a group of students spiced up a finance class with a game of "strip finance": each time certain financial phrases were invoked, participants removed an article of clothing. Several male students ended up bare-chested.
Considering the age of the average HBS student (27) and the extent of the average student's work experience (four years), the alleged behavior is especially startling to some, if not for its offensiveness, then for its sheer juvenile quality. Asked why the school's classroom climate may have deteriorated, one member of the faculty offers, "People hear what students before them got away with, and they feel they need to live up to the deeds of their predecessors."
Meanwhile, many women quietly seethe, says Julie Bornstein, a 1997 graduate. Recalls a woman from the class of 1992: "My section was terrible. It was just outrageous. The boys are passing notes saying, 'The woman professor looks like she didn't get laid last night.' And you're told these are people you need to associate with to get ahead in business."
Another recent graduate recounts how, during a discussion of a case study about Black & Decker power tools, one man illustrated his point with a comparison to male genitalia. Other men quickly picked up the "tool" metaphor and expanded upon it. "By the end of the class, there had probably been 10 or 15 comments like that," she says. "The women just stopped talking. There were no hands in the air. It was just the worst classroom experience I've ever had. I sat there, mouth open, amazed that the professor didn't stop them."
A faculty that's still ensconced in an old-boy mentality, several women suggest, may be part of the problem: when one student spoke in class about customers "getting screwed," one woman recounts, the professor chimed in with a comment about "lying back and taking it." (Of the B-school's 93 tenured faculty, 11 are women.) And several students from last year's Section G claim that one male assistant professor seemed to actively encourage the passing of notes, occasionally reading them aloud. "If these guys [students] have no negative feedback," asks another female alumnus, "how are they supposed to learn?"
Similar questions linger over the Section G matter. For starters, school officials are at pains to explain why they took so long to act.
Kim Clark suggests that the administration had been unaware of the extent of the problem. "If you compare what the case turned out to be with what we first knew," he says, "it turned out to be quite different." Yet as early as March 24 of last year, Robert Dolan, a professor who supervised a group of sections that included Section G, sent an E-mail to students acknowledging "actions which constitute harassment of fellow students, faculty, or visitors to our classrooms." He wrote: "Some of you have spoken to me about specific incidents, so I know this is a very real phenomenon...."
Indeed, at least one woman in Section G quietly had begun to collect lurid notes as they circulated about the classroom. In what may have been a culminating incident, say three sources familiar with it, another woman complained that a man in the section grabbed her buttocks while at Shad Hall, the school's athletic facility.
Shortly after that incident, the same woman student tearfully exploded before the section and demanded that the notes stop. According to several students who were present, she threatened to leak some of the offending notes to the press if the situation was not remedied. (She did not make good on her threat and declined to speak with Inc. for this article.) No faculty members were present at the time, but the woman also brought her complaint to members of the administration on more than one occasion, several sources familiar with the events say.
