Meanwhile, Mark Tatum, student president of Section G, made a halting attempt to lead the section in a discussion of the issue. But the meeting quickly erupted in confrontation, several students say. "The meeting ended in no resolution," recalls a male student in the section who supported the women's charges.
Tatum says he then decided to seek help from the administration. He met with Dolan, Professor Lynda Applegate, and administration staffer Patricia Light, asking them, he says, to intervene in the situation. But no significant action resulted from that meeting, Tatum confirms, other than Dolan's March 24 E-mail and a similar one from Applegate. "It was disappointing," says Tatum, who says he believed Section G's problems were emblematic of a larger, "schoolwide" problem. (Dolan claims he did not broach the subject directly with members of Section G because Tatum told him he wanted to handle the matter among the students in the section.)
"If anyone had ever been pulled aside by the administration, the note passing would have stopped," says a student intimately involved with the case. "It never happened."
Last year may not have been the first year that such problems arose in Section G, either. A woman in the previous year's Section G claims she collected samples of offensive notes and forwarded them to a faculty member, Janice Hammond. (Hammond, whom several students identified as the strongest faculty advocate of women's issues on campus, declined to comment.) And when members of that "old" Section G made a presentation to the "new G" (the incoming first-years) in the fall of 1996--a raucous HBS tradition in which section lore is passed down from class to class--the presenters made references to sodomy and repeatedly referred to women as "bitches," according to the recollections of four people who were present.
After classes had ended for the year, Professor Steven Wheelwright, the head of the M.B.A. program, and Janice McCormick, a staff member of the administration, sent students a letter expressing consternation about "certain behaviors that have occurred in Section G during the past academic year....Reports include vulgar notes and 'top ten lists' about individual students and visitors passed during classes...[and] the creation of an inhospitable environment for women in the section."
With those words and the end-of-year disbanding of Section G--which included Harvard University president Neil Rudenstine's son, Nicholas--there the issue seemed to die.
Many students were puzzled, then, when the school's Faculty and Staff Standards Committee (FSSC), an in-house jury of six professors and administrators, began questioning students and collecting evidence on the case in January of this year. Several students were subjected to handwriting tests.
Why the sudden prosecutorial zeal? Dean Clark says that, in part, the administration had discovered a loophole in the school's disciplinary procedures. Initially, he explains, the administration had believed that only the women could bring charges against their harassers, meaning they'd be put in the uncomfortable position of having to go public with their so-far informal complaints. The women were reluctant to do so. But then, says Clark, "we hit on this idea of letting the FSSC itself bring the complaint." At the same time, Clark says, the school's disciplinary procedures had been "in a transitional kind of period" in which one system was being phased out and another introduced.
One faculty member dismisses that explanation as disingenuous: the new disciplinary system had already been used expeditiously last year, this professor points out, to expel a student for plagiarism. "It suggests an institution that was just hoping the issue would blow over."
In Massachusetts, individuals cannot sue an educational institution for sexual harassment unless they file an administrative complaint within six months. (At press time, an HBS spokesperson said that no suit had been filed against Harvard.)
Sources familiar with the accusers' version of events claim that, in fact, it was the continued, implicit threat of public exposure of the situation that finally drove the administration to act. "People were demonstrating that they weren't tiring of the issue," says one of those sources. Speaking of administrators, another asserts: "Instantly they were like, 'Don't talk to the media.' They were more concerned with public image than how women in the school were feeling."
Oddly, the current situation comes at a time when the school has taken a number of high-profile steps to improve its standing on gender issues. Instead of receiving a simple pamphlet about sexual harassment (called Tell Someone) as in the past, incoming students now discuss a series of vignettes about appropriate and inappropriate classroom behavior. The school created a new administrative position, "director of student standards"--a sort of graduate-level hallway monitor--and has undertaken efforts to boost its female applicant pool. And late last year, the Committee of 200, a group of leading businesswomen, gave the school $500,000 to write more case studies featuring women. HBS announced it would chip in $500,000 of its own money for the cause.
But even that seemingly positive move drew fire. "That is just such a joke," one female student fumes. "HBS already had the money to write cases with women protagonists. If they really cared about women, they'd have taken the initiative." When Newsweek used the C-200 gift as an opportunity to lament the business school's "dismal record on women's issues," a member of the administration asked the Women's Student Association to write the magazine a letter of rebuttal, according to two people directly involved. The WSA declined.
