“Harvard Grad Student Union Protests Comaroff’s Return to Teaching After Sexual Harassment Findings” (Crimson, September 7, 2022):
Returning from two years of administrative leave for allegations of sexual and professional misconduct, Harvard professor John L. Comaroff stood up to start teaching his first class back on campus Tuesday afternoon.
Then, five graduate students stood up and walked out of the classroom in protest.
Meanwhile, dozens of students congregated in the Science Center Plaza to decry Comaroff’s continued employment at Harvard on the first day of his course, African and African American Studies 190X: “The Anthropology of Law: classical, contemporary, comparative, and critical perspectives.” This week, Comaroff resumed teaching for the first time since University investigations found he violated sexual harassment and professional misconduct policies.
The African-American professor is, according to Wikipedia, now 77 years old (i.e., almost old enough to be President of the United States), a great example of the tenure system in action. The point of this post, however, is the tendency of Harvard students to Follow Science when outdoors. Portions of photos in the article:
That’s life on campus right now!
Report from our former town, a Laptop Class suburb of Boston: as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of the students in a middle school classroom will be wearing masks.
OK I took the bait here and decided to read one of his books. This one:
https://www.johncomaroff.com/books/the-truth-about-crime-knowledge-sovereinty-social-order/
Whew! Just in the preface they (the book’s co-author is his wife) ask the normal kind of Super Massive Harvardian Unanswerable Questions which they then attempt to answer, or at least talk about in the rest of the book. I can say right off that bat that anybody who mentions Michel Foucault in the first sentence of the preface begins on thin ice with me. However, the best part is the unintentional black humor of the Preface, six years after the book was first published.
As far as the students involved in the protest are concerned, nothing can be done to help them.
When I make it half way through the book, I’ll send up a signal so people can gauge the decompression time it’ll take me to get back to the surface. Give me a few days, I’m working with diminished capacity.