A few years ago I would not have thought this possible. After all, it’s Harvard (for which I retain some vestigial affection), and the protestors, who are demanding the scalp of a black law professor who is defending Harvey Weinstein, are so terribly ignorant of the basis of criminal defense that they seem almost stupid. But they’re not stupid: their rationality has been overwhelmed by their wokeness. This is a very sad tale, and what’s worse is that Harvard administrators are complicit in demonizing the law professor.
The professor is Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., a Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard’s Law School and director of Harvard’s Criminal Justice Institute. He’s also a “faculty dean” at Winthrop House, one of the twelve residential houses/dormitories where Harvard students live for their first three years at the University. As dean there, Sullivan’s job is to oversee student life, making sure that everybody is as comfortable as possible, feels supported, and has the resources they need. It’s a big job, and so far Sullivan has done well, receiving great reviews.
That is, until it was revealed that he was part of Harvey Weinstein’s defense team.
As with many University law professors, Sullivan does private law practice in addition to his academic duties. And his clients have ranged over a whole spectrum, including the family of Michael Brown, the black teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and whose death helped ignite the Black Lives Matter movement. That should give Sullivan some bonus points to the students. Sullivan has defended other people whom the Left should approve of as well. In his eloquent and admirable defense of Sullivan in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy (another African-American), says this:
[Sullivan] helped win an acquittal in the double-murder prosecution of the professional football player Aaron Hernandez (a convicted murderer in a different case, who eventually committed suicide). He represented the family of Michael Brown, whose death at the hands of a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., fueled the Black Lives Matter movement. At the invitation of the Brooklyn district attorney, he designed and adopted a conviction-review program that freed scores of improperly imprisoned people. Sullivan is, in short, an imposing, deeply respected figure in the legal community.
. . . When a disoriented undergraduate running down the street naked was arrested by the police in April 2018, Sullivan was among the first to leap to the student’s aid, providing him with assistance that led to a favorable outcome. That student might well have been marked by a criminal record or suffered jail time but for Sullivan’s intervention. That instance was by no means idiosyncratic. Sullivan is characteristically drawn to defending the vulnerable. A piece in The Boston Globe notes an undergraduate who described how Sullivan supported her efforts to hold to account a sexual abuser. Sullivan’s record of vigilant attentiveness to the interests of students at Harvard should, at the very least, have earned him the benefit of the doubt. Instead he is the target of impudent disdain.
Why? Because he’s on Harvey Weinstein’s defense team and is reported to on the defense team of another Harvard professor, Roland Fryer, who has been accused of sexual harassment. That was enough for the students, as well as some Harvard deans, who can’t abide the idea of a defense attorney defending someone accused of sexual misconduct—even though he’s defended other people who don’t seem so reprehensible and is engaged in constructive judicial work for the poor and marginalized.
What happened? First the students went after Sullivan, demanding that he resign as the head of Winthrop House, and be fired if he wasn’t. As the Harvard Crimson (the student newspaper) reported on February 12:
More than 50 students called for College administrators to remove Winthrop Faculty Dean Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., from his post at a rally in front of Massachusetts Hall Monday afternoon.
Toting signs that read “Do Your Job” and “Remove Sullivan,” attendees laid out a set of demands for Harvard administrators. They called for Sullivan’s removal, a public apology, and a formal inquiry into faculty deans’ responsibilities to students.
. . . At Monday’s rally, students stood in front of Massachusetts Hall with tape over their mouths.
After several minutes of silence, a series of students spoke. Hilda M. Jordan ’19 said Sullivan’s comments on Weinstein and Fryer conflict with his role as a faculty dean. In particular, she pointed to Sullivan’s allegations that witnesses in Harvard’s investigations into Fryer were coached.
“Your role is not just in filing paperwork or smiling in our faces. Your role is to deal with the culture that you establish as a Faculty Dean. So Dean Sullivan, please reconcile how you can care about sexual assault and at the same time, have claims against a Harvard affiliate being nothing more than coaching?” she said. “You are a faculty dean, not just an attorney.”
Winthrop resident Madeleine D. Woods ’19 also called for Sullivan to step down from his post and for administrators to reshape the faculty dean position.
“Even if he puts out an apology, the fact that he didn’t even think of the impact this would have is probably the most damning element of this,” Woods said. “The only move forward is not only to remove Dean Sullivan, but then to have a structural reconsideration of what it means to be a faculty dean so we don’t have an issue like this again.”
Here’s a Crimson photo of the protesting students:
And another Crimson photo of how somebody defaced the door of Winthrop House:
It’s not just the students who are calling for Sullivan’s removal. As Kennedy notes:
“We condemn Sullivan’s decision to represent Weinstein,” The Crimson editorial board declares, highlighting what it views as “the incongruity” of “defending Weinstein in his role as defense attorney, while simultaneously working to promote a safe and comfortable environment for victims of sexual misconduct and assault in his capacity of faculty dean.”
. . . The editorial board writes that “when a mentor and authority figure makes a decision to defend an individual facing allegations of sexual misconduct, he has in effect closed his doors to any student who might look to him for support or solace regarding these issues.”
The Association of Black Harvard Women maintains that Sullivan’s involvement in the Harvey Weinstein case “will only work to embolden rape culture on this campus.”
It’s very odd that these accusations ignore Sullivan’s long-standing commitment to defending the poor and marginalized.
The Crimson suggests that the Harvard administration is taking the side of the students as well, which I find both disturbing and unconscionable:
Several College administrators attended the event. Dean of Students Katherine G. O’Dair and Harvard College Title IX coordinator Emily J. Miller watched the protest and spoke with students afterward. The Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response also set up a table with hot chocolate and handouts for attendees.
Lowell Faculty Dean Diana L. Eck, who attended the rally, said she agreed with students’ calls for the College to reevaluate the faculty dean position.
“We talk a lot about what the role of a resident dean is, what the roles of our tutors are, but the faculty dean role is really important. It’s not nominal. It means a certain amount of hard decision-making on the part of those of us who assume that role,” Eck said.
. . . Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana wrote in an email Monday that support for students in residential spaces is “among the highest of the College’s priorities.”
“I take seriously the concerns that have been raised from members of the College community regarding the impact of Professor Sullivan’s choice to serve as counsel for Harvey Weinstein on the House community that he is responsible for leading as a faculty dean,” Khurana wrote. “I have also met with Professor Sullivan to discuss his responsibilities to the House and have communicated that the College believes that more work must be done to uphold our commitment to the well-being of our students.”
Yes, I can well imagine what Khurana’s “discussion of Sullivan’s responsibilities” was about.
These administrators should be defending Sullivan like Kennedy did, not implying that they are on the students’ side. I have written to both Eck and Khurana expressing my displeasure with their behavior (see email addresses below).
The students’ attitude is apparently that anybody who criminally defends someone guilty of sexual assault should be demonized and punished, regardless of their record of social-justice defense. Indeed, it almost implies that no lawyer should be defending people as odious as Weinstein. Yes, Weinstein is odious, but everybody deserves a defense. The purpose of a vigorous criminal defense is largely to keep our system of justice strong and intact, ensuring that only the most rigorous evidence and highest standards of guilt (“beyond a reasonable doubt”) be enforced. In other words, a strong defense keeps the prosecution honest, the law strong, and the citizens comfortable with the judicial system. If Weinstein is found not to have committed crimes “beyond reasonable doubt”, then he shouldn’t be convicted as a criminal (though he could be found guilty in civil suits). I personally think Weinstein is guilty as hell, but his case still needs to go through the criminal-justice system before he’s tossed in the slammer.
This resonates with me because I was once in a related situation. For several years I worked as an expert witness for criminal-defense attorneys, contesting the government’s flawed and often duplicitous use of DNA evidence to “match” the DNA profiles of the accused with blood or semen samples. Almost always working for public defenders, and for free, I defended accused murders and rapists. I was even on the defense team of O.J. Simpson, though I didn’t contribute much to the trial. I learned a lot about our criminal justice system from this experience; one lesson was that the prosecution, supposedly committed to ensuring justice, would often twist the evidence because their real goal was conviction.
I did this work not because I wanted to free criminals, but to ensure that both the poor and the rich, the obscure and the famous, got a fair trial—a trial in which the accused could mount a rigorous defense and that the prosecution was kept on the rails and could make its case strongly. In other words, I worked to keep the legal system strong.
This bothered some of the students in my department, but only when I defended two black men accused of aggravated rape. That upset some female graduate students. To deal with that, I gave a talk to the students explaining how the government was misusing DNA evidence, and why I was contesting the prosecution: to ensure scientific truth and as well as a sound legal system. The public defender with whom I worked, a woman, also spoke to the students. In the end, I think they understood, unlike the students at Harvard. (By the way, let me give a shout-out here to these public defenders, who work long hours at low pay, doing the best they can for the poor people whom they represent. They are often overwhelmed with huge case loads, and my work with them opened my eyes to the difference in legal representation that the poor get in America compared to the wealthy.)
But back to Sullivan. Harvard should be defending him and defending his defense of others. But they aren’t. The students haven’t thought much about this, apparently, despite Sullivan’s having written two letters to Winthrop House students explaining his actions. He shouldn’t have had to do that. This is Harvard, for crying out loud! But even Harvard students can let their “wokeness” overwhelm their rationality.
Kennedy ends his defense of Sullivan with a powerful message. I’ve put part of this in bold because I think it explains why many university administrators are defending the woke, even when the woke are wrong or misguided:
These events are emblematic of a crisis besetting all strata of higher education, as activists of various stripes perceive cannily the temptation of administrators to mollify zealots in return for quiet — regardless of the merits of competing arguments or the importance of the values in question.
That “progressive” activists could denounce so bitterly a person who has demonstrated so clearly a commitment to inclusive, humane, liberal values and practices is indicative of a concerted illiberalism that is menacing university life. As this controversy unfolds, one can only hope that Harvard authorities will decline to defer to expressions of noisy discomfort and instead adhere to those intellectual and moral tenets that sometimes must bear the uncomfortable burden of complexity.
Kudos to Sullivan for vigorously defending his colleague.
One last thought: Harvard students are being groomed to be America’s leaders, and many of them will be. Their behavior thus makes me doubly distressed, for, unless they grow up, they’ll import this wokeness into politics, government, and every area of adult life.
These articles were brought to my attention by Greg Mayer, who also went to Harvard and who added his own take in an email to me:
One of the things that bothers me most about these things is the complete lack of respect for the principles of due process, and how that process often leads to the exoneration of the accused. There was a disturbing piece on NPR piece yesterday about 6 people jailed for a rape and murder they didn’t commit—exonerated years later by DNA tests. They were convicted using classic techniques used to develop distorted and false eyewitness testimony. I taught science and pseudoscience for 18 years, and one of the key take-home lessons is that the sincerity of a witness’s testimony is no guarantee of its accuracy. So many injustices have occurred due to simply believing what people say. It boggles the mind to see how quickly society seems to have forgotten that.
Weinstein might be guilty, but there is absolutely nothing dishonorable in insisting that he receive a fair trial, and nothing dishonorable in being his lawyer. John Adams defended the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre, winning acquittal of 6 of 8, and reduced charges for the other 2. Though a well known member of the Patriot party at the time, defending the British soldiers, he later wrote, was “… one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.”
As I said, I’ve written to both Dean Rakesh Khurana and Faculty Dean Diana Eck, copying Harvard President Lawrence Bacow, defending Sullivan’s right to defend Weinstein (or anybody else) without being demonized by students and tut-tutted by the Harvard administration. You can find their email addresses at the links right above if you want to give your opinion, one way or the other.
UPDATE: Here’s my letter, which I’ve put below the fold to save space:
