Shortly after Claudine Gay stepped down as president of Harvard University last month, an interesting sidelight to her years as a university administrator emerged: As dean of the faculty of arts and sciences a few years earlier, Gay was involved in removing a law professor from his secondary role as the dean of a campus dormitory.
The professor, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., had caused an uproar on campus in 2019 when he joined the legal defense team of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who was accused of rape or sexual assault by more than 80 women and whose case launched the #MeToo movement. Weinstein was later convicted of rape on two coasts, as well as other crimes, and is serving a lengthy sentence.
But at the time that Sullivan chose to defend him, Weinstein was legally an innocent man. He was as entitled to a robust defense as anyone else, as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
Harvard administrators backed Sullivan’s right as a lawyer to defend Weinstein but also saw his act as one that failed to take into account, as the dean of a house, the turmoil felt by the students in his dormitory. When Sullivan responded to students’ concerns by explaining the importance of a strong defense for unpopular defendants, Gay deemed it “insufficient” to address their feelings of being unsafe. Sullivan was pressured into stepping down as dean. Soon after, he also resigned from Weinstein’s defense.
This was hardly the first time that a lawyer has been vilified for representing people accused of heinous crimes. One hundred years ago, iconic lawyer Clarence Darrow, who already had a reputation for taking on controversial cases, was widely criticized for defending two teenage thrill killers.
“What would make everyone less safe is a justice system that runs on popular opinion rather than on the intentions laid out in the Bill of Rights.” That quote should be mass spread to all the corners of the nation for them to understand what the Constitutional Republic we are stands for since the beginning of it and before. Those who oppose it oppose it until it hits them in one way or another, then they want it the way it has been intended since this land was coming together as a nation.
Harvard has missed the boat on a lot of issues of late so this action written here is nothing new, sadly for them. Money talks and sometimes the BS with it walks proudly into decisions that are against what they started out as.
Pretty sad that an old revered institution of my state became the target of cancel culture. Judge Persky was only the beginning of special interests & advocates going after public officials who are only doing their jobs. I remember when Harvard President Gay became embroiled in the Prof Sullivan controversy, and I faulted her for caving into student pressure to force the man out as dean. But I also think it was wrong that she was forced out due to protecting her students’ freedom of speech over concerning geopolitical issues at the time. In both cases, her only concern was for her students, regardless if they were right or wrong in their actions
It’s interesting that the same phenomenon that can make college students “bleeding hearts” can also make them hate people accused of sex crimes—it’s this silly notion of “power.” Everyone feels so self-righteous when they think they’re fighting the good fight against the powers that be, even if that “power” is just a middle class kid from Ohio who happens to swim for Stanford. It’s how college students can become strident feminists in 1970s America, and Islamic revolutionaries in 1970s Iran. Maybe Yeats was right, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
John Adams, who later would become one of the main Founding Fathers, third president, and proponent of declaring independence from the British, defended eight British soldiers accused of murdering people in New York in 1770 while he was a practicing lawyer. At the time, the British soldiers were viewed on the same token as if occupied by Nazi troops, so Adams defense of them was seen as near-traitorous. But that would still pale compared to what is happening more and more today.