Thread by @annastansbury

18 women have reported sexual harassment by Prof Jorge Dominguez over 3+ decades. Harvard gov grad students today reiterated their call for an external review of the institutional policies, practices, and cultures that allowed harassment to occur 1/13

https://twitter.com/sophie_e_hill/status/1100796545325182982

An external review is standard good practice for an institution when there have been pervasive internal failures, particularly if they may indicate some systemic or cultural issue. Why? Here are a few reasons: 2/13

1. *Gathering info*: Patterns of inappropriate behavior are often somewhat of an open secret. Whisper networks warn people not to work too closely with person X, or not to behave in a certain way. Did this happen in this case? 3/13

If so, what went wrong in the organization's systems that either (a) prevented this knowledge from reaching the channels which would have led to investigation, or (b) prevented action from being taken when this knowledge did surface? 4/13

To understand what went wrong institutionally and systemically, a lot of people must be spoken with - not just those directly involved in harassment allegations. People are more likely to be open when speaking to someone outside the system in which the problems occurred. 5/13

2. *Ensuring impartiality*: The social sciences have collectively spent a lot of time studying incentives, power and human behavior. Internal reviews into allegations of systemic failure to address harassment likely fall foul of what we've learned in all three domains: 6/13

(a) Incentives: in any organization conducting a review of its own policies, there are likely to be incentives not to find serious failings, and not to publicize such failings if they occurred. Similarly with individuals involved in reviews of their own past behavior. 7/13

(b) Power: The nature of workplace harassment is usually power imbalances. It seems highly likely that the very reason these problems were not surfaced for so long and were not dealt with for so long is because of these power imbalances. 8/13

If those conducting the review are those with professional power over people involved in the review, it is less likely that people will be able to give their full and honest opinions & experiences without fearing a risk to their own professional futures. 9/13

(c) Human behavior: it is well documented that people tend to be optimistic about their own qualities, and subconsciously avoid admitting their own failures to themselves. This subconscious bias impacts all of us, no matter how hard we strive to be fair and impartial. 10/13

3. *Building trust*: Holding an external review is a commitment device by an organization, and as a result is a way of signaling to its stakeholders & community that it's serious about understanding what led to the institutional failures and how to address them in future. 11/13

In any large institution, it's hard to build trust in leadership through person-level relationships. Community members usually want to believe in the good intentions of leaders. In the absence of individual relationships, signals like this help prove those good intentions. 12/13

Those are my two cents, as an ally but not someone in the Gov department or directly involved in the efforts. For updates from the grad students working tirelessly on this, follow the wonderful @sophie_e_hill, and see this website
sites.google.com/view/externalr… 13/13