Timothy Patrick McCarthy
Appearances
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
It's very clear to me and those of us who have seen these archives that they sought to punish these particular students for who they are and what they were engaged in. None of it was a violation of any specific policy of Harvard. So the question is like, what exactly are they in violation of? The punishment was not just meant to punish these individual students.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
It was meant to send a message to students like them or to people who may have been involved but not yet discovered. And so it's meant to do two things, punish the individual and send a very strong message to the larger collective of students that were there.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
I'm going to be very clear about that. I've seen many instances over my years at Harvard in the 21st century and the late 20th century of, you know, moments where particular kinds of student activists, say, are made an example of or people who are engaged in academic dishonesty, right, are made an example of as a way to send a message to people that this will not be tolerated.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
I, like most people, found out about it in 2002 when Amit Pali, who was one of the writers and editors for the Harvard Crimson, discovered the archives that had been in a secret location, an undisclosed location at Harvard for all of that time, for 82 years. And so Amit actually went through the process to demand access to the archives.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
He had to go up against Harvard's resistance to making those archives available of unredacting names or to giving him full access to all of the elements of the archives. So he did a great service to history and to Harvard, frankly, in being so persistent and resilient in the face of what might have stopped someone who was less enterprising or less talented.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
Harvard has a long tradition of seeing itself as a sort of like maker of elites. There was this idea that these were elites, these were refined, intelligent, right? I mean, to use other kinds of terrible language, civilized. And, you know, and that idea of a Harvard man is also something that comes with a really complex understanding of masculinity.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
Though there were all of these ways in which like codes of masculinity were like wrapped up into this idealistic, of what it meant to be a Harvard, in this case, man. And obviously, I think this episode places into sharp relief the fact that the presumed Harvard man was also presumed to be heterosexual.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
Harvard has final clubs, which were super queer, some of them. Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which until very recently was an all-male drag show. That was one of the most gloriously celebrated things. The sports teams, right? I mean, there's a famous picture in the Harvard Faculty Club in the corner of one of the rooms. There's this picture of this bare-chested rower.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
And it could not be more homoerotic. It's like something out of Robert Mapplethorpe. And so, you know, you have all of these things all over Harvard. that are just screaming queenery if you pay close enough attention to them. So this ideal or ideal, this fiction of a Harvard man, though it came wrapped in a kind of fervent heterosexuality, was never just that.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
My name is Timothy Patrick McCarthy. I'm a historian who teaches on the faculty at Harvard. I teach at the Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where I am the faculty chair of the new global LGBTQI plus human rights program.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
It was always much queerer than it was meant to be. And I think, frankly, that that's probably the thing that is at the root of the anxiety. Not that there are these others in our midst, but that we may be them. And that's always been part of the anxiety that drives the prejudice and the acrimony towards queer people.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
In a way, Harvard, in outing these gay students and then purging them from its... society was an attempt trying to put itself back into a closet, which is why you have these private archives labeled the secret court, which were impenetrable to anyone until 2002, when a closeted gay reporter from the Crimson, Amit is now out and living a
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
wonderful queer life, demanded to have access to these closeted letters and notes and archives that now allow us to tell this story in a way that's much more out and public and part of the record and history of the university.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
Cyril Wilcox, who was an undergraduate at Harvard at the time, he was on leave, on medical leave from the college, and he committed suicide on May 13th of 1920. The night before he committed suicide, he confessed to his brother that he was actually involved in a homosexual relationship with a man from Boston by the name of Harry Dreyfuss.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
The brother, who's in mourning perhaps, but also stunned by the revelation of his brother's homosexuality, intercepts a couple of letters that were friends from Harvard who were in the letters detailing parties that they'd had and other kinds of things that they were doing.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
So the brother was so jarred by that, all of that, that he decided to set out to try to find this guy, Harry Dreyfuss, and he found him.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
And what it really was was a kind of ad hoc tribunal that was created to be outside of the normal disciplinary procedures of Harvard College at the time.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
Anytime a Harvard student gets a summons from the administration to appear before a disciplinary board, it's a major issue. And it's not one that's welcome in their lives. And these folks didn't even know what they were being called to talk about for the most part.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
I'm sure it caused shockwaves through these folks, particularly if these young men were talking to one another and finding out that other people within their social circles and sexual circles in some cases were also being summonsed.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
Harvard was the finishing school for the Boston Brahmin elites. If you were one of those people, and some of these students were from those families, these elite families and so forth, the embarrassment that you were going to bring to your family, right, as someone who was gay or homosexual, would have carried with it an enormous amount of social anxiety and emotion.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
Likewise, if you're from a more working class background or a background where you don't have those deep Harvard connections and those highfalutin social statuses, those kids, too, would feel incredibly vulnerable and anxious in a different way, that they finally got in, but now they're going to be kicked out. And that, too, would be an embarrassment to their family.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
One of the people that they enlisted to help them with their work, the members of the secret court, was this guy named Windsor Hosmer, who was what we'd call at Harvard proctors. He was a first-year proctor, which is basically like an RA or a resident assistant.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
And he was, I think, a graduate student who was enlisted by the secret court to spy on, to basically place under surveillance, Ernest Roberts and other men that were part of this larger community to basically track people. their activities and behaviors over a period of three or four days.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
He was doing this at the request of the secret court. And so, you know, they may not have even known that they were being watched and being tracked in that way.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
No question that they were aggressive interrogations. They were probably sitting there in front of these five members of the administration and faculty being interrogated about all sorts of things.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
The professor of hygiene at the medical school who was in charge of the physical examinations of students was asking questions about masturbation, was asking questions about penises and sexual acts and these kinds of things in ways that we can gather were quite unfiltered and quite direct. It was a different kind of examination.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
Not a physical examination, but it was a social and sexual examination that was, in essence, an interrogation that was based on persecution of these folks who were on the margins of society and also marginalized within the context of Harvard.
Campus Files
Harvard's Secret Court
This discovery, because it was something that was meant to be hidden, literally Harvard kept this archive in the closet so that we could not know this part of Harvard's history.