As I’ve noted, in mid-November 2015, Harvard law school discovered a supposed “hate crime”: Someone had placed a strip of black tape over photo portraits of black faculty members.
The incident immediately struck some of us as a likely hoax. A blog set up by Harvard law students, Royall Asses, provided exhaustive and compelling evidence that the incident was indeed a hoax.
Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, who was among “those whose photograph was marked,” speculated in an admirably sensible New York Times op-ed that the “puzzling” taping might have been “meant to protest the perceived marginalization of black professors” or might have been “a hoax meant to look like a racial insult in order to provoke a crisis.” Explaining why he didn’t “feel deeply alarmed and hurt,” Kennedy observed that race activists “seem to have learned that invoking the rhetoric of trauma is an effective way of hooking into the consciences of solicitous authorities” and warned that in the long run “reformers harm themselves by nurturing an inflated sense of victimization.”
None of this, however, has stopped Harvard law school dean Martha Minow from playing to the protesters. Far from even acknowledging the possibility that the incident was a hoax, Minow told alumni in early December that “our community was shocked and saddened by the defacement of the portraits” (compare Minow’s “defacement” to Kennedy’s “marked”) and that the Harvard University police was “investigating this as a possible hate crime.” In another e-mail today, Minow tells alumni that the incident “was and still remains … deeply troubling” but that the Harvard police have been “unable to identify the person or persons responsible.”
I’d love to see what sort of investigation the Harvard police conducted. Did they, for example, interrogate the individuals who have been identified as the possible hoaxsters and ask those individuals specifically whether they were responsible for the taping or knew who was? I’d bet not. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Minow constrained the investigation in order to prevent the police from uncovering the hoax.