A new book recounts Harvard's purge of gay students in 1920
Three years ago,The Harvard Crimson broke a story about a troubling series of events that had occurred on campus ... more than 80 years earlier. After months of effort, student reporters had received access to a set of documents cataloged in the university archives under the intriguingly vague heading “Secret Court Files, 1920.” The dossier was massive and, even after so many years, shocking. It contained 500 pages of correspondence and memoranda from an inquiry conducted to investigate a gay social circle based in a dormitory.
The panel of five Harvard administrators — including the president, A. Lawrence Lowell — did its work with a kind of vindictive glee. Seven undergraduates were expelled. One instructor had been forced to resign and to end his doctoral work. Another Harvard graduate who worked as a tutor had to sever any ties to the university.
At least one of the men later died in circumstances suggesting suicide, as William Wright recounts in Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals, published next month by St. Martin’s.
Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed
The panel of five Harvard administrators — including the president, A. Lawrence Lowell — did its work with a kind of vindictive glee. Seven undergraduates were expelled. One instructor had been forced to resign and to end his doctoral work. Another Harvard graduate who worked as a tutor had to sever any ties to the university.
At least one of the men later died in circumstances suggesting suicide, as William Wright recounts in Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals, published next month by St. Martin’s.