On its 20th anniversary, my testimonial on the Harvard STS Program
Content warning: Sexual harassment*, abuses of power, disillusionment
A few weeks ago, I received an email from the Harvard Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS), in which I was invited to provide a brief testimonial for the program’s 20th anniversary celebration.
I did not reply. Instead, for this anniversary celebration, I am providing a testimonial of my experiences at the Harvard STS Program, publicly and for the first time: my time as a postdoctoral researcher and visiting fellow at the Harvard STS Program in 2018/2019 was not celebratory at all. In the short time that I was there, I was sexually harassed*, marginalized, silenced, excluded, and gaslighted.
When I first arrived in the summer of 2018, I was supposed to stay at the Harvard Kennedy School for two years, with Sheila Jasanoff, the founder and director of the Harvard STS Program, as my supervisor. I was to conduct a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project on the re-emergence of psychedelic research in the United States, funded by the European Union. I was looking forward to intellectually engaging with excellent scholars in the field of STS, to developing professionally, and to furthering my career.
Yet I quickly noticed the program to be an environment rife with favoritism, toxic masculinity, subtle as well as palpable interpersonal abuses of power, and a place where gender discrimination does not allow women to thrive. Specifically, in my first few months at the program, two white cisgender males, one a postdoctoral fellow, the other a PhD student, began to harass* me.
After several months, the situation escalated one night at an end-of-semester fellows gathering at a brewery. I ended up in a highly suggestive conversation with the postdoctoral fellow that I experienced as increasingly inappropriate, humiliating, and cornering, especially in front of our colleagues. I became very angry, stopped talking with him, and the group left soon after. After arriving at my apartment, however, I remained in an extremely disturbed state. When I tried to confront the colleague via text messages to resolve the situation, I was ignored, as if nothing had happened.
I noticed similarities between my unfolding emotional reactions and the trauma of being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and its subsequent denial within my family system. This experiential knowledge has shaped my sensibilities towards abuses of power; I feel called to speak up about them.
I tried to speak with Sheila Jasanoff about the incident, but she did not answer my emails. I increasingly grew worried that I was facing retaliation. My fears were validated when I found out the following semester that I had not been invited to, or even informed about, an upcoming workshop with STS colleagues.
Although the postdoctoral fellow was not present at the program for the first two months of the new semester, I continued to feel anxious because the other male fellow, the PhD student, increased his–needless to say unwelcome–attention toward me. When this situation escalated at another social gathering and the postdoctoral fellow announced his return to the program via email, I entered into a crisis state with severely worsened PTSD symptoms.
I confronted both fellows and Sheila Jasanoff via email and WhatsApp. I was so disturbed about the situation that I had decided I could no longer safely participate in the program’s activities until it could be resolved. I was invited to speak with Sheila Jasanoff and a female representative from the Kennedy School, who was presented as an expert in sexual assault prevention.
At that meeting, I shared my experience and encouraged Sheila Jasanoff to start a restorative justice process in the group, so that all fellows could reflect on and learn from the actions that had caused harm. However, two days later, I instead received an official letter from her in which she accused me of having “violated basic standards of reasonable professional conduct” during my crisis. She also falsely claimed that I had indicated to her that “there was nothing concrete or specific that any of the fellows ever actually said or did that would justify” my response. I was excluded from all group activities of the Harvard STS Program and she ended my appointment a year earlier than agreed upon. I was also discouraged from contacting members of the fellows group.
I hardly could believe this was actually happening: after having a breakdown, I myself was being victim-blamed, punished, and kicked out of the program for it. As a world-renowned scholar studying how science and power co-produce each other, Sheila Jasanoff should have been sensitive to the dynamics that enabled the two male colleagues to engage in discrimination and marginalization of women at the program.
I had to find a new institution as fast as possible to transfer my grant and get my visa renewed to be able to continue with my research in the US for a second year. Fortunately, I was able to find a new institutional home at MIT.
I had one last meeting with Sheila Jasanoff (my then-supervisor from the University of Vienna, Ulrike Felt, and Jasanoff’s then-assistant were also present) after my expulsion from the program in April 2019 during which I expressed my strong intent to continue to engage with her work, the Science and Democracy Network, and the Harvard STS community, at least at its public events. Sheila Jasanoff responded with a huge grin: ‘You are not allowed to attend. You are a threat to the men. You should reconsider whether academia is the right place for you. Now everybody will think you are crazy.’ I again tried to explain that I experienced the conduct of the two fellows as abusive, but Sheila Jasanoff silenced me: ‘We don’t talk about abuse here.’
My journey since then has been challenging. I have been trying to continue with my research despite all the delays, disruptions, and disorientation, all while processing what happened to me.
I was able to connect with others who had similar experiences at the Harvard STS Program. I have collected many stories. I had many sleepless nights. Through the empowerment of meeting others, I co-founded a virtual feminist community, the FeminiSTS Repair Team, which helped me enormously to make sense of my experiences and counter the attempt to gaslight me into thinking that I was the problem. The real problem is an environment in which harassment* and discrimination is minimized, excused, victims are blamed, and even female professors protect male colleagues due to conflicts of interest. The fact that Sheila Jasanoff was amongst the original signatories of the Harvard faculty letter supporting John Comaroff–and has continued to express her support for him even after retracting her signature publicly–further corroborates this problematic pattern.
I cannot recommend becoming a fellow at the Harvard STS Program to anyone who wants to think for themselves and feels called to question authority. I will continue to speak truth to power for as long as I can, and I hope that others can equally find the courage to stand up and work with me for an academia in which harassment*, discrimination, and abuses of power have become relics of the past — an expression of dinosaur consciousness that we need to overcome to survive together and build a livable future for all beings, not just a few humans who think of themselves as homo superior.
For this reason I hereby bring the #MeTooSTS movement into being as a call to jointly counter the discrimination that can only thrive when one person is given too much gatekeeping power. This is simultaneously a #WeDoSTS movement, because we as STS also need to do STS in our own community and not just talk STS to other academic fields to resist the reproduction of epistemic and institutional injustices. Only through a collective effort can we fight against discrimination of all types in an academia still built on abuse-enabling hierarchical structures.
I encourage persons with similar experiences of the Harvard STS Program and other educational programs to come forth with public testimonies of their experiences of harassment* and abuses of power. We need to shed light on the darkness lurking behind the shiny images projected at anniversary celebrations in order to ensure that our communities are a safe place for all our members.
We need all the support we can mobilize from allies in the field of STS and aligned research areas to change the policies and procedures that currently do not protect but much rather re-victimize survivors and whistleblowers. This includes scholars with institutional and structural power to use their privilege to help us dismantle avenues for abuses of power in academia.
I urge all who still believe in the democratic production of knowledge and scientific freedom to raise their voice against the abuses of power committed by the Harvard STS Program. You can do so for instance at its anniversary symposium taking place at Harvard from November 3–5, 2022. Follow and, more importantly, fight with me @PsychedelicSTS on Twitter. #MeTooSTS #WeDoSTS
*Addendum/clarification
To not be misleading, I want to clarify that the phrase “sexual harassment” or “harassment” in this context does not refer to any kind of physical infringement, unwanted touch or contact. I never experienced any kind of physical infringement, unwanted touch or contact at Harvard at all. The “harassment” I address here was verbal and through facial expressions — I experienced signals of unwanted romantic intimacy over a period of several months which made me feel discriminated and disadvantaged because of my gender. According to the Ethics and Code of Conduct Policy of a major professional association in the field of STS (see esp. p. 4–5), the things I experienced can be defined as “sexual harassment.” Taken together, the layer of implicit sexual overtones I experienced created a hostile work environment for me. I also want to make clear that, for me, the negative experience has to be understood within the context of unequal power dynamics (see favoritism and discrimination on the basis of gender) and a broader culture of bullying at the program. My observations on this broader problematic culture at the program were a few days after my original post corroborated and elaborated on by Lee Vinsel. I strongly recommend reading his post to get an additional picture of the problem.
