John L. Comaroff

In the spring of 2024, the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences offered a one-time faculty retirement option to all tenured professors 73 years of age or older. Professor John Comaroff exercised this option, notified Harvard on March 8, and retired effective June 30, 2024.

I have been blessed with a long, fulfilling career as a scholar and teacher. For several decades I have taught and mentored many hundreds of students, among them more than 200 Ph.D. candidates. Many have gone on to impressive careers in a variety of disciplines. Needless to say, I am very proud of them and their achievements – and grateful to them for all that they have taught me. Through it all, I have had the opportunity to conduct extensive research and to write a large number of essays and books, many of them in collaboration with my wife of fifty- six years and life-long colleague, Jean Comaroff.

This body of work, like my pedagogy, has sought to promote wide-ranging scholarship, thoroughgoing critical awareness, and a deep sense of social responsibility. Teaching and research are what I do, so there is a significant measure of sadness in my decision to retire. Now, as I am about to enter my eightieth year, it is time to contemplate the next phase of my life.

Although it had no bearing on my decision to retire, it is no secret that, in 2021, a cloud was cast over me. In 2020, at a time when the Harvard Department of Anthropology was caught up in a moral panic occasioned by a very serious case of sexual misconduct, I was falsely accused of harassment by one Harvard student, and of threatening retaliation against two others. After a fourteen-month investigation, I was found not responsible for any of those accusations, save for one instance of alleged verbal impropriety. I had cautioned my student accuser of the well-established risk to her of potential sexual violence in a named African country where she was planning to do research; an entirely responsible warning, similar to the travel advisory issued by the U.S. Department of State that, somehow, was treated as sexual harassment under Harvard’s rather broadly stated rules.

Thereafter, in a second, highly questionable process in which I was given limited opportunity to defend myself and had no right of appeal, I was found responsible for “unprofessional conduct” arising out of a scholarly discussion with one of the students who had accused me of a threat. This was despite Harvard’s earlier investigation, which had already addressed the incident and found me not responsible. Moreover, the finding in this second investigation held that my intentions – which were wholly professional – were “irrelevant.”Subsequently, the three students filed a lawsuit against Harvard for not protecting them and other students against me. The suit repeated all of the allegations already found to lack merit, in more lurid, hyperbolic terms, while adding additional untested, and evidence-free claims of sexual misconduct. Moreover, the lawsuit was buttressed by a public relations campaign executed by a high-powered public relations firm engaged by the plaintiff’s attorneys, thus ensuring that these fact-free allegations would be circulated widely on campus and across the world without any due diligence, much less due process.

I, however, under Harvard’s rules of retaliation, had no right to reply. All this extraordinary attention, all the fur or, all the nastiness, arose out of two brief office-hour discussions, both academic in intent and content. As a further result of the lawsuit, an ugly, ferocious campaign was waged against me at Harvard by a small group of activists, people who have no knowledge of me, of my pedagogy, or of the facts of the case as established by Harvard’s thorough, largely exonerating investigation; this in order to make me a scapegoat for their larger concerns in a fight against the University. They misrepresented my actions, made new false accusations, occupied and disrupted my classrooms, pressured students not to take my courses or work with me, and suggested that my very presence on campus represents a danger to the entire University community — on its face, an absurdity. Unlike its responses to classroom protests this year, Harvard did nothing to protect my freedom to teach even when protesters occupied my classrooms. I cannot deny that this relentless campaign, and the negative public relations initiative in support of the meritless lawsuit, have been extremely hurtful given my decades of dedication to my teaching and my students. I believe that, in time, the indiscriminate rage, rabid personal attacks, and mob-rule tactics that sought to make political capital out of this whole unfortunate series of events will be replaced by a more informed, thoughtful, and honest dialogue on a number of very serious issues of current concern – among them, sexual harassment, campus safety, faculty-student relations, critical pedagogy, generational conflict, and academic freedom. Without responsible dialogue, the vitriol surrounding these matters will continue to do inestimable harm. It is not lost on me, as I leave Harvard, that I am very fortunate. I have had a richly rewarding career at the University of Manchester, the University of Chicago, and Harvard. Looking back on the past fifty-two years, I take special pleasure in the fact that I have remained connected with, and continue to be strongly supported by, many of my colleagues, past and present, and by a very large number of those whom I have had the privilege to teach and mentor. To all of them, I express my deepest appreciation. As for the future, there is much more for me still to do. I am already actively engaged in making plans for new work, new writing, new forms of pedagogy. And new challenges.

Postscript: On August 14, 2024, the court issued the following statement announcing the end of the lawsuit: “Now come the parties in the above-entitled action, by their attorneys, and hereby stipulate and agree that the action be Dismissed, with prejudice” – that is, cannot be reopened – “and without costs.” And so, a case that began in an angry uproar, divided the Harvard community, produced bitter attacks against me and my wife in the academy, and circulated across the world to banner headlines, died in a quiet whimper, with strikingly spare media attention – although it left a great deal of damage behind it.