Harvard Strikes Back

Bunkered in the University Hall basement last Friday, administrators and police plot strategy in their war on crime.

It has been a dark winter. Ten assaults in less than four months have left the Harvard community shaken.

But in this below-ground conference room, the officials in charge of campus safety have finally turned a corner in their battle. Last month, local law enforcement officials arrested Geremias Cruz Ramos, the University-employed custodian who allegedly went on a six-month assault rampage. A handful of new safety initiatives are in the works. After a series of highly publicized stumbles, administrators seem to have hit their stride.

Behind the turnaround is Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd, Harvard’s unofficial safety czar. At the beginning of the assault wave, the University struggled to craft a coherent response. Safety responsibilities are decentralized among dozens of Harvard officials. But in this cramped subterranean setting, Kidd has pushed key decision-makers into close contact.

A poster hanging from the basement wall screams the slated motto for the College’s new campaign against crime: “Safety starts with you!”

The message, designed for students, could just as well be directed to the group of University leaders that Kidd has assembled here.

These men and women will decide whether Harvard follows through with its war on sexual assault, or whether the University is left permanently on the defensive.

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Clad in a grey suit and a matching silk tie is Kidd’s right-hand man: Assistant Dean of the College Paul J. McLoughlin II, a rising star in University Hall.

Four months ago, McLoughlin—then a counselor at the Office of Career Services—gained his current post despite widespread speculation that the deanship would go to longtime student activities coordinator Susan T. Cooke. But at Friday’s safety committee, McLoughlin displayed the confidence of a veteran as he hashed out the details of the University’s new strategy.

Directly across the table from Kidd is Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) Chief Francis D. “Bud” Riley, flanked by an entourage of uniformed officers and aides. In 1996, when Riley took control of HUPD after 25 years of service in the state police, the department was dogged by allegations of racism within its ranks. He weathered that storm, as well as crime waves that followed, including a series of armed robberies that struck campus in the fall of 1996. But he has won widespread respect for his sensitivity to student concerns and his firm commitment to fighting crime.

Kidd begins the meeting by praising incoming Undergraduate Council President Matt W. Mahan ’05, who sits to Riley’s left, for helping organize the committee’s first meeting in November. Mahan faces the daunting challenge of filling the oversized shoes of outgoing council President Rohit Chopra ’04. Disarmingly polite, Mahan has unveiled a series of ambitious proposals to bolster campus security. He hopes to make the age-old demand for 24-hour universal keycard access a reality and to pressure Cambridge officials into installing more lights in the Cambridge Common.

According to Adeyemi K. Owolewa ’07, a student representative on the Safety Committee, the success of Mahan’s safety agenda could be “the defining component of his presidency.”

But with all these devoted administrators, students and police officers working to craft a unified University response, criticisms of Harvard’s safety infrastructure have not disappeared. According to James K. Herms, a former Extension School student and relentless safety advocate, the rate of non-residence hall violent crime at Harvard is more than twice the rate at the University of Pennsylvania, and nearly four times the rate at Yale.

Herms has directed his criticism at University Vice President and General Counsel Robert W. Iuliano ’83, who oversees HUPD from Mass. Hall. Iuliano’s office, meanwhile, has taken measures to keep Herms off campus. In a September 2003 letter that Herms released to The Crimson, University attorney Kimberly S. Budd threatened Herms with legal action if he violates the terms of a HUPD-written no-trespass order. “Your client has caused numerous disruptions in the last three years on Harvard’s campus,” Budd wrote to Herms’ lawyer. She wrote that Herms had made “inappropriate comments with sexual connotations to students,” had failed to follow HUPD-issued no-trespass warnings for individual buildings and had “misrepresent[ed] his relationship with the Harvard security guards and the Committee Against Sexual Assault.”

***

As Friday’s meeting indicated, Kidd is building a stronger University infrastructure capable of combating street crime. She has combined the resources of HUPD, College administrators, Mass. Hall officials, facilities managers and student leaders to generate a powerful, centralized response.

There is still more to be done. Here Mahan’s role is critical: he has pointed out a number of holes in Kidd’s response, including the lack of any effort to light the Cambridge Common.

But the team has made strides. They have created an innovative mechanism to protect students walking home on weekend nights. A roaming force of escorts on the streets will combine with extended van service and a new transportation hotline. And Kidd and her committee have streamlined a community advisory system that in the past sometimes failed to alert students of assaults.

Before the wave of assaults began, this infrastructure did not exist.

“It’s sad that it took something like this to make us safer,” Owolewa said. “It shouldn’t have come at the sake of those women.”

Just how many women became victims of sexual assault before University administrators took action remains unclear. Ramos has admitted to about 100 gropings—most of which went unreported—over the last few months, a police officer told a district court judge in late January.

But Ramos has only been charged in two of the ten assaults reported near undergraduate dorms since October. “I would love to say that one person is responsible for all incidents, but I can’t,” said Cambridge Police Department (CPD) Commissioner Ronnie Watson. “The [suspect] descriptions are too different.”

Riley warned Kidd and her team on Friday that Ramos’ arrest could spark a false sense of security. “Just because this arrest was made doesn’t mean people should fall back into a sense of complacency,” he said.

Four hours later, Riley’s words would prove prescient. A Harvard graduate student was groped on Holyoke Street at 8:30 that evening, she told police Monday.

Not Kidding Around

Kidd jumped to an inauspicious start as chair of the safety committee, garnering criticism for an incident even she concedes was “embarrassing.”

After the assault, administrators urged students to use SafetyWalk, a much-advertised volunteer-run walking escort service. But Kidd admitted soon thereafter that the program had quietly become defunct.

The snafu was particularly glaring, considering that signs on hundreds of campus blue light phones—emergency call boxes which link directly to HUPD headquarters—still featured SafetyWalk’s phone number.

Kidd is no stranger to controversy. In 1995, when then-Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 appointed Kidd assistant dean for public service, leaders of student volunteer groups—who favored a rival candidate for the post—staged a protest that drew a crowd of over 700. And in her first year on the job, she frequently clashed with student leaders of the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA).

By the time Kidd was promoted to associate dean last year, the friction between her and PBHA was a distant memory, and she had won admiration for being accessible to students. But when the SafetyWalk story broke, old criticisms of Kidd’s team reemerged.

According to Luke B. Hedrick ’05, co-president of Harvard Men Against Rape, Kidd and McLoughlin ignored input from members of the Sigma Chi fraternity who wanted to relaunch SafetyWalk.

In December, after The Crimson reported that SafetyWalk was no longer operating, Sigma Chi member Alejandro G. Ruiz ’05 approached McLoughlin with a proposal for a replacement student-run escort initiative. McLoughlin told Ruiz that administrators were already working to start a program of their own.

Ruiz, who attended Friday’s University Hall meeting, said he was pleased with the program McLoughlin eventually devised. But Hedrick cautioned against giving College administrators too much credit. Two months ago, he pointed out, College officials responsible for safety were directing students to a program that didn’t exist.

“Fast forward a few months, several assaults happen, and Dean McLoughlin suddenly decides to patch up the administration’s incompetence and sell it as a success,” Hedrick said.

***

In an interview with FM in January, Kidd offered a candid mea culpa for the demise of SafetyWalk, blaming her inexperience for the oversight. “If I had been in charge of the safety committee last year, that simply would not have happened because I would have known to check in the fall,” she said.

After she learned in December that the program was defunct, Kidd acted swiftly to take down the hundreds of SafetyWalk advertisements posted across campus. But she faced a far more difficult task in replacing SafetyWalk with an escort program that could stand the test of time.

“We don’t want to just put in place the same thing that went out of business before,” she told FM last month.

In perhaps her savviest move, she delegated authority over the issue to McLoughlin, who churned out impressive results.

On Friday, McLoughlin outlined the product of his labor: an intricately designed system under which the College will employ undergraduates and graduates to work as roving escorts from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday to Wednesday, and from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. Thursday to Saturday.

McLoughlin’s blueprint divides the campus into three zones: the Yard, the Quad and the River Houses. Six paid staffers at a time—two in each zone—will roam their territories and approach solo walkers to offer escorts.

Meanwhile, dispatchers at HUPD headquarters will field calls from students seeking escorts, helping them navigate the vast array of University-provided transportation options—which also include shuttles and an evening van service. And after the escort service closes for the night, dispatchers will send patrol cars to help stranded students get home.

Though the Harvard University Campus Escort Program (HUCEP) will be one of the most extensive escort programs among Ivy League and Boston-area schools, it still falls short of the 24-hour services offered by Northeastern and Yale Universities.

Northeastern’s program relies on cadets from the university’s police academy, a resource Harvard can’t match. And while Yale staffs its 24-hour service with professional security guards, McLoughlin said that if Harvard had followed Yale’s lead, administrators might have been bogged down in talks with labor unions. “I don’t know if we could have gotten it done as quickly,” he said.

Harvard’s decision to rely on student walkers will likely hold costs down, and according to McLoughlin, HUCEP could save money if its employees are Federal Work Study grant recipients. But, he added, “I’m sure it’s not going to be inexpensive.” The starting wage is $10.25 an hour, 15 cents more than Dorm Crew, McLoughlin said. And while he pledged the College would foot the bill at first, he speculated that graduate schools might help pick up the tab if their students and faculty use the service extensively.

McLoughlin said that HUCEP’s reliance on undergraduate and graduate employees could help fight students’ feeling of impotence about the spike in assaults. “I wanted the opportunity to empower students with a service they can provide to each other,” he said.

Two months after the University’s safety strategy hit rock bottom with news of SafetyWalk’s collapse, Kidd and McLoughlin have bounced back. Even while it existed, SafetyWalk—cordoned off in the Science Center basement—was scarcely used. With HUCEP, Kidd and McLoughlin have turned the SafetyWalk train wreck into a golden opportunity.

The Ground War

The series of sexual assaults sparked administrators’ creativity and spurred positive reforms. Likewise, HUPD—after resorting to stopgap measures during the crime wave—has found that its makeshift changes could become permanent solutions.

Soon after the beginning of the assault wave, HUPD increased the presence of police officers on foot, riding bicycles and in cars across campus, targeting areas where the assaults have occurred and the routes students frequent. Chief Riley said these focused patrols, originally introduced as a response to the assaults, are now here to stay.

For Riley, patrols and pathways are more than just job requirements. Among the 19,638 students across the University’s nine schools is Caitlin D. Riley ’05, who in addition to being a psychology concentrator in Quincy House, happens to be the seasoned chief’s daughter.

But winning the ground war is not enough. Fighting crime on a college campus means more than just putting criminals behind bars—though that itself is a tall order. In addition to protecting students from assailants who lurk on Cambridge’s streets, Riley must provide a sense of security for students who have been rattled by the assault wave.

But the infrastructure for communicating with students, an inefficient and outdated community advisory system, was not up to that task.

Within 48 hours of an assault deemed serious enough to keep the community in danger, HUPD sends an e-mail to a list of 159 University officials whose job it is to pass word quickly on to students. But in many instances this year, these e-mails languished in administrators’ inboxes, leaving students in the dark.

In some Houses, the e-mails are sent over House open-lists, keeping those students who choose not to subscribe to the list uninformed. And in first-year dorms, where responsibility for sending the alerts was decentralized among dozens of residential proctors, the situation was worse.

But no one seemed to notice anything was awry until this January, when three students were assaulted in nine days.

After looking at the HUPD website, Oulu Wang ’06 realized that an advisory had been sent out to her House four days after the incident it described took place.

“In cases of sexual assaults, these delays could potentially be dangerous,” she wrote to the Mather-open list on Jan. 14. “I find the delay unacceptable and irresponsible.”

On that same day, Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71, in an unusual step, usurped the advisory system and sent an e-mail to every undergraduate outlining the University’s response to the assault wave. HUPD has followed Gross’ lead: on Tuesday, the department e-mailed news of Friday’s Holyoke Street assault directly to each student, eliminating the fallible middleman.

Still, HUPD harbors reservations about the new system.

Although Riley said students who do not want to receive advisories will be able to opt out, safety officials fear their easy access to all students’ inboxes could make community advisories seem like spam.

“We tell everything, and in the end, we tell nothing because [students] stop listening,” Iuliano said.

According to Princeton University Police Chief Steven J. Healy, mass e-mails cannot substitute for human interaction. At Princeton, officers are assigned to campus student groups and residence halls so that safety messages can also be delivered in person. And while HUPD officers sometimes eat in dining halls and hold “safety talks” in first-year dorms and Houses, Harvard lacks the formal structure modeled by Princeton.

Student relations should be, and once were, Riley’s forte. When he assumed the reins of HUPD in 1996, he made improving police-student communication his top priority. And as he sat face-to-face with student leaders in the basement of University Hall last week, he seemed to be getting back into his groove.

Looking Ahead

University administrators are gaining ground in their quest to make Harvard safer. But students, led by council President Mahan, want to open a new front in the war against sexual assault. And the battle ground is Cambridge Common, the poorly lit municipal green between Garden Street and Mass. Ave.

In his final days as president last month, Chopra told FM that illuminating the Common was at the top of his list of safety prerogatives. But he failed to spur administrators to act. Staking out the Common lighting issue as his own gives Mahan the chance to emerge from Chopra’s shadow. But he has 373 years of history working against him.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Common was home to grazing cattle. Now, unlucky Quadlings trek across its grassy lawns as a short-cut between the Yard and their far-flung dorms—walking through what was the training ground for George Washington’s troops in the early days of the American Revolution. According to Cambridge Mayor Michael A. Sullivan, strict historical preservation requirements stand in the way of efforts to improve lighting in the park.

The Common is municipal property—outside of HUPD’s domain and beyond administrators’ control. As a result, Kidd, though sensitive to Mahan’s concerns, told FM that she would rather focus on matters within the safety committee’s jurisdiction than become embroiled in a spat with the city.

But Mahan isn’t satisfied with Kidd’s explanation. “Everyone seems to agree that the Common is unsafe,” said Mahan. “The deans don’t seem willing to fight with the city over this.”

According to Mahan, city officials are loathe to step up safety precautions in the Common because they do not want to admit that the symbolic heart of Cambridge has grown unsafe. Meanwhile, University officials—in an effort to avoid a town-gown confrontation—downplay the Common’s dangers.

Kidd, in an interview with FM last month, came closer than any administrator, past or present, to admitting that the Common is unsafe. “The University, by virtue of publicly designating pathways, tells students that they should not walk through the Cambridge Common at night,” she said. And according to Currier House Master Joseph L. Badaracco, “Students do know about the hazards of Cambridge Common... everyone has been warned so many times about parks, especially at night.”

Nonetheless, the University’s “designated safety pathway” maps still instruct students to walk along the edge of the Common on their way to and from the Quad, even though the other side of Garden Street offers better access to blue-light phones and administrative buildings.

The University seems to have recent crime stats on its side. “This recent spike [in assaults] is not occurring in Cambridge Common—it’s occurring in Harvard Square and the Yard,” Kidd said.

But logic like that will leave the University permanently on the defensive.

The University has made no moves to initiate conversations with Cambridge on the issue. Sullivan said he has never discussed the Common lighting situation with Harvard representatives. And in an interview with FM Monday, Thomas J. Lucey, the University’s director of community relations for Cambridge, said that Harvard has no plans to broach the subject with municipal officials.

But Mahan isn’t willing to let the issue languish. He has promised a letter-writing campaign to shame city officials into action.

It seems on this issue administrators have been upstaged by a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House.

Meanwhile, Mahan’s other priority, universal keycard access, has become something of a cliche in discussions of Harvard safety. The incoming president has clung to this goal, while administrators and House masters have not budged from strong opposition.

In a January interview, Mahan reiterated talking points he has recycled from previous generations of council leadership. “If you’re a first-year who is in a study group or visiting a significant other in Mather or Dunster House, and you have to be there until 2:30 [a.m.], you have to walk so far before there’s a building you can swipe into,” he said.

After 2:30 a.m., when non-residents lose keycard access to the Houses, students would have no safe place to go if they felt they were being followed, Mahan said. “If you feel uncomfortable at night walking home, you should have the option of walking into a safe space.”

But Mahan understands he faces formidable obstacles.

At bottom, the disagreement is between students who say universal access would make them safer, and administrators who say just the opposite.

Adams House Master Sean Palfrey worries 24-hour access would spark an outbreak of what he calls “piggybacking.” He predicts that with increased inter-House traffic, unsuspecting students will politely hold doors open, unwittingly letting potential criminals slip in.

But according to Princeton’s Chief Healy, “the issues surrounding building security, such as non-students piggy-backing...exist no matter who has authorized access.” And the College’s move to extend universal keycard access hours from 1 a.m. to 2:30 a.m. in January 2002 did not lead to rises in House crime or vandalism, Mahan noted.

If anything, though, the age-old keycard access spat is a diversion from the more important issue: cooperation between University officials, police officers, students and city politicians.

As the safety committee rounded the last corner of its basement meeting last week, universal keycard access was gently brushed aside. The bigger issues—the SafetyWalk fiasco, police deployment, community advisories and the Cambridge Common—dominated conversation.

It’s hard to imagine any of this taking place before the sexual assault wave began. At the beginning of October, Kidd was just settling in to her new deanship, and McLoughlin was just about to make the jump from career counselor to high-powered College administrator. Mahan was gearing up for his presidential bid. Riley and his forces were comfortably outside the campus spotlight. And Geremias Cruz Ramos was a custodian at Harvard’s University Health Services.

Last Friday, Kidd, McLoughlin, Mahan and Riley were sitting around a map of campus like generals plotting a battle plan. And Ramos was in Middlesex County jail, behind bars.