Quad Rape Created Urgency For Improved Safety

Early on the morning of Sept. 20, 1980, a young woman was walking home to the Radcliffe Quadrangle when she was accosted, dragged behind some bushes by Hilles Library, and raped. The incident, which occurred at the very beginning of the school year, appalled the Harvard campus and spurred discussion about the safety of women just after the College’s housing had become entirely co-ed.

In the wake of the rape, the security of the campus came under heavy scrutiny, especially in the Quad area and on the walk from the river Houses to the Quad. Then-master of North House Hanna Hastings charged the University with inadequately providing for the safety of Quad residents. In particular, Hastings pointed out that only one guard was employed to patrol all three Quad Houses, while each of the river Houses had its own guard and six guards roamed Harvard Yard, who mostly keep bicycle riders from mounting their bikes in the Yard.

But students raised the loudest outcry, especially groups like the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS) and Students Organized for Safety (SOS). They criticized not only the lack of security on campus but a culture that they alleged had allowed the incident to happen in the first place.

These groups called for the University to take immediate measures to improve campus security and were chafed when the administration did not share their sense of urgency. Then-president Derek C. Bok, rather than making immediate large-scale changes, responded by creating a new standing committee on security, chaired by then-associate dean Thomas A. Dingman ’67.

Dingman said the committee “reviewed all of the security arrangements for the undergraduate community,” and that among other things, its report led to some improvements in lighting around campus.

Bok explained at the time that “these changes would require an expenditure of funds; it’s not something you can just rush into.”

Alison Dundes Renteln ’81, then-president of RUS, called for swifter changes, including a lit path to the Quad. Renteln told The Crimson that she was “afraid we may be getting into a bureaucratic snarl.”

TAKING BACK THE NIGHT?

Some students alleged that the main problem lay not with security measures but with deeper problems with male-dominated society. In October of 1981, SOS chair Elisabeth M. Einaudi ’83 and Peggy A. Mason ’82, chair of the Harvard “Take Back the Night” (TBTN) committee, wrote an op-ed in The Crimson calling for improved safety measures and criticizing the mentality that generated violence against women. The letter praised recent security improvements like the shuttle system and increase in the number of security guards, but it further suggested that the University provide floodlights, extend patrol hours, and institute self-defense courses.

But these measures, Einaudi and Mason argued, were “only temporary solutions. The permanent solution is to alter the power structure and attitudes that lead to violence against women.”

“Violence permeates today’s society and affects each of our lives,” they wrote. “Now is the time to take back the night.”

The centerpiece of the movement was a march against rape on Nov. 8, which took place even after Radcliffe President Martina S. Horner refused to fund the event. The march was not supported only by women.

“It is time we stop hiding behind our individual issues and see the connection between them all,” wrote Benjamin H. Schatz ’81 in a letter to The Crimson. “Women’s issues affect every single one of us and demand our full support.”

A SAFER, BRIGHTER HARVARD?

Today, many of the safety measures demanded by students in 1980 have become a reality. Members of Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) teach a “Rape Aggression and Defense Program” which, according to the HUPD website, “empowers female students, faculty, and staff to combat various types of assaults by providing them with realistic self-defense tactics and techniques.”

But violence against women have not entirely disappeared. In 2003, a string of students were sexually assaulted in Cambridge Common, leading the University to install emergency call phones to improve safety on the walk to the Quad. The Harvard-operated phones, marked by distinctive blue lights, can be used to directly summon police. Earlier requests for such phones had been denied because Harvard did not own the land. It took the series of assaults for Harvard to agree to the callboxes, which were installed in the fall of 2004 at a cost of $12,000 to the University.

“Without the political capital gained by [the assaults], I don’t know if the University and the city would have been convinced,” then-Undergraduate Council president Matthew W. Mahan ’05 told The Crimson at the time. “The city and the University were not initially for it.”

The University also created the Harvard University Campus Escort Program in 2004 to keep students safe on late-night walks and initiated universal swipe-card access to the Houses to allow students to take refuge if they feel threatened.

Today, Harvard’s campus boasts more security now than it did 25 years ago. Laura C. Mumm ’09, co-chair of TBTN, says that there is a “plethora” of resources for students today. “To improve safety around Harvard,” she writes in an e-mail, “I think the best thing would be to make sure students actually feel comfortable in using the resources available to them.”

Improvement in campus safety could be traced back to the agitation in 1980, but even today, it takes “the political capital” of actual sexual assaults to move Harvard to institute substantial changes.

—Staff writer M. Aidan Kelly can be reached at makelly@fas.harvard.edu.