An association of Black students at Harvard Law School says the university “woefully failed to act” after four students received offensive emails and text messages from an anonymous sender, reports CBS News.
The Harvard Black Law Students Association issued a statement on Friday criticizing the school after it was unable to determine who sent the “hateful, racist and sexist” messages, and after officials refused to share details of an investigation with students who received the messages. Four students, including two who are Black, notified school officials this year that they had separately received messages with comments including “we all hate u,” “you know you don’t belong here” and “you’re just here because of affirmative action.”
Harvard Law School Dean of Students Marcia Sells issued a statement to CBS News saying that the school worked with university police “and engaged an outside law firm to investigate these four anonymous messages. Should we learn any new information, we will continue the investigation.” The student group believes the messages came from another student or students, but Harvard officials say that has not been confirmed.
The group says the messages were sent from “retailer display phones” and two anonymous Gmail accounts. Part of the dispute arises from a request to share details of Harvard’s investigation. The four students say Harvard officials promised to provide the findings of the investigation but have refused to do so. Harvard officials say student privacy laws prohibit them from sharing the findings. Simmering racial tensions have occasionally flared at the elite law school in recent years. In 2015, portraits of several Black professors were vandalized in a Harvard Law building, with slashes of black tape placed over the photos. Harvard police eventually closed the case without finding a culprit. Later, in 2016, the law school agreed to retire its official crest after students protested its connection to an 18th-century slaveholder, Isaac Royall Jr., who donated his estate to create the first law professorship at Harvard.
