LAWSUIT: HARVARD DEAN Rakesh Khurana, Threatens Harvard Males w Sex Assault Claims if Males Don’t Obey Him
If Harvard is looking to throw an administrator under the bus in the wake of federal and state lawsuits against its sanctions on single-sex clubs, Rakesh Khurana seems like a good candidate. The dean of Harvard College invited representatives of all-male clubs to a meeting under false pretenses a year before the sanctions were proposed. The May 2015 meeting was supposed to cover “the latest school policies on alcohol and sexual assault,” but Khurana instead threatened to blackmail the clubs if they didn’t go coed: At that meeting, according to the suit, Khurana waved a sheet of paper in the air that he said contained accounts of sexual assault. “Khurana said that the papers in his hand were very embarrassing to the clubs and that he could not guarantee that they would not be leaked,” the lawsuit says. “But, Khurana said, if some clubs became co-ed — systematically and soon — that would help the situation. It was an unmistakable threat.” The federal lawsuit pins Harvard’s campaign against single-sex clubs starting in 2014 on the installation of Khurana as dean of the college and a sexual-misconduct complaint against Harvard filed with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. It points to the seeming arbitrariness of the sanctions, which target otherwise unobjectionable groups simply because they limit membership to one sex. The plaintiffs’ website Stand Up to Harvard attacks Harvard on multiple fronts. “On December 3, brave students, sororities and fraternities filed lawsuits in federal and Massachusetts courts to stand up for the rights of students,” read a tweet many alumni re-posted verbatim across the social media site. “It is time to stand up to Harvard.”
thecollegefix By Greg Piper
