Harvard’s Feast of Grievance
In 1926, after giving a lecture on literature, Gertrude Stein was asked, “What about the woman issue?” She replied, dryly enough to start a forest fire, “Not everything can be about everything.”
The ousting of Ronald Sullivan, the first black faculty dean to preside over a dorm at Harvard, is one of those scandals that aspires to be about everything, and in the process becomes about nothing at all. Last Friday, Sullivan lost or gave up two separate jobs: his deanship of Winthrop House, and his legal representation of the alleged rapist and Harvey Weinstein. Sullivan, one of the nation’s preeminent criminal-defense attorneys, had struggled to keep these jobs simultaneously while also pleasing a faction of Harvard students who detested Weinstein and held his lawyer to account
