Take Back Harvard is a ongoing living archive of pre-published (or otherwise publicly available) materials, primarily from the 1970s until the present documenting and contextualizing the history of sexual assault and rape at Harvard. Organized under collections and tagged under general themes, our archival materials consist of Harvard Crimson articles, personal essays previously published in news and other media, university reports, Harvard University Police Department reports, and ephemera from student campus protests (e.g. posters, pins). If applicable, each piece is also tagged under its location on a campus-wide map to give users an interactive, spatial understanding of the archive. Our project has been constructed using Omeka Classic, an open access tool for the publication of digital media in the form of collections and curated exhibits. We use a customized Omeka theme called “takeback,” which was coded by the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library. All of the code is publicly available on their Github Repository. Our audience is intended to be composed of feminist scholars, student researchers, campus feminist organizers, and the general public.

A Chronology of the Archive and Future Directions

Take Back Harvard takes direct inspiration from UVA’s project, Take Back the Archive, a digital record documenting the history and culture of sexual violence at UVA until 2019. Founded by Lisa Goff, an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at UVA, the Take Back the Archive aims to serve as a model for similar archives at other universities interested in documenting their histories of sexual violence. Thus, Take Back Harvard has adopted a similar language, mission, and archival framework as the original, building off code publicly available in their Github.

We developed our project’s methodology in consultation with Lisa Goff and Vanessa Braganza, who were both involved with Take Back the Archive. We also interviewed Harvard librarians, archivists, digital humanities scholars, and existing undergraduate feminist organizers to establish a sense of the stakes and feasibility of Take Back Harvard.

Since the start of our work in February 2024, we have over one hundred archival pieces and three collections for public view on our site. We also have hundreds of materials in the process of being documented, summarized, and sorted by our undergraduate team and anticipate adding further collections and exhibits as we continue our research. Furthermore, our existing material is concentrated on material publicly and digitally available in student publications and national media, as physical archives housed in Schlesinger Library and Widener Library require digitization and special access. Moving forward, we hope to include materials from these physical archives, as well as ephemera from our campus community and activists. Like UVA’s project, we estimate our archive base to eventually reach the thousands.

Bureaucratic and institutional barriers also hinder and slow our archival process. University policy restricts access to university administrative records for a period of fifty years from creation date; records pertaining to individuals, including student and employee records, are closed for a minimum of eighty years. This policy includes campus-wide surveys on sexual assault and student culture that are key to understanding the landscape of Harvard’s institutional history and the formation of our collections. Furthermore, we are currently operating without grant funding. Therefore all programs like our digital customization software, Omeka Classic, to our in-person events are paid for by our undergraduate team. As we grow our team and apply for grant funding, we hope to expand our archive more quickly, while being mindful not to inflict further harm upon victims.

Ultimately, we would like to make this archive a site of discourse both within Harvard and across other campuses. Just this March 2024, The Harvard Crimson highlighted how Professor Eric Rentschler of the Slavic Studies department was put on leave for violating sexual assault conduct policies. Sexual violence on campus is an ongoing, long-standing problem, and we hope our archive can hold Harvard accountable for its complicity.

Archival Issues

We would like to surface a couple of the issues that we are still grappling with in our work, and that we would like to be in conversation about.

First, we recognize that our archive is not representative of the entire history of sexual violence at Harvard. We rely on documents produced in a past and present mired in white supremacy and class privilege. Our archive disproportionately represents the experiences of primarily white, female students, but these are certainly not the only survivors in Harvard’s long history. There are many survivors who have not come forward for various reasons, whose records have been lost over time, or whose cases have not been deemed worthy of written discourse or investigation. There is an especially likely underrepresentation of people of color, queer and gender queer people, and men. Moreover, there is likely an overrepresentation of sexual violence on Harvard affiliates, rather than survivors in the broader community who were assaulted by members of the University but lack the privileges of those at Harvard. Additionally, we cannot tell the history of sexual violence at Harvard without also telling the history of violence at Harvard, which includes legal enslavement, segregation, and a continuing legacy of unequal treatment. While Harvard classes did not become co-ed until 1946, and Radcliffe College was not officially integrated with Harvard until 1999, that surely was not the beginning of its relationship with sexual violence. While we want to draw attention to the stories that we do have access to, we do not want to distort the archive.

Another issue that we are still considering is the ethics of consent. While our materials are all pre-published or otherwise publicly accessible, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the parties involved were willing to have their stories discussed. Even if they were willing at the time of publication, this is not the same as consenting to be included in an archive such as ours. Reaching out to all of the authors and individuals mentioned in our archive would be an impossible feat, both because of the number of people, and because as we go back in history, some are no longer living. Yet, we are aware that this impossibility does not absolve us from ethical responsibility. Thus, we are partnered with the Harvard Feminist Collective—a non-hierarchical, survivor-centric group of undergraduate Harvard students working to end rape culture on our campus—who is providing counsel on the current landscape of sexual assault on campus and how to best serve and support survivors. Still, we need to think harder about the possible consequences of having this archive publicly accessible and whether or not we are facilitating potential harm to survivors. If so, we need to think about how we can inhibit this harm.