Harvard's "Secret Court" persecutes gay students
In 1920, Harvard set up a secret tribunal against gay students. The case only came to light in 2002.
On 23 May 1920, Harvard University's acting dean, Chester Greenough, set up a five-member tribunal to track down homosexual students. The occasion was the death of student Cyril Wilcox, who had taken his own life ten days earlier. His older brother then found letters pointing to a gay circle of friends at the university and turned to the dean. Greenough consulted President Abbott Lawrence Lowell and deliberately bypassed the regular disciplinary committee. Instead, a tribunal was formed that simply called itself "The Court". In the archive, the files were later kept under the name "Secret Court".
A few days later, the summonses began. Young men were questioned individually behind closed doors, down to the most intimate details. More than thirty interrogations took place. Eight students were expelled from the university, a young graduate was banned from campus and an assistant professor had to leave. Those expelled were to leave Cambridge, and later employers or universities were told the reason on request. Two of the students were hit not because of their own actions but because of their closeness to the accused. They were allowed to return in 1921; the others were not.
For decades the public learned nothing. Only in 2002 did student Amit Paley come across a folder in the archive titled "Secret Court Files, 1920". After months of research, he published the story in the Harvard Crimson. The then president, Lawrence Summers, called the 1920 proceedings abhorrent and expressly regretted them. In 2012, however, the university declined to award the expelled students posthumous honours, citing its rule on posthumous degrees. For the centenary in 2020, a series of events was devoted to the case.