Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
To further our mission of learning, teaching, and scholarship, Harvard must be a place where students, faculty, and staff freely exchange ideas, and where free expression and academic freedom are nurtured and protected. These elements of academic excellence are possible only if our community can engage in discourse and learning without fear that doing so will lead to personal harassment. The past year has underscored that these values are threatened by the proliferation of online and other harassment, including “doxing.”
When doxing attacks, online or otherwise, have come from outside the Harvard community, as was primarily the case in the past year, we offered, and will continue to offer, affected members of our community guidance and tools to help them protect their privacy and, to the extent possible, manage their online footprint. However, should a doxing attack on one Harvard affiliate come from another Harvard affiliate, we have additional responsibilities, and tools, for addressing such harassment.
Doxing violates two overlapping University policies: the prohibitions against “intense personal harassment” under the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (USRR) and “bullying” under the Non-Discrimination and Anti-Bullying Policies (NDAB). Doxing occurs under these policies when a community member publicly shares an individual’s personal information without their permission with the intention and effect of intense harassment. For purposes of these policies:
- Someone publicly shares personal information by publishing it, posting or reposting it on social media, emailing it, hyperlinking it, or making it available for download.
- Personal information may include a community member’s (or their immediate family member’s) personal or business address, email, cell or telephone number, class schedule, photo or video likeness, or similar information.
- The intention and effect of intense harassment means publicly sharing such information in circumstances that a reasonable person would expect to, and does, result in “harmful interpersonal aggression” by third parties that
- “humiliate[s], degrade[s], demean[s], intimidate[s], or threaten[s] [the targeted] individual”; and
- is “sufficiently severe or pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it creates an environment “that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive and denies the [targeted] individual an equal opportunity” to work or to educational opportunities as defined by the University’s NDAB policy.
Such conduct also violates the USRR’s prohibition against “intense personal harassment of such a character as to amount to grave disrespect for the dignity of others.”
Those who may have experienced doxing should consult School-based processes for enforcing the USRR or contact their local designated resources responsible for enforcing the NDAB in a School or administrative unit. Moving forward, we will learn from the implementation of these existing policies as applied to doxing, and we will seek input from faculty, students, and staff with a view toward revising this guidance as appropriate at the end of two years.
Today’s guidance, endorsed by the Harvard Corporation, makes clear that doxing violates these two bedrock University policies. At the same time, we must acknowledge that policies alone cannot eliminate digital and other harassment or the harms they inflict. To be the Harvard we aspire to be, we must create an academic and work environment that cultivates not only vigorous debate and dialogue but also mutual respect. Both are needed if we are to fulfill the promise of a learning community that is built upon and strengthened by members who reflect, and bring to Harvard from across the globe, different backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.
Sincerely,
Alan M. Garber
President
John F. Manning
Provost
Meredith Weenick
Executive Vice President
Andrea Baccarelli
Dean, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Dean, Harvard Radcliffe Institute
Nancy Coleman
Dean, Division of Continuing Education and University Extension
George Q. Daley
Dean, Harvard Medical School
Srikant Datar
Dean, Harvard Business School
Emma Dench
Dean, Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Marla Frederick
Dean, Harvard Divinity School
William V. Giannobile
Dean, Harvard School of Dental Medicine
John C.P. Goldberg
Interim Dean, Harvard Law School
Hopi E. Hoekstra
Edgerley Family Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Rakesh Khurana
Danoff Dean, Harvard College
Nonie K. Lesaux
Interim Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education
David C. Parkes
Dean, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Jeremy Weinstein
Dean, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Design