Student Journalism 101: Holding institutions accountable

In 2020, Harvard College’s student newspaper, The Crimson, broke a story about sexual harassment allegations against three professors in the anthropology department.

The article garnered a strong reaction from the student body, leading to student protests criticizing the university's complicity in the matter. It brought the anthropology department under scrutiny, as well as Harvard’s practices of handling such complaints, generating calls to reform the university’s sexual misconduct recourse practices. In June 2024, John Comaroff, who was implicated in the article — retired without emeritus status, an honor that the university strips only in rare cases.

This work of student journalism exposed an injustice at the university that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. It garnered loud reactions from the student body. And it spurred a response from the university.

To learn more about this reporting and the work that went into it, I spoke with James Bikales, the journalist who broke the story with his team at The Crimson. We discuss the role of student journalists in holding their institutions accountable through one particular piece of remarkable student journalism.

Here’s our conversation, for IJNotes:

To contact James Bikales about any of the resources he mentions in the podcast, feel free to reach him at jbikales@politico.com.