No Written Procedures'
The girl's mother said her daughter did not know the boy who was stalking her until they met at summer school.
The mother also says she asked Hewitt to fax her Harvard's procedures for handling such a case. But Hewitt told her she had "no written procedures to follow in these in these types of situations" and had no access to a fax machine, the mother and police say.
While declining to discuss the stalking case specifically, Virginia L. Mackay-Smith '78, the secretary to the College's Administrative Board, says "there should have been a bedrock knowledge that [the Faculty of Arts and Sciences] takes this seriously and will respond to cases.
"The FAS policy is not to stand in the way," Mackay-Smith says. "We recognize that cases like this can be subject to legal or court action and that in fact we will take pains to accommodate the court action if the student wants us to.
"The police are trained professionals and we would never presume to tell them how to do their jobs, "she adds, "But it is not unusual for upper-level administrators charged with the welfare of the students to consult with the security personnel."
Sources inside the Harvard police department are expressing frustration with the Harvard administration over the incident.
"A failure to act would have left us wide open to a civil suit," says a department source.
"If this girl gets killed and you're the officer and you knew about it but you didn't do anything about it because some administrator called and told you to back off, how awful would you feel? How are you going to live with that?" the source asks.
Johnson, the police chief, says "several meetings" between police and administration officials are planned for this month to discuss how to avoid a similar situation in the future.
"We want to try to coordinate to resolve some of the problems that arose out of that incident, but talking about it would only exacerbate the issue," Johnson says.
He has declined to comment further.
Despite the official silence, Harvard still has some explaining to do--if only to the mother of a frightened 17-year-old girl.
"I don't know why the administrators did what they did," the mother said in a telephone interview last week. "I'm just amazed by this whole thing....It's all just very strange."