100 years later, scholars revisit the Secret Court at Harvard
Sophomore Amit Paley was researching a story for the Harvard Crimson in 2002 when an unrelated note in the University Archives database caught his eye. The entry was titled “Secret Court Files, 1920,” and it described a mysterious committee that had persecuted Harvard students for homosexual activity. “It was so strange and so different from any other entry that I had seen in my time looking at the archives that I thought it would make an incredibly important story,” said Paley ’04, now CEO of The Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides suicide prevention services to young members of the LBGTQ community. As a reporter for the Crimson in 2002, Amit Paley '04 discovered the "Secret Court Files, 1920" in the Harvard Archives. Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer Paley had stumbled onto the existence of a hidden tribunal consisting of five Harvard administrators, overseen by University President Abbott Lawrence Lowell....