This sacred-to-profane story is thick with irony. Thiemann, 52, who resigned his deanship, was a Lutheran minister who had also established Harvard’s influential Center for the Study of Values in Public Life. An eminent scholar, he was by all accounts an energetic leader who spent much of his 13-year tenure upgrading the faculty and modernizing the curriculum. The school’s endowment shot from $64 million to $245 million, giving Divinity a loftier standing among Harvard’s competitive graduate schools. His colleagues saw a happily married father of two daughters whose fund-raising zeal was matched by his gusto for organizing faculty-student softball games. “I just about fell out of my chair when I read it this morning,’’ says John David Dawson, a religion professor at Haverford College and a former colleague.
The Globe forced Harvard’s hand last week after tracking down rumors for months. (Both Thiemann and his lawyer declined to comment.) While avoiding specifics, a Harvard spokesman called Thiemann’s actions “conduct unbecoming of a dean,” and pointed to the Divinity School’s faculty handbook, which bans “inappropriate, obscene, bigoted or abusive” material on school computers. But the images on Thiemann’s Harvard-owned PC, at his Harvard-owned residence, were not illegal, and his tenured teaching post isn’t threatened. Search for a new dean is under way, and few faculty expect fund-raising to fall off.
A confused pall hangs over the school in the wake of the revelations. Students’ reactions vary widely; some think the whole thing’s a harmless joke–“like getting caught with Playboys under the mattress,’’ said one female student. But others, including some in Divinity’s strong feminist contingent, take the disclosure more seriously. So far, no one is calling for Thiemann’s tenure to be revoked, but some women, at a student-faculty meeting last week, said they’d be uncomfortable taking his classes when his sabbatical ends in January. He’ll return having had a very public refresher course in his specialty.
