The Lifecycle of a Moral Panic

The matter of single-gender social organizations has followed a familiar American pattern. At the beginning, a genuine problem is identified; the responses to it are insufficiently effective; a moral panic erupts, inflamed by larger societal forces; the authorities make a muscular response, which infringes personal freedom; those concerned about the loss of freedom protest cautiously if at all, out of fear of seeming to give comfort to the enemy; and the matter ends with a course correction, perhaps under judicial order in cases where civil rights are at stake, and perhaps only years after the precipitating events.

The immigration and terrorism panics from the current presidential campaign—walls to solve the problem of Mexican rapists, immigration bans to solve the problem of terrorist bombings—fit the old pattern. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and Tipper Gore’s campaign to label dirty song lyrics show that the same pattern can stretch over issues grave and trivial.  The Internet has spawned a whole series of moral panics—we tell the story of the rise and fall of the Display Provision of the Communications Decency Act in chapter 7 of Blown to Bits.

Typically, the infringement of personal freedom is at first not acknowledged by the authorities, and is dismissed when raised by others. “It’s only a small dent in anybody’s rights, if it has anything to do with rights at all,” goes the argument. “These circumstances are absolutely unique and so this action could never set a precedent for anything else. And the small price is worth paying, given the magnitude of the problem and the importance of addressing it.” This logic leads to exaggeration in both directions, minimizing the threat to personal freedom and overstating the effectiveness of the reaction. The muscular response generally looks overblown once the moral panic subsides—until it is cited as a precedent during a later moral panic. Even the appalling Japanese-American internment has recently been cited favorably.

From a distance—and sometimes from close up, in the eyes of calmer souls—the response to a panic may look very different. As President Pusey said at the time McCarthy was going after Harvard professors for being communists, “Someday I am sure that we shall all look back on the hateful irrationality of the present with incredulity.”

The lifecycle pattern is understandable in political environments; people are often ready to sacrifice freedoms in times of fear, when rational discourse is most difficult. But academic institutions are devoted to the rule of reason and to teaching students how to solve problems rationally, with an eye to historical moments when panic trumped reason. For the pattern to play out at a great university sets a poor model for those we are educating.

The single-gender policy started with a genuine problem: Some of the final clubs are sketchy places, and bad things that happen at Harvard too often have final clubs in the narrative. My memory of Ad Board cases from twenty years ago is that the names of the same two or three clubs kept appearing in case reports—we started drinking at the X club and then went to his room, he got drunk at X club and punched me, somebody threw rocks from the roof of X club, and so on. I have no trouble believing that the reports continue and may be more frequent, reliable, and serious, as reporting of sexual assaults has increased. This is what I meant in my original letter to Dean Khurana when I referred to some of the clubs as “toxic.”

Various attempts to combat the problem have failed, or were effective only briefly. One tactic I tried that was surprisingly ineffective was to scare the grad board members, who might well be personally liable for damages if crimes or injuries occurred at their clubs. My successor went the other way—he tried to make nice with the final clubs. They reciprocated by inviting him to breakfast and serving a dish that was a word-play on his name. That approach did not work very well either.

Then a moral panic set in as college sexual assault, quite properly, gained national visibility. Whatever one thinks of the relevance of Title IX or of the preponderance-of-evidence standard, there is little doubt that the University has gotten much more aggressive about sexual assault prevention since the feds took an interest in Harvard’s response to complaints—and since litigation has been threatened against the university.

And so Harvard has offered a muscular response, of which the new policy is a part. Oddly, in the interest of inclusivit