Why History Matters

In a Crimson interview, Sanctions Could Be Subject to Change, Faust Says, President Faust starts out on a very promising note in discussing her policy about single-gender social organizations. “The way I talk about is I say, ‘here’s the problem, and now how do we figure out the solution.'" That is exactly right. It is what should  have happened but did not. Define the problem, and ask a group of faculty to come up with a solution, in consultation with students and administrative staff. It should have happened already. It still can happen. It should happen. Unfortunately, the president gives no indication in the interview that she would rescind her single-gender student organization policy or suspend its implementation to give time a group to devise a better one. She seems, in fact, quite skeptical that this sort of thing is within faculty purview at all.

To Government professor Eric M. Nelson ’99—who expressed frustration that Faculty members were not consulted before the policy was rolled out—Faust responded that, to her understanding, the Faculty has not traditionally been involved in shaping undergraduate life and played little role in decisions like the derecognition of the final clubs in the 1980s and the randomization of House assignments in the late 1990s.

According to the Crimson of December 11, 1984, the severance of the final clubs from the College occurred at a meeting of the Committee on College Life, an ancestor of the Committee on Student Life. The CCL was a standing student-faculty committee formed pursuant to the Dowling legislation. As the Crimson reports,

the 12 member committee, consisting of five students and five faculty as well as [Dean of Students Archie C.] Epps and [Dean of Harvard College John] Fox, unanimously recommended that the College expedite the separation.

 As I recall, this separation was but the end of a long process of consultations with faculty and students that had begun in 1977 with the "non-merger merger" of Harvard and Radcliffe. There were many, many faculty consultations along the way. It was not a voting matter for the Faculty as a corporate body, but the Faculty, through its elected representatives, was involved in shaping the outcome. The final decision was an executive decision by the dean of the College -- but he was acting on the recommendation of the duly constituted student-faculty committee. The Faculty was even more involved in the randomization decision. The decision to randomize the housing assignments was developed and recommended by the Committee on the Structure of Harvard College -- an ad hoc committee of very distinguished faculty that met in 1993 and 1994 and consulted widely with faculty, students, and administrators before issuing its report. A poor scan of the committee's report is posted here. In fact, the committee had a very broad mandate -- essentially to review the College and its structure. The committee itself identified self-segregation as a problem and proposed randomization as the solution, after considering a number of alternatives. The so-called Lewis-Maull Committee (Dean Nancy Maull co-chaired with me) included as members J. Woodland Hastings (Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Natural Sciences, Master of North House); Akira Iriye (Charles Warren Professor of American History); David Pilbeam (Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences); Peter J. Gomes (Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Minister in the Memorial Church); Richard J. Herrnstein (Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology); Paul C. Martin (John Hasbrouck van Vleck Professor of Pure and Applied of Physics, Dean of the Division of Applied Sciences); Barbara Rosenkrantz (Professor of the History of Science, Emcrita); and Theda Skocpol (Professor of Sociology). Its recommendation to randomize the Houses went, with a lot of moral weight behind it, first to the Committee on House Life (later merged with the Committee on College Life to form the present Committee on Student Life), then to the Faculty Council; then to the full Faculty for discussion; before finally being implemented by Dean of the College Fred Jewett. (In an ironic twist, Dean Jewett actually did not implement the policy as it was recommended -- he failed to control for gender ratio in each House. That proved to be a disaster the very first year, and that control, which had been recommended in the College Structure report, was put