The State of the Debate

Where things stand

Harvard Magazine has posted a nearly complete account of the December 6 FAS meeting. (Incomplete only because one speaker apparently has not given the editor permission to be identified or quoted.) Harvard Magazine gives matters like this much fuller and more professional coverage than the Crimson, which also attends the meetings, but the Crimson is to be congratulated for landing the money quote after the meeting, from beloved University Professor Helen Vendler: “I find the tactics of the administration loathsome, and I mean to have that word quoted.”

For those who are just tuning in, I submitted a motion last May, joined by eleven other professors who had reached out to me after my letter to Dean Khurana became public. In my letter, I explained my concerns about the new policy on unrecognized single-gender social organizations (USGSOs), which would bar their members from a variety of college roles and honors. Our motion codified the first thing I thought of when I heard about the policy: You don’t punish people for joining a club. That’s un-American, as I told the Boston Globe a week ago.

Many discussions and two full faculty meetings later, the matter is not settled. If our motion passes, the policy is blocked, but nothing else changes since there are no other circumstances under which Harvard has penalized anyone for joining a club. The motion is therefore a self-explanatory way of blocking the policy without changing anything else. In particular, it does not say that the final clubs should be left alone. It says only that Harvard will not punish students for joining clubs. As both I and Jim Engell emphasize in our remarks to the Faculty, we would much prefer not to vote on the motion at all and instead to have the policy withdrawn and then to have a serious discussion about the problems the policy is meant to address.

The dominant arguments

As I see it, there are really two arguments against my motion and for the policy as it stands. The first argument is that the final clubs are bad places, dangerous and noisy, over-privileged and under-diversified, and Harvard has to do something about them. The second argument is that USGSOs undercut College residential life, which should be happening in the Houses and in the Yard, not off-campus.

Neither of these arguments can trump the free-association principle that is the basis for our motion. We don’t punish people for joining organizations we don’t like and that they have a legal right to join. And we also don’t sacrifice individual rights to the community’s broad social goals. Our motion has no implications about other tactics to solve the problems the clubs cause.

There is an unverified premise behind both arguments against our motion: that making the clubs go co-ed would make them better behaved and would bring social life to the Houses. There is not a shred of evidence for either, and actually some evidence to the contrary. In the student survey comments, for example, the co-educational Hasty Pudding Club comes in for the same kind of criticism as the final clubs. In her remarks at the December 6 meeting, Professor Margo Seltzer does a good job on the likely ineffectiveness of the policy to address any of the problems to which it is said to be a response.

Of course, no right is unlimited, including the right to assemble. One could take the view—and some of the rhetoric goes in this direction—that the final clubs are so noxious that they fall beyond the pale of basic civil liberties, that they are unprotected by reference to the First Amendment right to association in the same way that obscene speech is not protected by the right to free speech. The problem with that argument is that nobody is claiming that level of toxicity for the majority of the organizations affected, which are not the male final clubs, but female final clubs, fraternities, and sororities. (And even among the male final clubs, not all host noisy parties with female guests.) If the policy had targeted the male final clubs, I probably would not have liked it, but I doubt I would have protested loudly. But the policy is not only likely to be ineffective in attacking the real problems, it is going to be accompanied by unjustified collateral damage to private organizations about which we have not been hearing any horror stories.

The argument from inclusivity

These questions