Where the rubber meets the road

The Implementation Committee reportis out, and Dean Khurana has acceptedits recommendations. The issuance of the report was followed quickly by the appointmentof the committee to consider alternatives, chaired, oddly, by Dean Khurana himself along with another faculty member. (One wonders if he might have delayed accepting the Committee’s recommendations until he had listened to other ideas from his new committee. Oh well.)

The report includes an elaborate set of definitions and categories of social organizations. As far as I can tell, the Index of Prohibited Organizations hasn’t changed. A sorority such as Lambda Upsilon of Alpha Kappa Alphastill isn’t on the Index, even though it is homogeneous in both ethnicity and gender, because it includes Wellesley and MIT students as well as Harvard students. So it’s nondiscriminatory!

The Report makes a number of rhetorical and historical leaps. It suggests that the newer organizations sprang up to serve students who couldn’t get into Final Clubs. That’s doubtless true for some clubs, but not for most of them. Most of the students in most of the single gender organizations are exactly the opposite—they have no use for the Final Clubs, and wouldn’t even have been at Harvard fifty years ago. Take Ali Partovi, for example, who spoke to the Globe.

“There’s a lot of people who share a distaste of the final clubs not just because of sexism but also because of the elitism, yet this policy punishes the guilty and the innocent indiscriminately,” said Ali Partovi, a 1994 graduate who was a member of the local chapter of Sigma Chi. He emphasized he was speaking personally and not for the fraternity. Partovi, a prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, said that as a nerdy, immigrant student on financial aid, he found Harvard lonely and exclusionary. In Sigma Chi, he said, he found a “ragtag group of misfits” and comforting camaraderie more welcoming than the final clubs.

The Report’s mischaracterization of the origins of the fraternities and sororities does not create confidence that the College has attempted to understand the sociology of these organizations.

The Report expresses some annoyance that the USGSO policy had been tied to the problem of sexual assault—which just might be because the two were mentioned in the same breath both by Dean Khurana when he announcedthe policy last May and by President Faust when she acceptedit. The report also expresses annoyance at the use of the term “sanctions,” as though disqualification from eligibility for a variety of distinctions were not punitive.

It is almost too easy to ridicule the report’s patronizing rhetoric. I had particular fun imagining the scenario of Appendix H, where we are asked to envision readings of Chaucer in the dining halls as a welcoming, gender-inclusive form of social life, unlike, I suppose, the bad, discriminatory stuff that happens in meetings of the Kappa Kappa Gamma. Have those who wrote the report actually read Chaucer? I’d suggest they be the first dining-hall performers, and that they work their way through The Miller’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, and The Reeve’s Tale, and see what fun happens.

But here I want to focus on the serious issue the report raises, which I have been wondering all along. What’s the enforcement mechanism? This is important because it’s the point Jim Engell was hitting in his remarks at the FAS meeting. The Statutes assign to the Faculty the job of disciplining students; the Faculty votes and publishes the rules it makes and the sanctions it imposes; and yet the proposal is for the College to punish membership in those clubs on the Index without faculty authorization to do this.

The Implementation Committee Report explains how this circle is to be squared. Students assuming these various roles will have to take an oath that they are not members of organizations on the Index.

I affirm my awareness of the College’s policy regarding the principle of non-discrimination, particularly with regard to membership in unrecognized single-gender social organizations. In taking a leadership position in a student organization/applying for a sponsored grant or fellowship/becomi