More Social Club Press

Two new items in the Boston Globe. Sage Stossel (AB'93) has a hilariously apt cartoon about Harvard's new social club policy. And Laura Krantz has a new story up. She had the wits to call Bowdoin and ask them about the comparison Harvard was using to justify its policy. Part of the answer is astonishing.

A spokesman for Bowdoin said that even though Harvard cited the college as a model, no one from Harvard contacted Bowdoin for information. Administrators were perplexed to read about their college in the news.

“Our decision was based on what was right at the time for Bowdoin and not necessarily relevant to what other colleges and universities face today,” college spokesman Scott Hood wrote in an e-mail to the Globe.

Really? The Clark-Khurana committee report presenting the new Harvard policy casually states that it was unlikely Harvard could come up with a better policy than Bowdoin's, and nobody bothered to call Bowdoin? Bowdoin's policy may or may not have been a success at Bowdoin; there seems to be some difference of opinion about that. But there are many ways in which Harvard's situation does not parallel Bowdoin's, where the fraternities were on campus and residential. Nobody at Harvard is trying to avoid living in the Houses, which house something like 97% of undergraduates, even though not a single undergraduate is required to live on campus after the freshman year.