Professor Jason Mitchell's Minority Report
Bits and Pieces 2017-10-04
Summary:
Professor Mitchell has kindly allowed me to post his minority report. It is very much worth reading, a model of reasoned analysis and clear writing. ------------
29 September 2017
In its Final Report, the Committee on Unrecognized Single-Gender Social Organizations (USGSOs) has modified its preliminary recommendation of June 2017, which would bar undergraduates from joining Final clubs, fraternities, sororities, or similar off-campus single-gender organizations (such as the Hasty Pudding). In lieu of a single policy, the Final Report considers a variety of strategies for addressing the USGSOs, which range from the sanction policy of May 2016 to calls for engagement with students to more aggressive police enforcement of underage drinking and noise statutes. The choice to adopt such a “multiple recommendation” approach reflects the continuing deep divisions within our community about how best to address the USGSOs. In discussions with many colleagues and students—and over many hours of debate within the Committee itself—it has become obvious that these issues do not admit to any straightforward solution, and that colleagues who start from the same goal of making Harvard the best place it can be may nevertheless arrive at very different end points. The purpose of this note is to offer an analysis of the main sources of these differences. As such, it is not intended as a dissent per se, but as a formal attempt to clarify some of the principles and conceptual distinctions that seem to matter most to my colleagues and students.
As I see it, when members of our community disagree about how to address the all-male Final clubs and other USGSOs, we may be disagreeing about either of two distinct questions. The first of these asks, “What problem are we trying to solve?”; the second, “What is the best way to solve it?” The Committee’s Final Report makes clear that a range of answers exists to the latter—thus, its “multiple recommendations” strategy. But, likewise, different members of our community provide very different answers to the question of what problem we are, in the first place, trying to solve. These differences have been reflected in the seemingly different ways that the problem of Final clubs has been framed for the Faculty over time and in different documents—many colleagues feel that the rationale for sanctioning USGSO membership has morphed from an initial focus on sexual assault, to later concerns about gender-based discrimination, and most recently, to issues of inclusion, belonging, and privilege. Indeed, the Committee spent a good deal of time discussing not only these problems, but also additional ones, such as the distorting effects of Final clubs on student social life and the health and safety concerns they pose for our students.
Some of my colleagues have decided that these shifts in rationale reflect some form of political expediency (“let’s keep making different arguments until the Faculty buy one of them”). But we may do better to conclude instead that the problem of the all-male Final clubs is—as psychoanalysts and philosophers of science would say—overdetermined. That is, we should not disavow the all-male Final clubs because they increase the incidence of sexual assault orbecause they discriminate against women orbecause they advance the prerogatives of a few individuals at the expense of many others or because the undermine student life or because they encourage unsafe drinking. We should repudiate them because they do all of these things. Perhaps any one such aspect of the clubs would be sufficient to make the case against them; together they lead, as the Final Report notes, to our community’s shared sense that we cannot afford to do nothing about them.
Note that I have restricted the point above to all-male Final clubs, and this is with intent. Many of us believe firmly that despite its shifting rationales, the College is “really” trying to address problems specific to the all-male Final clubs. After all, these are the only groups that own property adjacent to campus and that host the parties outside of which female undergraduates queue in the hopes of being admitted. These are the groups that perpetuate privilege most perniciously. And these are the groups that our colleagues have uniquely identified as important loci of sexual assault. Indeed, it is hard not to perceive a direct line connecting the Final Report in March 2016 of President Faust’s Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Assault to the annou
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