Professor Allen’s puzzling motion

Harvard Magazine gives the text of the motion Professor Danielle Allen offered at the October 3 FAS meeting:

that the policies of the Harvard College Handbook for Students for student organizations pertain to students participating in all student organizations recognized as such by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Faculty recognizes that on a college campus, as in society, basic freedoms and rights can come into conflict with each other. In such situations, the faculty and administration of Harvard College shall establish policies that protect individual freedoms while upholding the educational mission of the College.

This must have seemed benign and unobjectionable to the Faculty Council, since the Council voted in favor, 17-0. (Actually, the wording of the motion was changed after the Faculty Council voted for it – the revised version was distributed on paper at the beginning of the FAS meeting. Neither of these is the draft motion included in the report of the Clark-Khurana committee. So Professor Allen has offered three versions of her motion so far; perhaps a fourth will be offered before a vote gets taken. The Faculty Council opposed my motion, 2-16, so at least one faculty member, and perhaps two, voted for both.)

What is puzzling is that in a letterto the Crimson, Professor Allen describes the actual effect her motion would have.

Its effect would be that students who join student social groups that have become co-educational and that otherwise adhere to campus policies for student organizations will not face repercussions from the administration. Students who join social groups that have not become co-educational will be ineligible to continue enrollment at the College.

I have no idea how these conclusions follow from the text of the motion. The motion gives no protection to membership in any organization, as my motion would; it simply suggests which organizations would immediately be subject to institutional control. The statement that, if Professor Allen’s motion passes, members of noncompliant student groups would be punished harshly was also made at the FAS meeting and in an FAQ. As Harvard Magazine reports,

This approach seemingly would have the virtue of bringing regulation of USGSOs under FAS’s auspices, rather than relegating the decision to the president (to which some faculty members have objected, as described above). But it leaves what to do up to the dean. As for the risks students might face if they do not comply with regular oversight and regulation, Allen’s FAQ points, briskly, to “suspension or expulsion.”

In the Crimson, Professor Allen describes this way of proceeding as a “middle way between the two poles of the argument.” Hardly.

There is nothing new in the idea that Harvard should be trying to get all single-gender clubs to go co-ed; Dean Khurana has been doing his best at that for the past couple of years, with some success. Professor Allen’s recourse to Massachusetts Law as justifying such efforts to regulate the clubs is, as far as I can tell, without teeth. Indeed, it was exactly the fact that threats from Harvard could not be enforced that led the Clark-Khurana committee to reject the earlier draft of Professor Allen’s motion. So the argument that Harvard can legally regulate the clubs doesn’t advance the ball at all, and leaves the original question: what to do if the clubs do not cooperate. Professor Allen says their members should be suspended or expelled, and suggests that her motion implies that, but it doesn’t.

Let’s read it again:

that the policies of the Harvard College Handbook for Students for student organizations pertain to students participating in all student organizations recognized as such by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Yes, of course, the policies of Harvard College apply to Harvard students—to all Harvard students. The restrictive clause that follows (students participating in this or that) adds nothing to what we already know about the applicability of Harvard rules to Harvard students. The motion does not say that students may not participate in organizations that do not comply with rules governing recognized student organizations. That is, of course, the very question my motion seeks to clarify, by guaranteeing that they may.

-o-

Professor Allen seems to have couched her motion in bland language so that it will receive broad support, on the understanding that it would authorize the administration to work out the details without ever bringing anything contentious to a vote of the full Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Bland motions are dangerous. Even the unanimously voted