The matter of single-gender social organizations has
followed a familiar American pattern. At the beginning, a genuine problem is
identified; the responses to it are insufficiently effective; a moral panic
erupts, inflamed by larger societal forces; the authorities make a muscular
response, which infringes personal freedom; those concerned about the loss of
freedom protest cautiously if at all, out of fear of seeming to give comfort to
the enemy; and the matter ends with a course correction, perhaps under judicial
order in cases where civil rights are at stake, and perhaps only years after
the precipitating events.
The immigration and terrorism panics from the current presidential
campaign—walls to solve the problem of Mexican rapists, immigration bans to
solve the problem of terrorist bombings—fit the old pattern. The internment of
Japanese-Americans during World War II and Tipper Gore’s campaign to label
dirty song lyrics show that the same pattern can stretch over issues grave and
trivial. The Internet has spawned a
whole series of moral panics—we tell the story of the rise and fall of the
Display Provision of the Communications Decency Act in chapter 7 of
Blown
to Bits.
Typically, the infringement of personal freedom is at first
not acknowledged by the authorities, and is dismissed when raised by others.
“It’s only a small dent in anybody’s rights, if it has anything to do with
rights at all,” goes the argument. “These circumstances are absolutely unique
and so this action could never set a precedent for anything else. And the small
price is worth paying, given the magnitude of the problem and the importance of
addressing it.” This logic leads to exaggeration in both directions, minimizing
the threat to personal freedom and overstating the effectiveness of the reaction.
The muscular response generally looks overblown once the moral panic subsides—until
it is cited as a precedent during a later moral panic. Even the appalling Japanese-American
internment has recently been cited favorably.
From a distance—and sometimes from close up, in the eyes of
calmer souls—the response to a panic may look very different. As President
Pusey said at the time McCarthy was going after Harvard professors for being
communists, “Someday I am sure that we shall all look back on the hateful
irrationality of the present with incredulity.”
The lifecycle pattern is understandable in political
environments; people are often ready to sacrifice freedoms in times of fear,
when rational discourse is most difficult. But academic institutions are
devoted to the rule of reason and to teaching students how to solve problems
rationally, with an eye to historical moments when panic trumped reason. For the
pattern to play out at a great university sets a poor model for those we are
educating.
The single-gender policy started with a genuine problem:
Some of the final clubs are sketchy places, and bad things that happen at
Harvard too often have final clubs in the narrative. My memory of Ad Board
cases from twenty years ago is that the names of the same two or three clubs
kept appearing in case reports—we started drinking at the X club and then went
to his room, he got drunk at X club and punched me, somebody threw rocks from
the roof of X club, and so on. I have no trouble believing that the reports
continue and may be more frequent, reliable, and serious, as reporting of
sexual assaults has increased. This is what I meant in my
original
letter to Dean Khurana when I referred to some of the clubs as “toxic.”
Various attempts to combat the problem have failed, or were
effective only briefly. One tactic I tried that was surprisingly ineffective
was to scare the grad board members, who might well be personally liable for
damages if crimes or injuries occurred at their clubs. My successor went the
other way—he tried to make nice with the final clubs. They reciprocated by inviting
him to breakfast and serving a dish that was a word-play on his name. That
approach did not work very well either.
Then a moral panic set in as college sexual assault, quite
properly, gained national visibility. Whatever one thinks of the relevance of Title
IX or of the preponderance-of-evidence standard, there is little doubt that the
University has gotten much more aggressive about sexual assault prevention
since the feds took an interest in Harvard’s response to complaints—and since
litigation
has been threatened against the university.
And so Harvard has offered a muscular response, of which the
new policy is a part. Oddly, in the interest of inclusivity, the policy would
divide the student body into two classes. The virtuous, who are not members of
single-gender social organizations, would be eligible to be team captains,
Rhodes nominees, and so on. The deplorables, who do join such organizations,
would not be eligible for such honors. The response brings cheers because
finally someone is being tough. The fact that the response may do little to
solve the original problem, and would infringe rights of free association that
Harvard has long honored, gets lost in the self-congratulations.
The Sexual Assault Task Force report is a good document, and,
in my opinion, correctly (if rather too sweepingly) identifies the final clubs
as problematic. Neither the report nor the statistical evidence it cites
supports forcing them to go co-ed, or discouraging men from joining, as
effective responses to the problem of sexual assault. Indeed, if a club has a
reputation for being an unsafe place for women, one might question Harvard’s
wisdom in encouraging women to join.
What to do, if the new policy isn’t the right approach?
Harvard could start by aggressively educating students about any unsafe places
it has identified—clubs, parks, or dark alleys near Harvard Yard. Training on
how to party safely, not just at the final clubs but anywhere, would be another
targeted response—drink in moderation if at all, and never from a punch bowl; take
a buddy with you and never leave without her, etc. Improved social spaces are
often cited as a necessary response, and who could argue against that on this
crowded campus? But Harvard social spaces, which will inevitably be regulated,
will never compete against spaces off campus where the drinking age is ignored.
Calling in the police when the final club parties disturb the peace might level
the playing field of social attractiveness between Harvard and non-Harvard
spaces.
In responding to this moral panic, the very definition of
the problem morphed into one of broad social “exclusivity” and even
“privilege.” Those may be problems, but they are not problems for which any
evidence has been presented, so it is hard to judge the response. How odd to
hear the Harvard leadership brandishing a stereotype in the interest of
promoting diversity and inclusivity! Nor would any problem of privileged
exclusivity of the final clubs be fixed by forcing them to go co-ed. If in fact
Harvard knows that the membership of the clubs is largely drawn from some
hereditary elite, then having the daughters of those families join their sons
in the clubs is a laughable blow against privilege. To suggest that simply
being single-gender makes the clubs dens of “exclusivity” and “privilege” is to
play a word game. By that standard, the Anglican monastery on Memorial Drive is
“exclusive.”
And I have never heard anyone refer to the fraternities and
sororities as socially exclusive. In fact, my guess is that the members of
those organizations, which never used to exist at Harvard, are disproportionally
the students who might have attended their state universities had they not come
to Harvard. I would speculate that the rise of fraternities and sororities is a
side effect of the democratization of Harvard College—its evolution from a
largely bicoastal, high-income, urban institution into one much more
representative of America.
Students tend to bring to Harvard the clubs and hobbies that
they had in high school or that their high school friends are enjoying at
universities near home. I have joked, but it may well be true, that
fraternities and sororities grew in popularity among Harvard students around
the same time that we began seeing a baton twirler at halftime of Harvard
football games. These were not part of old Harvard because old Harvard was not
representative of America. The reason these allegedly exclusive organizations
exist is because Harvard is more inclusive than it has ever been. I don’t love
the baton twirling or the sororities either, but that doesn’t matter. Harvard
is large, and contains multitudes.
So when President Faust said in her
video
about the final clubs, “The whole situation could be resolved in a minute if
these clubs admitted women,” I wonder which “situation” she was referring to.
Not the problem of sexual assault. Not the problem, whatever it is, of off-campus
sororities and fraternities. Not the problem of “privilege” or “exclusivity.” Only
the problem, perhaps, of widespread unhappiness with the policy itself.
oOo
President Faust had an op-ed in the Crimson on September 21,
Claiming
Full Citizenship. It’s a good account of the history, and I’m glad she
points the finger at Radcliffe College as an institution which in its latter
days did more to hold back than to advance the equality of women
undergraduates. However, the article transitions in an abrupt and puzzling way
to justifying the new policy on single-gender social organizations. Just when
did the Kappa Kappa Gamma, or the Porcellian Club for that matter, become one
of the “opportunities central to Harvard undergraduate life,” and thereby fall
under Harvard control?
Much less under presidential control. The op-ed has three “I
want”s in the last two paragraphs. These seem to be intended to justify the “We
created a policy” that is used in the
Atlantic video. This is constitutionally
simply wrong—the Statutes are clear that the College is in the “immediate
charge of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” not of the President. That is why
the Faculty annually votes all the rules and regulations for the College, and specifically
approves any changes.
But quite aside from the statutory questions are the deeper
questions about the role of the institution in the private lives of its
students. There may be many things that the president, or indeed the Faculty, “wants”
of Harvard students. We have historically exercised humility in deciding which
of those institutional “wants” were appropriate to demand. How did it come to
pass that what the president wants can become the law of the land for students
who wish to be first-class Harvard citizens?
In particular, I wonder: If, as the president states, the
correct response to Harvard students joining single-gender social organizations
is to make them second-class Harvard citizens, was the Verba committee wrong?
At the time when President Faust, with great dignity, upheld the FAS policy against
discriminatory organizations and barred ROTC from Harvard, should Harvard have
imposed on ROTC students some loss of privilege in the interest of greater
inclusivity? Does the president think that what the Verba committee considered
too patronizing on Harvard’s part is today no longer patronizing at all? Or is it
now OK for Harvard to be patronize—some might say infantilize—its students, by limiting
their freedom to choose which off-campus activities they may honorably join?
