By Patrick Brennan
Friday, May 13, 2016
Harvard University may be the greatest permanent
gathering of intellect in the history of the world. It has the finances and
managerial expertise to match — in fact, it just concluded a $6.5 billion
capital campaign, the largest in the history of American higher education.
And yet the university’s recent attempt to settle an
important issue for many of its undergraduates is . . . amateurish, incoherent,
and petty.
Harvard announced last week that it will impose sanctions
on members of single-sex social organizations not recognized by the college:
male and female “final clubs,” fraternities, and sororities. Many others have
already addressed the illiberality of and principled problems with banning
Harvard students from some leadership positions based on the social groups they
belong to. These criticisms have even come from a liberal or two.
So I want to focus on said amateurishness, and what it
says about the crisis at the heart of Harvard and other universities.
The administration seems to have been unable to make up
its mind what kind of punishments should befall single-sex organizations that
have, as of 2016, become unacceptable to the university. The dean involved in
designing the new policy danced around various threats and targets in private
and in public, finally settling on a halfway measure: making members of
single-sex social organizations ineligible for leadership positions in official
extracurricular groups and sports teams, and refusing to recommend them for
such fellowships as the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships. In other words, the
university is now going to prevent undergraduates from choosing the leadership
they want for the organizations they run, and it will have an explicit policy
of sending applicants for said scholarships who may not be the best Harvard has
to offer. Very sensible.
One major motivating factor for this effort: Harvard’s
contention that single-sex social organizations contribute to sexual assault.
What is the evidence for that? One survey found that a somewhat higher
percentage of female students who have ever participated in activities
sponsored by a single-sex group have been subject to “nonconsensual sexual
contact” than was the case among those who hadn’t participated. No data or real
qualitative research suggests that the clubs or their culture have anything to
do with the rate of such incidents. In fact, the incidents could have happened
anywhere, anytime, at Harvard. (They could have taken place at a Students for
Palestine party!) As Caitlin Flanagan put it, “It would be almost impossible to
concoct a more meaningless statistic.”
And yet that seems to be not only the administration’s favorite argument for blaming sexual
assault on single-sex policies, but actually its only argument. Not for lack of trying, one suspects, the university
has unearthed no other hard evidence — if the above can itself be called
evidence — that final clubs, fraternities, or sororities contribute to the
incidence of sexual assault.
The self-righteous condemnation combined with utter lack
of evidence is an embarrassment. A good share of the groups caught in Harvard’s
dragnet have almost no co-ed events at all — i.e., almost no avenues through
which they could reasonably be responsible for sexual assault. The world’s
greatest and richest university really wants you to believe that Porcellian
members lunching in coat-and-tie and Kappa Kappa Gammas networking over canapés
are causing sexual assaults. The absurdity of the new sanctions is already
coming home to roost, with some of the strongest and most politically damaging
pushback coming from such groups. (The administration has put forth its own
theoretical explanations for why single-sex organizations — or final clubs at
least — contribute to sexual assault, but this is a remarkably intrusive step
to take on the basis of theory.)
But the timing, at least, of Harvard’s sanctions is not
wholly arbitrary: The school began the push against single-sex clubs in
anticipation of a Title IX report from the Department of Education alleging
that the school handles sexual assault poorly. It now explicitly offers the
sanctions as a response to the report — instead of, you know, focusing on
handling sexual assault properly.
Yet anyone who cares about sexual assault — a real
problem on college campuses — and the Department of Education, which is
supposedly dissatisfied with Harvard’s handling of it, should be livid that this is such a big part of
Harvard’s response. Loyal alumni of Harvard concerned about sexual assault and
the institution’s self-preservation vis-à-vis the federal government should
expect a lot better than this amateurish, opportunistic plan, too.
If this is not intended as a practical measure, but
merely as a principled one, it is no more defensible. The administration has
repeatedly claimed that final clubs’ and Greek organizations’ single-sex
policies most stop because they are out of step with the 21st century and
“antithetical to [Harvard’s] institutional values.”
This is so obviously untrue I hesitate to explain why:
The campus abounds, as it should, with Harvard-sponsored all-women
organizations. If Harvard just banned fraternities and male clubs, could they
offer some intersectional complaint about all-men’s activities with social
purposes, then? Hard to square with
official blessings for the Black Men’s Forum, the Latino Men’s Collective, and
the South Asian Men’s Collective.
These groups technically do not require that all members
be female or male, as I understand it — but I cannot remember an exception to
the rule, and a strong sense of sexual difference is at the heart of their
identity. As the graduate president of one men’s final club pointed out, a
graduate of Bryn Mawr like Harvard president Drew Faust cannot possibly believe
that single-sex organizations are innately wrong. Meanwhile, wealthy co-ed
groups such as the Harvard Lampoon, the Hasty Pudding, and the once-all-male
Fox and Spee are unaffected by the new policies — so it is hard to say Harvard opposes
social or economic exclusivity.
So is this the logic — that sexual discrimination is
okay, and elite social organizations are okay, but sexual discrimination by
elite social organizations is not? That is a mighty thin reed to stand on.
And this is all before we get to the question of whether
intrusions into students’ private associations are the right or effective way
to keep students safe and happy and foster whatever values Harvard believes in
these days.
Harvard, its students, and its alumni deserve better. The
school’s agglomeration of intellect and ambition, built on centuries of
tradition, loyalty, and excellence — and now the opportunity for students of
any background to flourish there with every financial need met by the
generosity of earlier alumni — is a great, great thing.
But now the university is lashing out, under false
pretenses, at loyal students and alumni, either in the service of shallow
loyalty to the cause of the moment, or as a short-sighted attempt to cover up
its own institutional failures. This is real, unnecessary, and self-inflicted
damage. Harvard needs more institutions that provide structure to students’
social lives and engender lasting loyalty — not fewer.
Last fall, a number of my classmates whom I wouldn’t
categorize as politically conservative or even political at all approvingly
sent me Ross Douthat’s column on the crises convulsing colleges such as the
University of Missouri. They more or less deserve it, he argued: “The [Mizzou]
protesters may be obnoxious enemies of free debate, in other words, but they
aren’t wrong to smell the rot around them. And they’re vindicated every time
they push and an administrator caves: It’s proof that they have a monopoly on
moral spine, and that any small-l liberal alternative is simply hollow.” Right
now, Harvard is slipping into the same trap.
I was a member of an all-male final club as an
undergraduate, and I won’t make any claims that it’s a high-minded institution
— it’s about nothing more than the unique loyalty and camaraderie that a
single-sex organization fosters. But at least it knows what it stands for, is
honest about it, and, I hope, will stand along with the other clubs and
organizations to preserve its right to its traditions and mission.
Right now, that’s more than can be said of Harvard.
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