Professor Ben Friedman gave the best speech during the
debate on November 7. He observed,
among other things, that if we have learned anything over the past year and a
half, it is that
the life of the Houses, those
jewels of the Harvard structure, is nowhere near as engaging to our students as
it should be, and in consequence it is losing out to life in other venues. What
have we done in response? An all-too-familiar feature of American business
behavior…is that when a firm’s product is losing out in competition, the firm’s
response is not to improve its product but to seek to get the regulators to
take its competitor’s product off the market. In effect, that’s what we have
been doing here. Think of what we might have accomplished—think of what we
still might accomplish—if we redirect the time and talent and energy that this
faculty has put into this two-year-long discussion…to thinking about how best
to re-invigorate life in Houses, rather than simply looking to shut down the
alternative that too many of our students now prefer instead.
(The entire Harvard Magazine editorial opinion from which
this passage is quoted is very much worth reading.)
Harvard can't seriously think that problems with House life
are due to the clubs. Harvard cannot on the one hand credibly claim that
off-campus clubs so damage the Houses that students who join them should be
disgraced or even expelled, and at the same time build a "campus center"
to draw students out of the Houses, and encourage students to take faculty out to
lunch at local restaurants under the "Classroom to Table" program.
There is something bigger going on with House life than could be cured by shutting
down the clubs.
Let's stipulate—even though I don't believe it—that it is
Harvard's job to more fully manage students' social lives. (After all, one
reason students come to Harvard rather than, say, Bowdoin is because of the
greater opportunities to have fun and to do interesting things off campus. I
hope the next administration will be less socially oriented and will refocus us
instead on academic matters.)
Viewed from a very high altitude, the problem of social life
in the Houses has some unacknowledged origins. It is a familiar complaint that social
life is bad because the Houses are more crowded than they used to be, and more
crowded they surely are. That's unfortunate, but all things considered, I think
Harvard has made the right tradeoff in educating a few more students rather
than housing a smaller number in more spacious quarters.
The problems of social life in the Houses are more the
result of other changes over the years. One is that a college with a 1:1 sex
ratio generates more socializing—and thus the need for more social space—than
the all-male college for which the Houses (and the old clubs) were designed. The
pressure on social space became more intense as roughly the same number of
students became 50-50 men and women, and as significant changes occurred over
the same decades in the way young American men and women socialize with each
other.
Also, while Harvard was assuming from Radcliffe complete
social and residential responsibility for women students, it absorbed and
renovated the Radcliffe dormitories (in the Quad), but allocated Radcliffe Yard,
once the center of academic, social, and administrative life for women
undergraduates, almost entirely to graduate education and research. (Only
Agassiz Theatre remains an undergraduate building.) Inevitably, that put
pressure on other social and administrative spaces for undergraduates. (As has
the increasing number of College administrators.)
So Professor Friedman is right. We might have spent the last
year talking about the life of the Houses rather than the evils of single-sex
clubs. But the waste of time and energy that might have been devoted instead to
improving House life is only one, and not the most serious, of the costs of
this misadventure. I can think of several others.
The financial costs of the assault on the clubs are likewise
not the most serious, but the resulting antipathy of alumni and parents (such
as Heather Furnas)
can't be welcome. Yet it may not matter. Fundraising numbers are robust. Two
nine-figure gifts in the past decade have come from alumni of the professional
schools (Gerald Chan and John Paulson), not the College. It may be that, like
everything else in American society, alumni influence is tipping toward the top
hundredth-of-a-percent of an increasingly financially stratified population.
Has Harvard's fundraising model so shifted that the institution can afford to
be indifferent to alumni loyalty?
The cost that bothers me most is the personal cost to
students, especially women. Women will be the big losers if harsh sanctions are
imposed on members of single-sex clubs. When the sanctions were announced under
cover of exam-period darkness back in May 2016, did the President or the deans even
know how many women belong to such organizations? Nothing was said about
women's clubs in the initial announcements. Indeed, by citing sexual assault,
those announcements suggested that the moves were meant to help women. In September 2016, the President sounded
this half-hearted acknowledgment of the existence of women's clubs:
We need to be sure that we provide
women with networking opportunities, with the support they need. We need to
figure out the ways to do this. The women’s clubs have grown up because we, as
a community, have not done that adequately. And so I don’t think that being
this kind of organization — one that was created because something was withheld
from you — is the best way to address these women’s needs.
This is the sort of logic that the Letter
from 23 Undergraduate Women characterized as "astonishingly
patronizing." Women are not joining sororities because the doors of the
Porcellian are barred to them. None of the reports and pronouncements over the past
year make any attempt to understand the sociology of the sororities and women's
final clubs. No evidence has been presented that any of the ugly labels
attached during the debates to the male final clubs applies to any of the
women's clubs.
The attack on all clubs demonstrates exactly the indiscriminate
stereotyping we hope students will avoid in other contexts. The women's clubs
operate quietly, and women have their good reasons to join them. They provide
something (actually, different things to different students) that those
students find useful, supportive, or empowering. There will be a cost if what the
clubs provide is taken away, and it is shameful that Harvard trivializes that
cost. God save us if our graduates use such uninformed, ideological methods
when they go to Washington to craft social policies for the nation.
The governance question, detailed
several times by Professor James Engell, was skirted but not settled by the
outcome of the November 7 vote. Is the Faculty in charge of the discipline of
undergraduates, as the Statutes plainly state? The president refused to say.
She recently said that anything that has to be put in the Handbook will be
voted by the Faculty, but claims uncertainty about what matters those might be.
At the same time, attempts have been
made to confuse "the Faculty" with "faculty," for example
by referring to the Clark-Khurana committee as a "faculty committee,"
even though barely half of its members held even the lowest of faculty
ranks. The Faculty is an allegedly
self-governing corporate body, with statutory responsibilities, committees of
elected members, and binding formal votes, while "faculty" could
refer to anyone with a faculty title whom the administration chooses include in
its deliberations. The wording of the Howell motion
("it is the responsibility of the faculty and administration of Harvard
College") deceptively blurs this distinction—there is no faculty of
Harvard College, and conjoining "the administration" as an equal
partner cedes to the administration the statutory authority of the Faculty of
Arts and Sciences.
Finally, and related to all these concerns, the handling of
the sanctions has created mistrust that will not easily be repaired. The source
of the mistrust is that a badly conceived plan was promoted on the basis of a
preposterous dogma: That single-sex organizations are inherently odious, that
the very idea of a single-sex organization should excite the same revulsion as does
the Ku Klux Klan. (Somehow while all this was going on, President Faust found
time to speak at the inauguration of the new president of Wellesley College.) That
lie (which has also corrupted
the "inclusivity" initiative) created many inconsistencies and
absurdities—for example, that the Women's Center is morally superior to a women's
club because men can use it, or that the Black Men's Forum is OK because it
isn't a forum for black men. This explains why the rationale kept shifting, though
never enough to explain why some harmless organizations had to be killed off
along with the dangerous ones.
The assertion of authority by Senior Fellow Bill Lee in a
recent Crimson interview
tends to confirm what I suspected.
This attack on single-gender social organizations started at the Corporation
level, as a risk mitigation endeavor. After one Title IX lawsuit, and a long history
of bad behavior at certain male final clubs, Harvard's legal governors were
worried about the extent of its financial exposure, and so the president and
deans took the most aggressive actions against the clubs of any administration
since the late 1990s. But their plan of action was couched in moral language
rather than the language of safety and risk, and resonated with certain lines
of progressive thought.
So even though this all started because some of the clubs
posed risks, students were never told to stay away from them, only that students
should hate them. Since the lawyers (I am sure) shot down any idea of treating
women's clubs differently from men's, or some men's clubs differently from
others, the category of offensive organizations kept morphing by expansion, not
contraction.
And the administration, having crawled out onto a precarious
moral limb to much applause, could not admit that the original motivation was a
perfectly reasonable worry about student safety and Harvard's financial
exposure. To be sure, the worst behaviors of the worst clubs kept getting
cited—in fact, one speaker on November 7 cited a recent hazing death of
fraternity pledge at a state university in arguing against my motion. One
faculty colleague described this as "emotional blackmail," but I bet
it swung a few votes. Sadly, the death of a Harvard undergraduate barely two weeks
earlier suggests that loneliness may be a more serious death risk for Harvard students—and
as the letter from the 23 women observes, that risk factor seems likely to be
increased, not decreased, by shutting down the off-campus clubs.
The night before they were released, a member of the College
administration showed me the letters
from Dean Khurana and President Faust announcing the sanctions regime. My
immediate reaction was, "No one will believe you." That is, no one
would believe that the stated reasons for the crackdown were the real ones. Now
the Senior Fellow has expanded his unprecedented involvement in the structure
of undergraduate life by declaring that the as yet unnamed next president of
Harvard will not change the policy that was announced so abruptly and unwisely
on May 6, 2016.
This has been a nightmare for Veritas.
