Professor Steven Pinker's remarks at the October 3 Faculty meeting

I was opposed to the recommendations of USGSO report, and support the motion by Professor Lewis to rule out such draconian measures in the future.  I believe they run afoul of the principles on which liberal education are based.

First, a human institution is not an omnipotent embodiment and enforcer of morality but must be grounded in a social contract with circumscribed responsibilities. A university contracts with its students to provide them with an education. It does not require them to submit to control over their lives, 24/7. Legal activities that students do on their own time and off university premises are none of the university’s business.

Second, a university is not a religion with a mandatory creed. One of the essential values in higher education is that people can differ in their values, and that these differences can be constructively discussed. Harvard has a right to value mixed-sex venues everywhere, all the time.  If some of its students find value in private, single-sex associations, some of the time, a university administration is free to argue against, discourage, or even ridicule those choices. But it is not a part of the mandate of a university to impose these values on its students over their objections.

Third, universities ought to be places where issues are analyzed, distinctions are made, evidence is evaluated, and policies crafted to attain clearly stated goals. Policies that restrict students’ freedoms should not be symbolic statements of values; they should be means to justifiable ends. But punishing students for belonging to private organizations is a sledgehammer. It doesn’t distinguish between single-sex and other private clubs. It doesn’t target illegal or objectionable behavior such as drunkenness or public disturbances. Nor by any stretch of the imagination could it be seen as an effective, rationally justified, evidence-based policy for reducing sexual assault. As my colleague Jason Mitchell argued in his minority report, there are plenty of proven ways of altering behavior between the extremes of moral suasion and authoritarian prohibition.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the policy of banning students from private organizations is widely seen outside Harvard as exemplifying some of the worst tendencies of elite universities. It can only contribute to the impression that universities are not dispassionate forums for clarifying values or analyzing problems but institutions determined to impose their ideology on a diverse population by brute force. In an era in which the credibility of reason-based institutions is vital yet endangered, this can have pernicious effects.

Let me be concrete. Those of us who engage in argument with intelligent people on the opposite end of the political spectrum often encounter the objection that the near-consensus among academic scientists (on climate change, for example), cannot be trusted. Everybody knows, they say, that university research is distorted by the political agenda of elites trying to exert control over individual choices. “No, no,” we insist; “Universities aren’t like that; we open-mindedly identify problems and try to come up with solutions.” A policy that is widely seen by the outside world as repressive virtue-signaling makes our job that much harder.

Professor Eric Nelson's remarks at the Faculty meeting of October 3

I would like us to reflect for just a moment on how we got here.  Two years ago, a University task force on sexual assault asserted that final clubs were responsible for a wave of sexual violence against women on our campus.  The administration responded to this report by announcing an unprecedented set of sanctions against undergraduates who join unrecognized social groups, including final clubs and sororities.  As the subsequent debate unfolded, it emerged that the task force’s claim about the link between final clubs and sexual violence was false, and that the data on which it had relied in making this claim had been misconstrued.  From that point on, we ceased to hear anything from the administration and its supporters about the problem of sexual assault—although it must be said that the task force’s assertion has not to date been retracted, nor has any apology been offered to the large numbers of Harvard students and alumni who were mistakenly (and very publicly) branded as sexual predators by the University. 

The rationale for the sanctions then shifted; the danger was no longer assault, but discrimination based on gender.  Single-gender social organizations were now said to be no less odious in principle than racially segregated ones—a remarkable finding from a College that admits hundreds of students each year from single-gender schools, maintains a host of single-gender sports teams, clubs, and performing groups, and divides students by gender in undergraduate housing.  Presumably we would not do these things if we regarded them as tantamount to Jim Crow.  Indeed, I wonder if it has been noticed that several of the fellowships from which the administration proposes to exclude members of single-sex clubs are themselves tenable at single-sex institutions. 

But before a proper debate could be had about this revised rationale, it shifted yet again—this time to the value of inclusion, full stop.  On this view, the final clubs and sororities were to be anathematized, not for admitting members of only one sex, but for choosing their members at all.  The question became whether it was so urgent to rescue some Harvard students from the discomfort of rejection that we ought to deny all of them the right to form any intimate associations of like-minded peers, even off-campus.  But this too is now old news.  The most recent justification for the proposed ban seems to be that we are worried about the integrity of the residential system at Harvard—the prospect of undergraduates fleeing the houses to live in a “Greek” world of fraternities and sororities.  This despite the fact that 99% of undergraduates voluntarily elect to live in the houses—and that, if we are truly worried about this issue, we remain perfectly free to require undergraduates to live on campus, whatever the fate of the Lewis motion. 

When the reasons offered for a given policy change as frequently as they have in this case, we should begin to wonder whether the policy in question has anything to do with reasons.  The bottom line here, as it seems to me, is that we just don’t like these clubs.  And some of them, at least, clearly merit our dislike.  But the first principle of a liberal arts education—and of the liberal society to which we are all rightly committed—is that disliking something is an insufficient reason to punish people for doing it.  Here, I think, we might profitably learn from our students, two-thirds of whom rejected the proposed sanctions in a referendum last year.

Lastly, I think we need to take seriously the broader national context in which this debate is unfolding.  It is news to no one in this room that we are currently facing a concerted effort by dangerous opponents to paint Harvard and our peer institutions as bastions of ideological groupthink, in which a frenzied and menacing political correctness has replaced common sense—and in which freedom of speech and association are routinely sacrificed upon the altar of diversity and inclusion.  I do not think this is who we are, but it strikes me that, over the last two years or so—on issue after issue—we have been doing our level best to make it easier for these opponents to caricature us.  This would perhaps be a price worth paying if we were right on the merits—but, as it happens, I believe we have not been.  We have been getting it wrong and looking foolish in the process.  My suggestion is that we ought to stop.  There are, alas, very real battles ahead of us, for which we will require the support of a united faculty, student body, and alumni community—to say nothing of our fellow citizens.  I don’t see why on earth we would further risk that support merely to destroy a bunch of tweedy Victorian relics.

That there are problems with undergraduate social life at Harvard, no one will deny.  But, as the committee report helpfully notes, these have primarily resulted from decisions that we ourselves have taken—and it is our responsibility to address them.  Let us turn to that important business.

I urge colleagues to support the motion.

Thank you.

My remarks introducing the motion on clubs

There was a good discussion in the FAS faculty meeting. The matter will be put to a vote on November 7. Here is what I said:

I move: Harvard College shall not discipline, penalize, or otherwise sanction students for joining, or affiliating with, any lawful organization, political party, or social, political, or other affinity group.

This is a simple motion. It says Harvard College can’t punish students for joining a club. It does NOT say that students who belong to clubs can’t be punished for bad things they do. It does NOT take away any tool that has been used in the past to discipline students for their behavior. It would, however, block several social club policies that have been proposed over the past year and a half.

I cannot find a single case prior to May 2016 when Harvard said it would punish a student for joining any organization -- a club or anything else. To the contrary, when Harvard barred ROTC from campus, we explicitly rejected the idea of punishing ROTC students for joining a discriminatory organization. And in the 1950s, when Senator McCarthy called on Harvard to fire one of us, Wendell Furry of the Physics Department, for being a member of the Communist Party, President Pusey refused on principle, in spite of enormous political pressure and his own anti-communist sentiments. Harvard today holds the moral high ground. We would give it up if we were to adopt any policy that would punish students for joining a club.

Some who are concerned about my motion have asked me, “but what if a student joins X”—and then name some particularly odious national organization. Well, we have survived a long time without any rules against joining hated organizations. This is not the time to institute such a rule in order to crush some off-campus sorority.

Students should not give up their rights peaceably to assemble off campus when they enroll here, any more than they give up their rights to read, write, and say what they wish. Indeed, by becoming students they do not give up their right to have private lives. All these freedoms are fundamental to our educational mission.

In a Faculty meeting last year, I teasingly referred to the possibility of an Index of Prohibited Organizations, like the Index of Prohibited Books of the medieval Church. Little did I expect that the Clark-Khurana Committee would publish exactly such an Index—in fact a list that was expanded beyond what had been proposed before the committee reviewed the policy. Let’s not go down the path of trying to maintain a list of the sort that even the Roman Church eventually realized was a bad idea.

If we can’t remember history, at least let’s look to the future. Suppose we publish a list of clubs and punish their members. What will we do when government officials again demand that we punish members of some allegedly un-American group? In the year of the Muslim ban, would anyone be surprised if the government tried to put us to the test? Would we say, “Oh no. At Harvard, we suspend civil liberties only for organizations that threaten our deepest values, like the Bee and the Owl, not the ones you think are bad for the nation.”

I am grateful for the hard work of the committees that have worked on this difficult task, but I must note how little is said in their reports about the social structures they seek to destroy. The caricature of off-campus clubs as bastions of privilege, full of the stock of the Puritans learning to discriminate against other people, is not based in fact, certainly not in any facts presented in the report. Indeed, the report contains almost no facts of any kind. It does not even mention that more women than men are members of affected clubs. There is no data showing how many incidents have been reported at which clubs. That data might have shown that most of the trouble is caused by only a handful of the clubs, including only a few of the men’s and coed clubs and none of the women’s clubs. That would suggest that a narrower remedy made more sense than the broader ones that are proposed.

Data may be hard to come by, but then how will the College know who is in these private organizations? The report doesn’t say. Will we encourage students to turn each other in?

It is not true that everything else has been tried to combat bad behavior at the problematic clubs. There is no right to unpeaceable assembly; we should call in the police when students break the law. And we should tell students which clubs are dangerous places, and why. When muggings occur in Cambridge, we don’t just say, “there is crime in Cambridge, so students must stay on campus.” We tell them where they shouldn’t go, explain why, and expect them to protect themselves. To the extent that Harvard’s legal liability is driving any of this, or indeed to the extent that we are worried about student safety, education would be more effective as well as more appropriate.

I urge you to read Jason Mitchell’s superb minority report. From the beginning this has been an attempt to kill the men’s final clubs without much concern for the collateral damage from making a much broader rule. Let’s be clear what problem we are trying to solve and then go straight after it. Strengthening the Houses does not require punishing students for hanging out off campus sometimes. Opening “networks of power” to women does not require destroying the networks they have created for themselves.

And there is no silver bullet in Professor Allen’s astonishingly sweeping motion either. To “establish policies that protect individual freedoms while upholding the educational mission of the College” is exactly what committees have been trying to do for a year; it is time for a statement of principle from the faculty, not a carte blanche handoff to the administration. As the Clark-Khurana committee notes, the Allen motion raises but does not answer the question of what to do if the clubs do not cooperate. Punishing their members is not the right answer.

I beg you, this is not a trivial matter. Students engaged in unlawful or violent behavior should pay a price for what they do. But nobody should be punished just for joining a club. Not us, and not our students. Thank you.

Added after the meeting. A medievalist points out that the Index was NOT, in fact, a medieval invention; it emerged in the sixteenth century. In other words, it was a reaction to the Enlightenment, not a piece of pre-Enlightenment church culture. I regret the error.