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 letter to 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 FAS statement in favor of student body diversity has unexpectedly been cited by the president in justifying her attack on students’ freedom to join outside organizations.

The Allen motion offers a theory to justify Harvard’s legal right to regulate outside organizations—something I haven’t questioned (though others may have). So for me, the reference to Massachusetts anti-hazing statutes seems beside the point. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that if Harvard wants to make a rule that no member of the Bee or the Kappa Kappa Gamma may enroll, it can. My entire argument is that it shouldn’t have rules of that kind. In the particular hypothetical Professor Allen posed, in which a Harvard Pokémon Club staged cheating as an annual club ritual, she argued that all its members should be expelled. I am all in favor of throwing out cheaters, but I don’t see why some Pokémon-loving reformer who refused to go along with the crowd should get tossed too. As I have said many times, students should be punished for what they do, not for what clubs they join.

In the course of arguing that even the state sometimes steps in to regulate private organizations, the assurances in the First Amendment notwithstanding, Professor Allen makes a curious citation to support her case. (This and other documents are available here.)

[W]hen the Supreme Court handed down its 1987 decision in Rotary International, affirming California’s decision to prohibit gender-exclusive membership policies for clubs of that kind, the Court argued that “the State’s compelling interests in eliminating discrimination against women and in assuring them equal access to public accommodations. . . extends to the acquisition of leadership skills and business contacts, as well as tangible goods and services” (481 U.S. 537 [1987]: 548-549, emphasis added).

What is odd about that citation is how the Court got to the conclusion that, in the case of the Rotary Club, it could override the usual protections of free association. It was because the Rotary Club was so … inclusive. “The evidence in this case indicates that the relationship among Rotary Club members is not the kind of intimate or private relation that warrants constitutional protection,” Justice Powell states in his opinion. As the syllabus summarizes the argument,

In determining whether a particular association is sufficiently intimate or private to warrant constitutional protection, consideration must be given to factors such as size, purpose, selectivity, and whether others are excluded from critical aspects of the relationship. Here, the relationship among Rotary Club members does not warrant protection, in light of the potentially large size of local clubs, the high turnover rate among club members, the inclusive nature of each club's membership, the public purposes behind clubs' service activities, and the fact that the clubs encourage the participation of strangers in, and welcome media coverage of, many of their central activities

To apply this to the final clubs seems to require arguing simultaneously that Harvard should regulate them because they are exclusive and can regulate them because they are inclusive! And to the extent that certain clubs are not particularly selective (some of the sororities, for example), that makes them more vulnerable to intervention by the authorities, not less.

I am, in any case, skeptical that Harvard’s interest in getting women jobs in investment banking has much to do with its insistence that the Porcellian Club go co-ed. It would be the easiest thing in the world to ramp up the support of women who wanted high-paying jobs in the financial sector; the industry would gladly help any Harvard effort to do that. No Harvard administrator has ever said that anything of the kind was an institutional priority, except when complaining about the final clubs.

There are other curious aspects to the argument for the motion, for example the relevance of the anti-hazing statute:

The law has been taken to apply to final clubs since it was introduced, and the final clubs adhere to its provisions.

Taken by whom? But yes. It’s a criminal statute. I am not surprised that the clubs acknowledge that they comply with it. It is a huge leap to suggest that this statute somehow justifies Harvard intervening in their membership practices. And to take another matter Professor Allen cites, I am also not persuaded that a Harvard rule against faculty having sex with students—a condition of an employment relationship—has any relevance to students’ club memberships.

Of course there can be such limits on individual freedoms in the context of our contractual relationship with the institution. The question is which ones Harvard should impose. The motion is dangerously vague on that substantive question, handing it off to “the faculty and administration.” Which seems to mean that another Clark-Khurana committee will make the rules, and the Faculty, corporately, will have no say.

I have from the beginning cited the Verba report and its explicit rejection of the idea of punishing ROTC students for joining what was then a discriminatory organization. It seems that we can infer how Professor Allen would want such a dilemma of conflicting freedoms and rights to be handled in the future. If Harvard is unable to persuade the government to drop its transgender ban in the military, will we expel our ROTC cadets?

So what should happen to a motion when its explanatory materials state a good deal more about its purpose and effects than does its text? It should be defeated. It is plainly intended as an alternative to my motion, and if it passes, the administration will surely use the apparatus surrounding the text to justify its harsh interpretation of the Faculty’s intentions.

-o-

One final point. The motion claims to be moderate because it limits the scope of institutional reach to student organizations as defined by Massachusetts Law. So it is meant to swat away the questions about political parties and the like.

What seems not to have been stated anywhere is that Professor Allen’s Index of Prohibited Organizations is a great deal longer than that of the Clark-Khurana Committee. For example, it would include all the ethnic fraternities and sororities. They were excluded from the Clark-Khurana list because that list was restricted to organizations that consisted mostly or entirely of Harvard students, and these organizations (the ones I know about, anyway) are joint with MIT, Tufts, BU, and/or Wellesley. (Here is a link to one of them.)

The ethnic fraternities and sororities are a piece of Harvard culture I don’t know much about. They do not turn up on police blotters or Ad Board dockets. The only time I ever hear about them is when students tell me how important their organizations are to them. They are old, some of them; W.E.B. Dubois was a member of one.

The recent funeral of Dr. Allen Counter, whose name is synonymous with inclusiveness and diversity at Harvard, ended with a moving display. About 40 of his fraternity brothers, old and young, including several senior African-American Harvard faculty and administrators, rose from the congregation, assembled in the front of the chapel, formed a ring by linking their little fingers, and gave him a solemn ritual sendoff.

I am not at all sure that Harvard understands the social structures it is seeking to destroy.

Professor Jason Mitchell's Minority Report

Professor Mitchell has kindly allowed me to post his minority report. It is very much worth reading, a model of reasoned analysis and clear writing.

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29 September 2017

In its Final Report, the Committee on Unrecognized Single-Gender Social Organizations (USGSOs) has modified its preliminary recommendation of June 2017, which would bar undergraduates from joining Final clubs, fraternities, sororities, or similar off-campus single-gender organizations (such as the Hasty Pudding).  In lieu of a single policy, the Final Report considers a variety of strategies for addressing the USGSOs, which range from the sanction policy of May 2016 to calls for engagement with students to more aggressive police enforcement of underage drinking and noise statutes.  The choice to adopt such a “multiple recommendation” approach reflects the continuing deep divisions within our community about how best to address the USGSOs.  In discussions with many colleagues and students—and over many hours of debate within the Committee itself—it has become obvious that these issues do not admit to any straightforward solution, and that colleagues who start from the same goal of making Harvard the best place it can be may nevertheless arrive at very different end points.  The purpose of this note is to offer an analysis of the main sources of these differences.  As such, it is not intended as a dissent per se, but as a formal attempt to clarify some of the principles and conceptual distinctions that seem to matter most to my colleagues and students.

As I see it, when members of our community disagree about how to address the all-male Final clubs and other USGSOs, we may be disagreeing about either of two distinct questions.  The first of these asks, “What problem are we trying to solve?”; the second, “What is the best way to solve it?”  The Committee’s Final Report makes clear that a range of answers exists to the latter—thus, its “multiple recommendations” strategy.  But, likewise, different members of our community provide very different answers to the question of what problem we are, in the first place, trying to solve.  These differences have been reflected in the seemingly different ways that the problem of Final clubs has been framed for the Faculty over time and in different documents—many colleagues feel that the rationale for sanctioning USGSO membership has morphed from an initial focus on sexual assault, to later concerns about gender-based discrimination, and most recently, to issues of inclusion, belonging, and privilege.  Indeed, the Committee spent a good deal of time discussing not only these problems, but also additional ones, such as the distorting effects of Final clubs on student social life and the health and safety concerns they pose for our students.

Some of my colleagues have decided that these shifts in rationale reflect some form of political expediency (“let’s keep making different arguments until the Faculty buy one of them”).  But we may do better to conclude instead that the problem of the all-male Final clubs is—as psychoanalysts and philosophers of science would say—overdetermined.  That is, we should not disavow the all-male Final clubs because they increase the incidence of sexual assault or because they discriminate against women or because they advance the prerogatives of a few individuals at the expense of many others or because the undermine student life or because they encourage unsafe drinking.  We should repudiate them because they do all of these things.  Perhaps any one such aspect of the clubs would be sufficient to make the case against them; together they lead, as the Final Report notes, to our community’s shared sense that we cannot afford to do nothing about them.

Note that I have restricted the point above to all-male Final clubs, and this is with intent.  Many of us believe firmly that despite its shifting rationales, the College is “really” trying to address problems specific to the all-male Final clubs.  After all, these are the only groups that own property adjacent to campus and that host the parties outside of which female undergraduates queue in the hopes of being admitted.  These are the groups that perpetuate privilege most perniciously.  And these are the groups that our colleagues have uniquely identified as important loci of sexual assault.  Indeed, it is hard not to perceive a direct line connecting the Final Report in March 2016 of President Faust’s Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Assault to the announcement two months later of the first sanctions policy.  That Task Force repeatedly makes the case that it is the all-male Final clubs that pose serious concerns with regard to sexual assault, and that this is mainly possible because they control the space in which many undergraduates socialize (unlike other USGSOs).

My sense is that our current divide has emerged, in part, because of a continual choice to first select one or another of the specific problems caused by the all-male Final clubs and to then develop policies designed to address that problem broadly throughout undergraduate life.  This impulse is understandable—we are, after all, a community that values first articulating our principles and then developing policies that serve them.  When our goal is to achieve a particular outcome (say, the end to all-male Final clubs) we naturally want to start by defining the principles at stake, such as an opposition to gender-based discrimination, and then allow our policies to flow from that principle.  But thus far, this approach has created something of a dragnet, which threatens to sweep in student groups that many of us feel are not much of a problem (or, at least, not nearly as much of a problem as the all-male Final clubs); fraternal organizations without houses in which to host parties and womens’ Final clubs, not to mention the Hasty Pudding, do not really seem to be at the root of campus ills.  It is my own belief personally—and I think the sentiment of many faculty colleagues—that we would have done better to clearly identify what we are trying to achieve, which is an end to the noxious, distorting, and often abhorrent influence of the all-male Final clubs on undergraduate life.  This is surely the point on which the greatest number of us agree; if for no other reason, it would serve well as the starting point for discussions about what policies best achieve our goal.

Which brings us squarely to the second major source of disagreement within our community: regardless of how one answers the question of what goal we ought to be aiming for, there remains an open—and very contentious—question of how best to go about achieving it. 

To date, much of the debate around this issue has been cast a clash between competing values.  On the one hand, our community is committed to inclusion, we fight against discrimination in all its pernicious forms, and we have rightly begun to identify and dismantle the many structures that prevent members of our community from feeling that they belong at Harvard (and that it belongs to them).  On the other hand, we recognize that this set of values is one among many that progressive, well-intentioned individuals espouse.  Another set of such values includes notions of free expression, of individual autonomy, and of the right to free association.  One frame on the current faculty debate concerns how to adjudicate between these values when they conflict with one another.  The choice of some students to socialize off-campus with only certain people acts as a barrier to inclusion and belonging for other students; to whom do our responsibilities lie?  Each of us recognizes that rights (even those enumerated in the law) are not absolute but must be balanced against our responsibilities to one another—thus, the restrictions on free expression that enjoin us from shouting “fire!” in a crowded faculty meeting or the like.  One way of thinking about our current state of division is as a disagreement about whether the hazards posed by the all-male Final clubs and other USGSOs warrants a similar abrogation of (some of) our students’ rights (such as to free and lawful assembly).  [I am, of course, glossing over many nuanced aspects of this point of view, but only because I wish to make the observation below.]

This way of framing the debate tends to bottom out in the question of whether we should intervene against the all-male Final clubs and other USGSOs.  But another way we might have this discussion is by instead asking the question of how we ought to intervene.  What I mean is this: For much of the past 16 months, we have been led to think in binary terms—either we take the extraordinary step of patrolling the off-campus social lives of students, or we wave a white flag of surrender to the status quo and acquiesce as the Final clubs continue to exert an adverse effect on our community.  What is missing from this duality is any substantive discussion of how we might effect meaningful change on the Final clubs through more ordinary means.  The policies of sanctioning USGSO membership surely comprise extraordinary measures: they make extraordinary and unprecedented claims on the private, off-campus lives of our students; implementing them will require a radical reimagining (for many of us) of the relationship between the faculty and its students’ private lives; and they seem (to many of us) to contravene other values that ought to characterize a liberal institution committed to free inquiry and personal transformation.  One index of just how extraordinary these policies seem is the amount of time spent by the USGSO Committee on the question of whether the various sanctions policies are even legal.  Such policies will take us into uncharted places.

Is there nothing short of such extraordinary measures that can bring change to our campus?  The USGSO Committee’s Final Report tells us the answer to this question is no, that we have tried in vain for years to rein in the Final clubs through normal channels.  But a look at what is described suggests that the College’s ordinary attempts have been limited to various forms of “moral suasion,” mainly comprising various meetings between administrators and club leaders and alumni boards.  If the College’s efforts have indeed consisted mostly of an occasional stern talking-to, then we have little reason for surprise at their failure.  Social scientists—economists, sociologists, those in psychology departments and business schools—have learned a great deal about how to change people’s behavior, and we know that “moral suasion” is probably the least effective ways of going about it.  This is why when public health officials aim to decrease cigarette smoking, they do not simply tell people, “Cigarette smoking is bad, you shouldn’t do it.”  Instead, they have waged a sustained campaign to inform consumers of the dangers of smoking; they make it harder for young people to obtain cigarettes; they have worked relentlessly to transform cigarette smoking from something with social cachet into something that borders on shameful and “uncool”; and so on.  No, this has not proven straightforward, and yes, it has taken time and real effort.  But walk around Harvard Square on a Saturday night, and you will struggle to find an (American) student smoking a cigarette, an absence that would have leapt out for its strangeness not all that long ago.

So we might then ask ourselves: Can we use these kinds of techniques to change student behavior regarding the all-male Final clubs and other USGSOs?  Are there no such ordinary means by which to drain these clubs of their vitality (or to “shrivel” them, as a colleague has colorfully put it)?  Again, we have been led to believe not.  But many of us are skeptical of this claim.  Thus, my sense that when we look past the legislative motions and parliamentary maneuvers, the blog posts and leaks to The Crimson, a good deal of opposition to the sanction policies flows from a desire to try—seriously for the first time—to rein in the Final clubs through a full suite of methods that we ordinarily use to change social behavior.[1]  That is, we have not had—but should be having—a full-throated conversation about whether we can reach our shared goals in ways that do not require us to compromise other core institutional values.  I am not convinced we can, but many of us believe it is worth first trying. 

However, any serious attempt to use such “ordinary” measures to undermine the Final clubs’ influence on campus needs to start from an analysis of why exactly they play such an outsized role in campus social life in the first place, and thus what the College must do to drain their vitality.  During the USGSO Committee discussions, we heard, in every meeting, that the Final clubs dominate undergraduate social life precisely because few good on-campus alternatives exist.  A similar point was made manifest in the Implementation Committee’s report: that if the College wants to rob the Final clubs of their appeal, it must start by creating attractive alternative social spaces for undergraduates.  Many of our students want a place to “have fun”—which we would do well to acknowledge means drinking alcohol, acting in mildly transgressive ways, and being out from under the watchful eye of tutors and resident deans.  Wonderful as they are, the Houses do not—and perhaps cannot ever—fully serve that desire.  And although I resist the notion that Harvard College is somehow obliged to administer its students an appropriate dosage of fun (surely, something somewhere in the Boston area caters to the needs of college students?), we should acknowledge that the (real or) perceived lack of alternative spaces for “letting loose” remains a powerful draw of the Final clubs for our students.  Thus, draining energy away from the Final clubs will require that we direct it elsewhere.

Finally, it is impossible not to comment on the current campus morass without also noting the deep and abiding concerns of the Faculty regarding its role in informing College policy.  The implementation of either sanctions policy will permanently reshape the relationship between the faculty and our students (perhaps for the better, perhaps not).  At the same time, however, the specific way in which these policies have been advanced threatens at theh same time to alter the relationship between the Faculty and its Administration.  Many of us—including many of us who would otherwise not be opposed to taking extraordinary measures against the USGSOs—are deeply disturbed by what we view as unprecedented administrative overreach, including the widespread perception that our Administration is committed to avoiding a faculty vote on the proposed policies.  From my conversations with many colleagues, it is hard to overstate how divisive and demoralizing this posture towards the Faculty has been, not least because it could have been avoided in the first place.  In many ways, it is this aspect of our current situation that troubles me most.

One final note, this one of appreciation for my fellow committee members—students, staff, and faculty alike—for their unfailing civility, eloquence, and clarity of thought throughout our discussions; you have been a continual reminder of the things that make Harvard great.  Suzannah Clark deserves special recognition for her thoughtful leadership of the Committee, and for her truly herculean efforts on our behalf. 

Jason Mitchell

Professor of Psychology

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[1] As a side note, I object to the Final Report’s characterization that opponents of the sanctions policy “argue that suasion is always better than sanctions” (p. 14).  That statement does not reflect my understanding of the discussion within the Committee, nor do I know any colleagues who traffic in such absolutes.  A more accurate statement might be to suggest that some opponents of the sanction policies are arguing that suasion (or other ordinary measures) are in this instance a better course of action right now than the sanction policies as formulated.