Harvard University is taking a tough stand against the privilege creeping through their campus of mostly privileged students by barring anyone who belongs to a single-gender organization, sorority, fraternity or “final club” from having any part in university leadership.
The move will also bar members of such gender-exclusive clubs from receiving scholarship recommendations and sports team captainships, lest Harvard be seen as favoring the privileged—as though the mere fact that these clubs exist at a top Ivy League school does not already communicate such an idea. This includes those clubs that are all-female, since Harvard’s leadership believes those were formed only to “counter the male dominated dynamics” of Harvard’s social underground.
The move comes in response to a sexual assault prevention report compiled by Harvard’s Task Force for the Prevention of Sexual Assault and championed by Rakesh Khurana, the dean of the college, who has had single-sex clubs in his sights for months. His rationale is the purported increased risk of sexual assault if single-gender clubs exist on campus.
The school chose not to use the risks of sexual assault as the basis for their decision, deciding to couch their logic, instead, in lofty words about Harvard’s delicate balance of power: “[t]he discriminatory membership policies of these organizations have led to the perpetuation of spaces that are rife with power imbalances…The most entrenched of these spaces send an unambiguous message that they are the exclusive preserves of men.”
While fraternities are a frequent source of ire for campus social justice warriors, Harvard also targeted “final clubs,” private campus social organizations that are neither authorized nor officially connected to the school, in its decision. There are less than 20 male and female “final clubs” on Harvard’s campus, all of which engage in such horrendous behaviors as holding cocktail parties, undertaking country outings, and hosting formal dinners.
While many of the members are descendants of East Coast elite—almost all alumni in the Harvard Corporations were once members, and the clubs receive endowments through alumni support—the clubs have been liberalizing membership of late, with two clubs even going co-ed at the behest of Harvard’s dean. All final clubs share co-ed spaces.
Unsurprisingly, slow efforts at gender inclusion in these clubs have left Harvard’s administration antsy. Harvard’s Task Force for the Prevention of Sexual Assault decried the mere presence of gender segregated clubs as creating “a culture often inimical to Harvard College.” And Harvard’s administration left open the possibility of increasing the pressure on single-sex social clubs if they refused to go co-ed—even noting that the administration could go so far as to ban any member of the club from also attending the college.
