The proposal to ban final clubs would be illogical, illiberal — and totally in character
By Ted Gup
July 18, 2017
A Harvard commission last week called for an end of the university’s final clubs, those elitist, secretive, and traditionally all-male bastions of social privilege, throwbacks to a time when the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, T.S. Eliot, or John F. Kennedy gathered with fellow members to toast their good fortunes and occasionally raise hell.
The authors of the Harvard proposal doubtless imagine themselves to be progressive and responsive to changing societal values. They see themselves as striking a blow against Jurassic social lairs that, they say, promote sexual harassment, even assaults; and yes, they also admit to finding the clubs utterly distasteful in the modern era. With the likely support of Harvard’s first woman president, Drew Gilpin Faust, whose disdain for the clubs is a matter of public record, the commission’s proposal may well be adopted. Students who ignore the ban and join such clubs would face expulsion or suspension.
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A Harvard commission last week called for an end of the university’s final clubs, those elitist, secretive, and traditionally all-male bastions of social privilege, throwbacks to a time when the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, T.S. Eliot, or John F. Kennedy gathered with fellow members to toast their good fortunes and occasionally raise hell.
The authors of the Harvard proposal doubtless imagine themselves to be progressive and responsive to changing societal values. They see themselves as striking a blow against Jurassic social lairs that, they say, promote sexual harassment, even assaults; and yes, they also admit to finding the clubs utterly distasteful in the modern era. With the likely support of Harvard’s first woman president, Drew Gilpin Faust, whose disdain for the clubs is a matter of public record, the commission’s proposal may well be adopted. Students who ignore the ban and join such clubs would face expulsion or suspension.
To quote the great philosopher Clint Eastwood, as Dirty Harry, “a man’s got to know his limitations.” The same may be said of a university. Its jurisdiction and authority are rightly bounded by the perimeters of its campus. The certitude of its moral and intellectual prowess does not give it infinite license to control the private lives or thoughts of its students, to manage the affairs of society at large, or to deliver its principles as if tablets from on high. The evangelical zeal of any university, its messianic compulsion to promote progress (as it and it alone would define it), is a sure sign that it misunderstands its core responsibilities: educating its students and demonstrating by word and example the need to respect the rights of others to self-determination, even when adjudged to be wrong. A university on a mission is a dangerous thing in a pluralistic society, a betrayal of the diverse values it purports to represent, and a sure way to alienate those it seeks to enlighten.
A university on a mission is a dangerous thing in a pluralistic society, a betrayal of the diverse values it purports to represent.
To those unfamiliar with Harvard’s history, its proclivities to social engineering, its orthodoxies, and its more than occasional lapses of sanctimony, the proposal may sound like a noble move toward inclusiveness, modernity, and feminism. In fact, it is part of a long tradition of socially coercive tactics, overreaching, and bullying. Simply put, Harvard has a history of going too far — both politically and territorially.
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That Harvard feels it can dictate to its students what they can and cannot do in their off hours, off campus, in private buildings, may mystify some, but historical examples abound. In 1912, its aristocratic president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, so hated the labor movement and the famous Bread and Roses textile strike at the mills in Lawrence, Mass. — 25 miles to the north of Cambridge — that he offered Harvard students an out to taking their exams if they would arm themselves, mount up, and form a militia. A hundred or more students answered the call, marching on the mills to guard the owners’ property and make sure strikers did not get out of hand. It was no coincidence that Lowell’s family fortune derived from a mill.
In 1920, when Lowell caught wind of the fact that there were gay students on campus, he convened a secret tribunal and had the students expelled. His actions produced suicides, depression, and shame. But that was not enough for him. He also called for those found “guilty” to be exiled from Cambridge, well exceeding his or Harvard’s authority. But failing to honor the edict would bring down upon the students the wrath of Harvard. The university did, in some cases, subsequently destroy their reputations.
Going back to Harvard’s early years, the dictates of its conscience and its orthodoxy, always cloaked in self-reverential terms and in defense of moral values, produced a series of stunning results. In 1751 it accepted a bequest from Judge Paul Dudley, the terms of which were the establishment of a lecture series which every four years was to focus on “detecting, and convicting, and exposing the Idolatry of the Romish Church, their tyranny, usurpations, damnable heresies, fatal errors, abominable superstitions, and other crying wickedness in their high places.” That bequest was honored for nearly 150 years, and its name — the Dudleian lectures — continues to this day at the Divinity School. Those lectures and the views they espoused helped legitimize Boston’s anti-Catholic fervor, which at times boiled over into violence, arson, and riots.
Harvard’s penchant for overreacting is part of its DNA. In 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered controversial remarks to Harvard’s Divinity School. The university was so enraged that it banned him from the campus for 30 years. (Never mind that today a building is named for him.)
In December 1929, Harvard fired the entire staff of 20 women, mostly immigrants, who cleaned Widener Library after they had the temerity to ask for what was then minimum wage in Massachusetts. It was a week before Christmas and the depths of the Depression. A campaign waged by alumni — spearheaded by Corliss Lamont, son of the head of J.P. Morgan — managed to raise enough money to get them through the hardest of times.
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Indeed, Harvard has never been content with opening (or closing) minds just on its campus, but has always felt it had the right to reform, correct, or alter the course of those beyond its grounds, a misguided form of noblesse oblige. Charles Eliot, Harvard president from 1869 to 1909, lent his voice and his prestige to the banning of various books and plays in Boston, to racial segregation, and to forced sterilization of the “feeble minded” and disabled. He also publicly opposed women’s suffrage.
But such a history has in no way humbled Harvard. Today, it is a gloriously diverse university that welcomes all races, religions, gender and sexual orientations, and classes, but its inability to resist overreaching, to restrain itself from exercising moral coercion on those beyond itself, is deeply ingrained.
And its targeting of the final clubs is itself an exercise in moral selectivity. Harvard claims that its animus toward the clubs is partly based on their conduct toward women, the creation of hostile environments where women are discriminated against, harassed, even assaulted. The evidence of this is mostly anecdotal — and in no small measure a pretext, it seems, for ridding the university of what some consider an anachronistic embarrassment.
But if Harvard is so determined to rid itself of organizations that habitually offend and objectify women and promote environments of sexual predation, then perhaps they should discontinue men’s sports. After all, the record of team sports like men’s cross-country and soccer is replete and well documented with regard to such offenses. But while Harvard canceled a soccer season, no commission has tendered a proposal to eliminate sports — nor will it, given the alumni blowback that would ensue.
The 22-page commission report is long on innuendo and short on documentation. While broadly referencing transgressions, it implies that the underlying sin is the clubs’ mere existence.
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History has handed Harvard a remarkable legacy that is as complex and contradictory as history itself. To deal with it maturely means to take ownership of Harvard’s institutional flaws, past and present, and to realize that traditions can be, if not tolerated, then at least moderated and contextualized.
Animosity toward the Old Boy Network now threatens to take its toll on the New Girl Network.
Harvard has yet again chosen to take a blunderbuss rather than a scalpel to the problem. Unable to discriminate against the traditionally all-male finals clubs, it has also, in the name of consistency (that “hobgoblin of little minds,” as Emerson put it) been forced to call for the eradication of women’s final clubs and sororities as well. These are places where women can assemble, network, and forge critical alliances and moral support that will benefit them over the course of their lifetimes. President Faust very likely did not have that in mind when she first struck out against final clubs. It was simply part of the law of unintended consequences — which is always what happens when policy and emotion get ahead of restraint and nuanced thinking.
It may feel good to indulge oneself in the “kink of rectitude,” as the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh put it, but that seldom produces worthy policy. Animosity toward the Old Boy Network now threatens to take its toll on the New Girl Network. The Harvard commission says the final clubs are inconsistent “with the forward-looking aspirations of the university.” But a backward glimpse at Harvard’s past excesses might be more constructive.
Harvard takes great pride in its motto, “Veritas” — or “Truth” — but it is fixated on symbolic gestures rather than actual solutions. Recently ridding itself of the revered law-school crest because it contained sheaves of wheat referencing an early donor who was a slave owner might have made some sense if it had been followed by a general purging of chairs and building names after slave owners, opium traders, anti-Semites, racists, eugenicists, and anti-feminists. Shutting down the final clubs would erase a symbol of elitism and secrecy at a university that turns away 95 percent of its applicants and whose governing corporation is steeped in secrecy. Its faculty club is the definition of exclusive and posh, and its continuing hosting of events at the independent Harvard Club, which some years ago collected ostensible tips but then did not share them with staff, suggest a continuing insensitivity to the very issues the university claims to be concerned about.
The past is full of embarrassments, but organizations, even final clubs, can evolve. Dictating, threatening, or punishing such organizations sends a signal throughout the university that the avenues to social change and progress are not built on intellectual appeals or merit, but on the power of brute institutional force, draconian punitive measures, and prejudice cloaked in moral authority. One does not defeat exclusionary institutions by banning them, does not demonstrate the power of inclusiveness by shunning, or demonstrate the power of reason by resorting to blunt force.
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In 2009, Faust was asked what wise counsel she had received regarding governance. She cited the words of Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School: “Strategy,” she said, “is what you don’t do.” Harvard’s consideration of final clubs is the perfect opportunity to apply that sage advice.
Ted Gup is an author, journalist, and professor of journalism at Emerson College.