Fraternities and Sororities Sue Harvard Over Its Policy Against Single-Sex Groups

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Two years ago, Harvard’s fraternities, sororities, and “final clubs,” which are not officially affiliated with the institution, faced an order from the university’s president: Go coed, or your members will lose the ability to hold campus-leadership positions and to be endorsed for outside scholarships. On Monday, Greek life struck back. A group of fraternities, sororities, and three students filed lawsuits against Harvard’s leaders, in both state and federal court, for allegedly discriminating against the organizations with the new policy.

In both cases, the plaintiffs are asking the courts to block the policy and to award unspecified damages.

The policy was announced in 2016 by Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s president at the time, after a university task force on sexual-assault prevention found that “final clubs” fostered “a strong sense of sexual entitlement.” But the new policy that followed applied as well to the Greek organizations, barring their members from leadership positions and endorsements for such scholarships as the Rhodes and the Fulbright.

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Some members of all-female final clubs and sororities protested the new policy, arguing that women needed a single-gender safe space. Critics also questioned why women’s groups had to follow the same rules as men’s groups, which the task force’s report found to be more often a source of trouble.

The lawsuits echo the yearslong struggle by members of single-sex groups who wanted to preserve their status. “Harvard University has implemented a new student-conduct policy that selectively and discriminatorily denies to certain undergraduate students rights, opportunities, and privileges generally available to its undergraduates,” says the lawsuit in Massachusetts court, filed by the international sorority Alpha Phi, Harvard’s Alpha Phi chapter, and the sorority Delta Gamma.

Only one single-sex sorority remains on the campus, according to the lawsuit. The rest have shut down, merged with men’s organizations, or reformed on a coed basis as a result of the new policy.

The federal lawsuit — filed by the sororities Kappa Alpha Theta and Kappa Kappa Gamma, the fraternities Sigma Chi and Sigma Alpha Epsilon, SAE’s Harvard chapter, and three unnamed students — states that their parent organizations require them to be single-sex, and so they cannot comply with Harvard’s rules.

The lawsuit also states that Harvard discriminated against all-male groups. “No objective evidence has ever shown that the single-sex nature of all-male organizations increases sexual assaults at Harvard,” the lawsuit says. “Harvard’s view that all-male clubs — because they are all-male — are misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and classist, is also sexist.”

For Rebecca Ramos, who was president of the Delta Gamma sorority chapter when the university rolled out the 2016 policy, the changes were the antithesis of why sororities exist in the first place: to empower women where they have been historically marginalized.

“I would’ve thought it would be unthinkable that they would try to punish students for trying to seek out a supportive environment and place where they can be themselves and grow into strong leaders,” said Ramos, who graduated in 2017.

W. Scott Lewis, a partner in the Ncherm Group, a risk-management consulting company, said it’s questionable for Harvard to treat individual decisions such as what groups to join as violations of policy. But he acknowledged that Harvard, as a private university, “has a lot more latitude than a public school.”

“No public school would probably be able to get away with this at all,” he said. “To sanction an individual for merely being a member of an organization is certainly an interesting methodology to go about it.”

Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Follow Andy Tsubasa Field on Twitter at @AndyTsubasaF, or email him at andy.field@chronicle.com.