Just over a year ago, Harvard University’s leaders made an announcement that they hoped would be the final word, for the time being, in a lengthy debate over the future of campus social life.
Starting with the freshman class in 2017, any student who joined a single-gender social group — like one of the university’s exclusive final clubs, or a fraternity or sorority — would face restrictions. Members wouldn’t be able to hold leadership positions on campus, serve as captains of athletic teams, or receive Harvard’s endorsement for postgraduate scholarships like the Rhodes and the Marshall. The groups could avoid the sanctions only if they went coed.
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Just over a year ago, Harvard University’s leaders made an announcement that they hoped would be the final word, for the time being, in a lengthy debate over the future of campus social life.
Starting with the freshman class in 2017, any student who joined a single-gender social group — like one of the university’s exclusive final clubs, or a fraternity or sorority — would face restrictions. Members wouldn’t be able to hold leadership positions on campus, serve as captains of athletic teams, or receive Harvard’s endorsement for postgraduate scholarships like the Rhodes and the Marshall. The groups could avoid the sanctions only if they went coed.
Technically, the policy had been unveiled in May 2016. But after 18 months of contentious conversations, Harvard’s governing board finally voted to approve the restrictions. The board’s action would, in theory, institute the policy beyond the tenure of Drew Gilpin Faust, the president at the time, who stepped down this summer.
To some observers, the demise of exclusionary social groups on college campuses makes a lot of sense. As student populations diversify, administrators are growing more aware of the need to foster inclusive environments, not ones segregated by gender and class. At Harvard, the men’s final clubs in particular seem like vestiges of a university from an earlier era, when the student body was whiter and wealthier than it is today.
So on the surface, it would be easy to dismiss the lawsuits filed against Harvard by Greek organizations last month as a last-gasp effort. Privileged people are digging in their heels in the face of threats to their privilege, the argument goes. The suits are accompanied by a national campaign and petition, with an extensive website that purports to tell “the Truth” about single-gender social organizations. Some sorority chapters at other colleges have encouraged members and alumni to sign on.
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But the sorority members who have become the loudest voice in favor of the lawsuits argue that their fight isn’t about protecting privilege at all. It’s about protecting women.
Harvard officials have said their crackdown on social groups was designed to do just that. In their view, all-male final clubs encourage misogynistic behaviors and create problematic environments for women. The solution? To discourage the behavior at the source.
Since the university couldn’t singlehandedly eliminate private, unrecognized, off-campus organizations, administrators put in place the strongest disincentives to joining that they could come up with — and that would, they hoped, pass legal muster.
The women, on the other hand, say that the administration’s approach to halting gender discrimination has endangered gender-exclusive spaces that weren’t part of the problem. In fact, those women say, such groups remain necessary on a campus where issues like sexual misconduct persist.
Since the policy took effect, it’s the sororities and women’s final clubs that have disappeared, while most of the men-only groups continue to operate. This fall, all four of Harvard’s sororities shut down. One recently reopened, but with a small fraction of its former membership. The six female-only final clubs have all started the process of going coed.
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Some critics of exclusionary student organizations say there is urgency for colleges to act, especially given recent deaths at fraternity parties. What’s happening at Harvard, though, highlights the potential consequences of the more drastic efforts of administrators to regulate campus social life.
‘Inconsistent With Our Values’
The architect of Harvard’s policy is Rakesh Khurana, dean of the undergraduate college since 2014, who shepherded the proposal to fruition amid intense blowback.
Initially, Harvard officials pitched it as a sexual-assault-prevention strategy. Then a number of people pointed out that the vast majority of assaults occurred in the coed dorms, not in final clubs or Greek houses. Within a couple of months, administrators changed their tune.
“The rationale began to shift toward this broad principle that anything single-gender is inconsistent with our values,” said Harry R. Lewis, a professor of computer science and a former dean of the college, in an interview. He tried, but failed, to convince Harvard’s faculty to approve a motion that was intended to derail the sanctions.
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Meanwhile, two committees debated the policy. One, a faculty group co-chaired by Khurana, released a preliminary report in July 2017 recommending that Harvard go further and bar students from joining final clubs, fraternities, and sororities. But just one-fourth of the committee members had actually supported that plan, according to later reporting by The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. The group’s final report watered down its recommendations.
The university did not make Khurana available for an interview. When he first recommended that single-gender groups face restrictions, in 2016, he wrote in a letter to Faust that there would inevitably be criticism. But he portrayed that dissent as no different from the initial resistance to admitting women as students.
“Moments of institutional change are sometimes accompanied by a sense of loss and fear,” he wrote, “but they are also crucial turning points for growth and renewal.”
Harvard’s statements, letters, and reports on the sanctions policy are full of scathing language about the noxious and discriminatory practices of single-gender organizations. Almost all of the criticism is directed at the final clubs. There are few mentions of sororities. Nor fraternities, even though they, too, often face criticism for misogynistic and discriminatory behavior.
“The current social scene at the College revolves around deeply entrenched systems of power,” reads the February 2017 report of a committee convened to figure out how to carry out the policy. “Men’s final clubs in particular can leverage the historical dominance of gender, class, and race to preserve that power.”
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Yet the restrictions on leadership opportunities and fellowship endorsements affected a wider swath of single-gender organizations beyond the final clubs, including Greek chapters and all-male and all-female choral groups.
It’s also clear that Harvard officials were committed to taking aggressive steps to correct what they saw as social ills. Versions of “the university must act” and “taking no action is untenable” appear throughout the statements and reports.
Administrators faced pressure in part from a wave of student-survey comments that described men’s final clubs as hotbeds of sexual misconduct and accused the university of not taking responsibility for what happened in the mansions just steps away from some dormitories.
Harvard’s faculty committee held up peer institutions like Williams and Bowdoin Colleges as examples of institutions that successfully barred sororities, fraternities, and similar groups. Social organizations at other institutions have gone coed on their own, citing the changing realities of modern-day campuses.
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There are acknowledgments in the Harvard policy documents of the asymmetry between the social realities for men and women on campus, and the important role played by women-only spaces. One committee suggested that Harvard have a five-year “bridge” period for women’s groups, during which they could continue to “operate with gender-focused missions” and make the transition to an arrangement in which they were recognized by the university and yet “entirely unconnected from the typical Greek system.”
But last March, administrators canceled the “bridge” program.
The final policy says that Harvard “has a long and complex history of grappling with gender discrimination.” Administrators, the policy says, are happy to help women’s groups “wishing to transition from having a women’s exclusive membership while maintaining a women’s-focused mission.”
‘Letting Us Talk but Telling Us No’
When Rebecca Ramos talked with Harvard officials in the spring of 2016 about the future of her sorority, Delta Gamma, she initially got the impression that they wanted to help. But that feeling didn’t last.
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Ramos, who is from Seattle, hadn’t planned to join a sorority; it wasn’t necessarily something she saw as important to the college experience. What her sorority did was bring her together with women who shared ideals and values, yet not interests and backgrounds. The group was diverse, she said. More racially diverse, in fact, than Harvard’s student body overall.
When Ramos and other sorority leaders first sat down with administrators, the women acknowledged that their organizations needed to be more inclusive. They had ideas: Creating additional organizations that were coed, for students who wanted that kind of experience. Sharing physical spaces among sororities to reduce membership costs.
They emphasized that nearly every woman who goes through the sorority recruitment process is offered a spot in one of the groups. They proposed a partnership with administrators to focus on sexual-assault prevention.
Officials asked for a more formal write-up of the proposals, Ramos said, which they provided. But they never heard back, she said. Weeks later, amid final exams, the restrictions on single-gender groups were announced to the campus. The collaboration with administrators quickly dissolved, said Ramos, who graduated in 2017.
Laura Doerre, who was until recently national president of Kappa Alpha Theta, said that in a later meeting, Harvard officials seemed unwilling to entertain the idea that sororities could become more welcoming while remaining restricted to women. “As soon as we started talking about that, it became a philosophical issue that we couldn’t overcome,” Doerre said. “It was very much a ‘letting us talk but telling us no.’”
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A November 2017 statement signed by 23 female students, including Ramos, said Harvard’s premise “has been that women must not be allowed to join groups without men — for their own good — because it is the only way to ‘get at’ men’s final clubs.” Women’s protests of the policy, they wrote, “have been met with the response that women groups are unfortunate collateral damage for a more noble cause — this cause of protecting them. This is egregious.”
A Harvard spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request for comment on administrators’ conversations with leaders of women’s groups.
Women who were in sororities began to feel stigmatized, said Ellen Rothschild, a former president of Alpha Phi and a 2017 Harvard graduate. “You didn’t know what was going to happen if you didn’t accommodate the sanctions and abide by the new rules,” she said. Some became afraid that Harvard was taking their sorority membership into account when they applied to law school, business school, or graduate programs. Others worried that they could be expelled outright.
In the spring, interest in sorority recruitment dropped by 60 percent, according to the Crimson. By August, the newspaper reported, there were no longer any women-only social organizations. One, Alpha Phi, has since reopened; the sorority is part of one of the lawsuits against Harvard. The chapter’s membership peaked at 160 women in 2017, according to the suit. Now there are eleven women who “have rejoined or expressed interest in rejoining.”
Four men-only groups have gone coed over the last couple of years. But nine others, mostly final clubs, continue to operate.
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Why was the impact on women’s groups so much greater? Women’s groups weren’t as well established in Cambridge, said Emma Quinn-Judge, a Boston lawyer who is lead counsel for one of the lawsuits against Harvard. Men’s final clubs have been around for centuries and have large alumni networks and resources that can help them survive in challenging circumstances. Moreover, the clubs aren’t bound by national rules — such as mandatory single-gender membership — as sororities are.
While national Greek associations didn’t file the lawsuits against Harvard, they’re providing financial backing and general support, said Judson Horras, president of the North American Interfraternity Conference. More than 100 organizations are contributing in some way to the effort, he said, and about 62,000 people have signed a petition on the Stand Up to Harvard website demanding that the sanctions policy be reversed.
Horras described the lawsuits as “the last resort.” The interfraternity conference and the National Panhellenic Conference declined to say how much money they’re spending on the legal efforts.
There’s also the question of whether to eliminate the men’s groups, among which hazing, alcohol, and sexual-assault issues are concentrated, and preserve the women’s groups. Regardless of the legal implications of doing so, Greek leaders seemed uncomfortable with the idea. “We haven’t thought about that,” said Doerre, of Kappa Alpha Theta, after a long pause. “I would say, even in the men’s groups, there has not been any conduct cited as a reason for this policy.”
Greek organizations tend to stick together, said Jim Barber, an associate professor of education at the College of William & Mary who has studied fraternities and sororities for two decades. The national governing bodies work in tandem. Individual chapters interact a great deal with one another, and many of their events and fund raisers involve partnerships.
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‘Distinctions Get Lost’
Some aspects of the Harvard case are unique. Final clubs are Harvard-specific groups. The clubs, fraternities, and sororities are not recognized by the university, so some argue that it has little authority to regulate them, although officials have countered that “these organizations are very much of Harvard.” In contrast, most Greek systems elsewheres have a formal relationship with the institution.
Still, many administrators will closely watch the Harvard lawsuits because they, too, are grappling with how to regulate students’ social lives in an era of heightened concern about safety, said Gentry McCreary, a consultant with the Ncherm Group, a risk-management consulting company. “This is the culmination,” he said, “of years of conversations and frustration about the heavy-handed actions that colleges are taking against fraternities and sororities.”
The debate at Harvard has also prompted people to articulate what value certain single-gender groups can provide on campus as colleges move in a more diverse, inclusive direction. As Lewis, the former Harvard College dean, talked with female students about the sanctions and the loss of their organizations, he said, the stakes became clear. When women go to computer-science classes, it’s a men’s club all day long. Sororities had been their respite.
Moreover, he said, all kinds of campus groups are open to all genders but clearly have a specific mission. The Harvard Asian American Women’s Association, for instance. “We can’t seriously claim that we don’t think single-gender organizations have value here,” Lewis said.
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Several experts on student social organizations said Harvard was looking at the groups too simplistically. For one thing, the Greek system is not made up of only gender-based groups, said Barber, the William & Mary professor. “The entire community is built on divisions between gender, race, religion, all of these different factors that go into it,” he said.
“When we paint with a broad brush,” he said, “distinctions get lost.”
Young people have always spent their college years figuring out who they are, but these days students are even more interested in embracing their individual identities and grappling with how different identities intersect, Barber said. As they go through that process, “there’s a benefit to having spaces with people who identify in similar ways to you to talk about what that identity means.”
The conversation in Greek communities about identity and diversity has changed significantly over the past decade, Barber added. He was part of a working group of alumni of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity that several years ago examined the possibility of admitting transgender men as members; it began doing so in 2015. “That definition of what single-gender means is becoming more inclusive,” he said.
Alexandra Robbins, who interviewed hundreds of fraternity members for a new book, Fraternity, that seeks to dispel myths about the organizations, said it’s not just women who sustain collateral damage when policies like Harvard’s appear; men are, too. Serious behavioral problems are typically limited to a handful of students in a couple of chapters, she argued.
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“There’s an assumption that all male groups must exhibit toxic masculinity simply because they’re male,” Robbins said.
Assuming that all single-gender groups are like final clubs or secret societies is a huge mistake.
When Robbins was an undergraduate at Yale University, she was a member of Scroll and Key, a secret society that went coed in the 1990s. Her experience in a coed setting, she said, didn’t seem that different from the way things were when the club was all male.
But groups like final clubs and secret societies have missions different from those of Greek groups, she said. They’re most interested in creating “small, powerful alumni networks for the college.” Fraternities and sororities involve networking, too, but they’re more grounded in cultivating friendships and lifelong lessons. “Assuming that all single-gender groups are like final clubs or secret societies is a huge mistake,” Robbins said.
The future of Harvard’s restrictions on single-gender organizations remains in flux. But for the past two and a half years, officials have stood firm. “Harvard should not have to change its commitment to nondiscrimination and educational philosophy for outside organizations that are not aligned with our longstanding mission,” wrote Rachael Dane, a university spokeswoman, in an emailed statement.
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Faust, Harvard’s former president, and William F. Lee, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, said in a December 2017 open letter that Harvard is actually not punishing members of single-gender groups by taking away their opportunities for leadership positions and scholarships.
“Ultimately,” they wrote, “students have the freedom to decide which is more important to them: membership in a gender-discriminatory organization or access to those privileges and resources.”
Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.