It looks like the finale for the final clubs. A Harvard faculty committee released a report last week recommending that all fraternities, sororities, and similarly “exclusionary” single-sex social organizations be phased out by the spring of 2022. The committee determined that it would not be enough for these organizations to go co-ed; the campus must be rid of them completely.
Harvard withdrew official recognition of final clubs decades ago, but last year the administration went further, declaring that their members would not be able to hold leadership positions on campus or receive the recommendations required for some postgraduate fellowships and scholarships, including the Rhodes Scholarship.
The absurdity of the recommendation to eliminate them was not lost on outside observers: How can Harvard, of all places, tell students not to join exclusive institutions? But many faculty—not to mention students and alumni—say such a policy would also be an unnecessary breach of students’ freedom. As psychology professor Steven Pinker wrote recently, “A university is an institution with circumscribed responsibilities which engages in a contract with its students. Its main responsibility is to provide them with an education. It is not an arbiter over their lives, 24/7.” As the folks at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education point out, Harvard is clearly violating promises of freedom of association it’s made to its students over the years.
These are good points, but what’s particularly strange about this recommendation is that it makes almost no mention of the reason Harvard president Drew Faust and Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana wanted to re-examine the role of final clubs on campus in the first place. In the spring of 2016, the school released a report regarding sexual assault on campus, which concluded that the all-male clubs deserved a disproportionate share of the blame.
According to Harvard’s survey, 47 percent of female college seniors “participating in the Final Clubs”—that is, attending male final club events or belonging to female final clubs—reported “experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact since entering college.” The same was true of only 31 percent of all seniors. The report concluded that “a Harvard College woman is half again more likely to experience sexual assault if she is involved with a Club than the average female Harvard College Senior.” The clubs are bastions of “sexual entitlement,” troubling areas of potential alcohol abuse and sexual assault, and a “vestige of gender inequity” on campus.
So what happened? Why didn’t the committee simply force the final clubs to go co-ed and call it a day? Well, the committee’s report includes testimony from students who say that unpopular kids feel bad when they are not chosen for these clubs and poorer kids feel bad because they don’t have tuxedos to wear to final club events and can’t afford the expectations that come with membership.
In other words, simply making the clubs co-ed wasn’t checking enough privilege. “Our main reservation about the stated goal of the policy was whether the focus on ending gender segregation and discrimination is too narrow,” the report reads. “If all of these organizations adopted gender-neutral membership in a timely fashion, there would remain a myriad of practices of these organizations that go against the educational mission and principles espoused by Harvard University.”
But doing away with the clubs won’t solve any of the problems faculty and administration set out to address. Not only will Harvard always be an exclusive institution, there will always be gradations within it. There will always be students who skip the cafeteria lines and spend their weekends trying out trendy new restaurants in Cambridge and Boston. During vacations, some will ski in Europe and sun themselves on Maui. Some will even find places to wear their tuxedos. Harvard can offer free tuition and subsidize summer internships, but it is presumably not going to guarantee that everyone has a summer place on Nantucket.
As for the original issue of curbing sexual assault, the university has been misguided from the beginning. The survey the university conducted, which again was the impetus for changing the final club policy, was badly written and poorly analyzed. The questions themselves were deeply confusing. “Since you have been a student at Harvard University has a student or someone employed by or otherwise associated with Harvard . . . continued to ask you to go out, get dinner, have drinks or have sex even though you said no?” If you answered yes to that question, you were counted as a victim of sexual assault.
Though there is almost no mention of it earlier in the report, there is a table at the end titled “Percent of Female Victims of Nonconsensual Penetration Involving Physical Force or Incapacitation by Involvement of Substances and Tactic.” In almost two-thirds of cases involving physical force, the victim was voluntarily drinking alcohol; in another 4 percent of cases, the victim was voluntarily using drugs. In these cases, 69 percent of the offenders were drinking and 5 percent were using drugs.
From the similarity of these numbers, you might think that the victims and offenders were drinking or doing drugs together before they engaged in sexual activity. This gets to the heart of the problem on Harvard’s campus and many others these days: The drinking culture has gone off the rails. Students are not exercising good judgment regarding sexual encounters because many of them are too drunk to do so.
While overall alcohol use among young adults has not changed much since the 1970s, there has been a shift on the extreme end of the spectrum. According to a 2013 report in JAMA Pediatrics on high school seniors, “On occasion, 10.5% consumed 10 to 14 drinks, and 5.6% consumed 15 drinks or more.” In every recent account of life on campus, men and especially women describe “pre-gaming,” that is, getting tipsy before they even leave their dorm rooms. For women, this is often so that they can shed their inhibitions and behave like men (also known as “empowerment”).
It would be nice to think that getting rid of some off-campus locations for drunken sex would solve these issues, but the truth is that it will not even make a dent. Like most colleges, Harvard is not serious about fixing its drinking problem, let alone its message that young women have achieved equality when they act like men. Declaring that you are going to take on the campus rape crisis sounds much sexier. College administrators don’t want to seem like old fogies trying to curb something as frivolous as a few extra beers. And heaven forbid they consider the problems of co-ed dormitories and bathrooms.
“Time after time,” according to the committee, “the social organizations have demonstrated . . . unwillingness to change—even as new students join them over generations.” Truthfully, though, it is the administration that has demonstrated a stubborn inability to see what is in front of it. If students want to be snobbishly selective in some ways while getting too drunk to be discriminating in others, the modern college campus affords them plenty of opportunities.
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, is the author of The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians.
