As Harvard fights off charges of racism against Asian-American applicants in court, it faces still more lawsuits from multiple sororities and fraternities for discrimination. Students in the lawsuits accuse the school of violating Title IX and students’ rights to equal treatment and fair association under the Massachusetts Constitution.
The students are probably right. The explicit defense of Harvard’s actions is that they were well-intended but ultimately dumb. That is, that Harvard took down what are known as its informal, men-only “final clubs” because they had a rape problem. The Greek system was collateral damage.
But the actual issue is that Harvard, as a university, stood accused of failing to investigate sexual assaults at final clubs, elite and historic but officially unrecognized single-sex organizations that have been around for centuries.
The implicit rationale for Harvard’s attack is more sinister: It’s another milestone for the progressive deconstruction of the so-called “gender binary” — which is to say, the reality that there are men and women, and they’re different.
Harvard’s chapter of Delta Gamma proactively updated their membership policies to admit transgender women into their sorority. If Harvard simply wanted to make the Greek system more trans-friendly, it could have strong-armed single-sex organizations to admit binary conforming trans students as Delta Gamma did. Instead, they chose to attack single-sex organizations indiscriminately.
Why? The progressive path of feminism was always going to lead to the erasure of women and women’s-only spaces. The fashion industry is slowly devolving to a Harrison Bergeron-esque hellscape of egalitarian dystopia. Just as beautiful ballerinas in the short story are forced to wear masks and handicaps to hide their femininity, models are increasingly lambasted for “unrealistic” beauty (despite the fact, of course, that the entire job of a model is to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible).
So it makes perfect sense that the progressive elite’s next assault would be on literal safe spaces for women and men. While there’s no question that the integration of genders is wholly necessary for the majority of professional and personal spaces, women and men still value spaces to cultivate a community of kinship and support. In the Me Too era, spaces for men and women ought to be understood as more important than ever. Women need to empower each other, and men need to cultivate more noble and productive standards of masculinity.
It’s also interesting to see how Harvard thinks it can have its cake and eat it too. Secret societies like Harvard’s final clubs are foundational to the Ivy League. The Porcellian Club is almost as old as the country itself.
For Harvard to think that its prestige is totally unconditional, and that destroying much of what made the school prestigious to begin with won’t backfire, demonstrates the unbridled ego and elitism of the administration. Harvard may face the music in the courtroom, but this is a foreboding blueprint of what next in academia is to come.
