Harvard is banishing the off-campus “final clubs” that have functioned for generations as the school’s equivalent of fraternities and sororities, as Naomi Schaefer Riley reports elsewhere in this issue. The university has its reasons, most notably a contentious claim that the clubs foster a culture of sexual assault. But laughably, the school’s justification for impinging on students’ freedom of association includes the complaint that the clubbable crowd has the nerve to dress up on occasion.
“As many have noted, final clubs reinforce existing campus inequities,” proclaimed the university’s Committee on the Unrecognized Single-Gender Social Organizations. “Low-income students, who might not own a tuxedo or be comfortable with small-talk at cocktail parties, are disadvantaged from the outset.” Nothing is quite so funny as the elitest of elitist institutions denouncing elitism. Still, it’s a shame, because once upon a time administrators realized that tuxedos were socially leveling garments—albeit ones that leveled everyone up—and they knew that part of their job was to teach even the most bumpkinish of their charges how to tie a bow-tie, thus making the young scholars fit for adult society.
But if the wearing of fancy clothes is now anathema to Harvard values, The Scrapbook suggests that it is about time the university get serious about enforcing a truly egalitarian dress-code for the student body.
