Herewith The Scrapbook takes note of the troubling alignment of two separate stories.
As readers may be aware, Harvard University is in the midst of a self-imposed crisis, as the administration seeks to force single-sex “final clubs” to admit members of the opposite sex. Harvard’s principal target, of course, is such venerable all-male institutions as the Porcellian Club, which was founded as long ago as 1791 and is best known to history for having blackballed Franklin D. Roosevelt (class of 1904). But there are female single-sex organizations at Harvard as well, which complicates the issue.
To be sure, and largely for political purposes, Harvard is determined to destroy the final clubs; but because the clubs have no official affiliation with Harvard, and American citizens theoretically enjoy freedom of association, the university is attacking them from their flanks. Accordingly, President Drew Gilpin Faust insists that the clubs violate Harvard’s spirit of “inclusiveness”—tell that to the 94 percent of applicants Harvard turns down!—and demands that members of either sex be barred from leadership positions on campus.
Meanwhile, university spokesman Jeff Neal claims that places like Porcellian contribute to the culture of “sexual assault” on campus. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, he notes that “a recent survey . . . found that 47 percent of female Harvard seniors participating in final-club activities had experienced nonconsensual sexual contact, compared with the campus-wide average of 31 percent.”
Now, if the truth be told, The Scrapbook is cheering for neither side here. There are greater problems in the world than the fate of Ivy League fraternities and sororities; and the Harvard University approach is indistinguishable from that of, say, Yale or the University of Missouri. But The Scrapbook was appalled to learn that, in the same week it was announced that President Obama’s elder daughter will soon be enrolling at Harvard, after a gap-year interval, she stands a one-in-three chance of being sexually assaulted at Harvard—indeed, nearly a 50 percent chance if she “participat[es] in final-club activities.”
Far be it from The Scrapbook to tell the president and first lady where to send their child to school, but what sort of parent knowingly dispatches a daughter to a collegiate snakepit of sexual assault? Could it be that the Obamas secretly disbelieve the sort of statistics Harvard’s spokesman cites? Surely not, for the president’s own administration has been busy for years purveying similar statistics about the perils of sexual violence on American campuses.
Female Harvard undergraduates have now joined Porcellian in protesting Harvard’s war on single-sex institutions. And who can blame them? If the culture of sexual assault is as bad as Harvard says it is, keeping the boys and girls in their separate clubs is not only fair but essential.
