Harvard president Drew Faust announced Friday a policy to restrict members of single-sex final clubs, fraternities, and sororities from leadership positions elsewhere on campus—effectively coercing the gender-neutralization of groups which operate independently.
In Defining Ideas, a journal of the Hoover Institution, legal scholar Richard A. Epstein addresses Harvard’s latest assault on freedom of association, casting the college’s policy in light of a broader trend to enhance “diversity” at the cost of diversity. Looking to Harvard’s future, “There is now a perfect all-purpose cover for a set of top-down interventions that will push Harvard still further over the edge.”
Epstein writes:
Faust and [dean of the college] Khurara speak with moral certitude on matters of diversity. It is of course sensible for Harvard to decide to open its doors to any and all who want to apply. But it is very intolerant of its leaders to insist that their procrustean model of perfect gender parity is ideal for everyone else. Just because it folded Radcliffe into Harvard does not mean that Columbia should have folded Barnard into Columbia College at that time, instead of going coed as late as 1984. Right now there are still many women’s colleges, and the occasional men’s college, which operate successfully on a single-sex basis. Indeed, if it were not for Title IX, there would probably to this day be many other institutions that would have retained a higher level of single-sex activity. The situation is even odder because Harvard’s Faust and Khurara impose the same ultimatum on women’s final clubs as they do on men’s. But given their harsh denunciation of male power, shouldn’t these all-women organizations be welcome as havens and safe spaces free of the male domination, where women can lend aid and support to each other? Sadly Faust and Khurara offer no reason why these advantages should be sacrificed on the altar of gender neutrality.
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