To counter any appearance of discrimination, Harvard has announced that it will begin punishing students for joining single-gender social clubs beginning with the class of 2021.
As The Harvard Crimson explains, undergraduates who decide to join a fraternity or sorority will be banned from becoming team captains for any athletic team and from holding any leadership position in recognized student groups. In addition, those students will be ineligible for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships.
Leading the charge against all "forms of privilege and exclusion" are Harvard President Drew G. Faust and Dean Rakesh Khurana. The new policy was sent to current undergraduates via e-mail. Faust wrote:
Although the fraternities, sororities, and final clubs are not formally recognized by the College, they play an unmistakable and growing role in student life, in many cases enacting forms of privilege and exclusion at odds with our deepest values. The College cannot ignore these organizations if it is to advance our shared commitment to broadening opportunity and making Harvard a campus for all of its students.
Khurana's language was even more pointed, specifically to the male-only variety:
[T]he discriminatory membership policies of these organizations have led to the perpetuation of spaces that are rife with power imbalances. The most entrenched of these spaces send an unambiguous message that they are the exclusive preserves of men. In their recruitment practices and through their extensive resources and access to networks of power, these organizations propagate exclusionary values that undermine those of the larger Harvard College community.
The reason Harvard administration is coming down on male social clubs in particular is in response to the school's sexual assault task force that has linked fraternities to the rise in reported rapes, though as Reason.com noted, "the overwhelming majority of reported rapes at Harvard took place in the dormitories." But nonetheless, Harvard insists male-only clubs are a threat to student safety.
Also noted at Reason is Khurana stating his willingness to "relax" the new policy IF these clubs would begin admitting members of the opposite sex, because surely if clubs become co-ed, there'd be less opportunity for sexual assault.
Whatever the outcome, Harvard has sent a clear message, as Khurana wrote:
[The] unrecognized single-gender social organizations have lagged behind in ways that are untenable in the 21st century.
So Harvard effectively is punishing students who wish to join off-campus clubs because they don't match its own political persuasion. In the interest of diversity, the school is banning diverse groups from joining in common interests. How anti-liberal is that?
