It takes real talent to insult both men and women with a single bureaucratic ruling, but never fear: Harvard’s administration appears to be up to the job.
According to new rules recommended by the Dean of Harvard College and approved by Harvard’s president, any student joining Harvard’s all-male or all-female finals clubs or any student joining a single sex fraternity and sorority will be ineligible to head campus organizations, captain sports teams, or receive scholarship recommendations from university officials. To call this both idiotic and totalitarian would perhaps be too generous. Harvard’s latest capitulation to absurd political correctness is a shining example of the intellectual and moral rot at the heart of America’s elite universities, one that has implications far beyond the Ivy League.
I say this with great sadness, as there is still a tremendous amount of valuable and important work that goes on in America’s top universities (I was a student at Harvard in the past, and am now fortunate to be at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.) There are outstanding physicians curing diseases, scientists making technological breakthroughs, and even (amidst piles of dreck and politicized pseudoscience) social scientists who are adding valuable insights to our understanding of the world. But as institutions, Harvard and its fellow elite brethren have gone far astray, and arrogant radicals are in the driver’s seat. The fact that this appalling decision was the product of over two years of deliberation shows that it is not simply a casual example of one small bureaucracy going off the reservation, but rather a calculated and deliberate act of stupidity and moral cowardice.
Harvard’s stance would be bad enough just on the principle of free association. It’s hard to imagine a more odious and literally totalitarian academic regime than one that that punishes students for what they do in private groups with no formal affiliation with the university. What’s next, banning Republicans from heading campus organizations? Surely the GOP platform has many elements that fly in the face of Harvard’s definition of inclusivity. (No doubt, some Harvard apparatchik will read this and think, “What a brilliant idea!”)
RELATED: Harvard’s Hypocritical Attack on Freedom of Association
But in fact, Harvard’s decision is worse than that. Because unlike many “free association” cases, in which the conservatives might uphold the general principle without endorsing the particular choices of those wishing to associate, the free association that Harvard is attempting to stifle here is very valuable for both men and women. In one of the delicious ironies of this case, Harvard president Drew Faust herself attended a single-sex school (Bryn Mawr).
Many people want to spend some percentage of their time in the company of people of the same sex because it allows them to be free of the performance and roles that they may feel obliged to play in a mixed-sex setting. The idea of fraternity brothers and sorority sisters is at the heart of this concept. To nobody’s surprise, national sororities and fraternities have blasted Harvard for its decision and more than 200 women rallied outside of Harvard’s administration office in protest earlier this week.
The free association that Harvard is attempting to stifle here is very valuable for both men and women.
While Harvard has justified its decision in the name of eradicating privilege and combating sexual assault, what this is really about is not, primarily, privilege, but Harvard’s ideological desire to declare men and women interchangeable, which they are not. Men and women are equal, but, within that equality, men and women often have very different goals, desires, and ways of relating to one another. This has been understood from time immemorial. In contrast to this common-sense view, however, Harvard’s position implicitly endorses a vision of sex, gender, and power embraced and developed by radical feminists. In such a world (which also informs the Left’s transgender-bathroom moral hysteria) sex and gender differences must ultimately be erased, and the refusal to do so is inherently oppressive.
Ironically, perhaps the best way for Harvard students to get around these draconian restrictions is to have a couple of the men in all-male finals clubs or fraternities declare that they consider themselves to be women, or vice-versa for sororities. In one instant, the fraternities cannot only be rid of the stain of sexism, but they can have gender-inclusive bathrooms. This modest proposal is, of course, ridiculous, but no more so than Harvard’s new policy.
#share#Harvard’s attack on the “privilege” of such single-sex groups is equally misdirected. In a laughable display of a lack of self-awareness, Harvard College’s dean, in his letter announcing the changes, claimed that “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.” Umm . . . a large part of the undergraduate experience at Harvard is about “access to networks of power,” which is achieved through “recruitment practices” that involve bringing together a combination of top academic students, young leaders, and a sprinkling of the scions of wealthy families. For someone at Harvard to bleat about someone else at Harvard’s privilege is like Donald Trump telling someone they need to tone down their rhetoric.
And let’s not forget Harvard’s very selective moral concern. While the college is clearly offended that men might want to have spaces to socialize exclusively with men and women with women, it seemed far less offended when Harvard students took part in celebrating a Satanic “black mass.” Harvard (while appropriately condemning the group) did not punish any of the students involved, nor were any black-mass participants forbidden from holding offices in student groups.
#related#The college also officially gives recognition to a BDSM and “kinky” sex group and allows a Harvard-sponsored “sex week” in which all types of fetishes are freely discussed and advocated. And since the pathetic justification for Harvard’s restriction on single-sex groups was centered around sexual assault, perhaps some Harvard faculty member could do a scientific survey on the rate of sexual assault experienced by active participants in Harvard’s Satanist group, BDSM groups, and sex week vs. say, members of Harvard’s Anscombe society, “a student group endorsing premarital abstinence and sexual integrity, and upholding the institution of marriage and the family.” Another modest proposal: Perhaps if we are so concerned about sexual assault, we should require Harvard students to attend Anscombe society events.
So to review, Harvard says Satanists and sadomasochists are fine representative leaders of student groups, but members of Kappa Alpha Theta are beyond the pale. Those moral standards seem clear and logical to me.
William F. Buckley once said that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than the 2000 faculty members of Harvard University. As this latest bout of pernicious totalitarianism from Harvard’s administration shows, Buckley, as usual, was on to something.