On May 6th, 2016, President Faust and Dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, announced in an email to students that beginning with Harvard’s Class of 2021, undergraduate members of unrecognized single-gender social organizations will be banned from holding athletic team captaincies and leadership positions in all recognized student groups. They will also be ineligible for College endorsement for top fellowships like the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships. Over the past two years, this policy has been met with backlash and support, criticism and praise. In order to truly understand this policy and why it is so controversial and divisive, both Harvard’s complicated relationship with social organizations and some crucial events leading up to the policy’s release must be examined.  

It is almost impossible to separate the history of Harvard from the history of Harvard’s social clubs. In 1901, the Porcellian Club built a gate directly in front of the entrance to their clubhouse and named it after the man who founded the club in 1784, having it prominently feature the club’s symbol, a boar's head. The gate leads straight into Harvard Yard. Everyday, hundreds of Harvard community members and tourists from around the world walk through the Joseph McKean gate, now a landmark of Harvard College. The Harvard Final Clubs are located in the heart of Harvard Square at the center of the College’s campus. Their central location and multi-million dollar properties are not the result of attempts to undermine the College’s power and detract from Harvard’s residential house system, but rather these houses were built by the early Club members at a time when land was easy to acquire.

Throughout most of the 20th century, the Final Clubs were closely affiliated with the Harvard administration. Throughout the 1930’s and 40’s, George F. Plimpton, the Associate Dean of Harvard College was responsible for supervising “Non-Athletic Undergraduate Organizations” and promoting “the cordial relations existing between the Final Clubs and our committee.” The major shift in Harvard’s attitude towards the Final Clubs occurred during the post-war period when as “ the college [underwent] countless revolutions and reorganizations, the clubs…remained remarkably stable.” The tensions between the Final Clubs and Harvard administration reflected the “battle of the New Harvard against the old” and over the course of the next three decades, Harvard began to portray the Final clubs as being not inline with Harvard’s new focus on diversity and inclusion. Despite criticism and calls for action, Harvard did not take any concrete steps to address the concerns regarding the Final Clubs until the United States Office of Education intervened and began scrutinizing racial issues at Harvard and “warned Harvard that it would investigate claims of racial discrimination in Final Clubs under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”

For Harvard, the impetus for immediate and extreme action against the Final Clubs in the early 1980’s stemmed from pressure by the Federal Government. Suddenly, the Final Clubs were not just a piece of Harvard’s history, but a liability to its future. In 1984, in order to eliminate the liability the Final Clubs posed to the Harvard reputation, Harvard gave the Final Clubs an ultimatum that if they did not admit women, they would lose all privileges that come from official college recognition.

For the next thirty years, the Final Clubs continued to thrive without administrative oversight or formal relationships with the College. During this time period fraternities and sororities began to establish chapters at Harvard, and female final clubs emerged as well. Unlike every other Ivy League school, which recognizes Greek Life, Harvard could not recognize these groups in spite of the protection national organizations provide the University from the liabilities they were concerned with because Harvard had committed to its position of not recognizing single-gender organizations. Despite their unrecognized status, the typical issues of exclusivity, drunken misconduct, and compatibility with Harvard’s residencial system led the tensions between Harvard and the Final Clubs to persist. However, no concrete actions were taken by the Harvard administration until Harvard’s relationship with the Final Clubs again came under scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Education in 2014.

In 2014, a complaint was filed with the Depart of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. This complaint specifically cited all-male final clubs as “major site[s] of sexual violence” and spurred an intense federal investigation into the College’s compliance with Title IX that is still ongoing. The Crimson obtained the complaint through a Freedom of Information Act request - it reads: “By not monitoring the Final Clubs, the University is condoning a social space that contributes to alcohol-facilitated sexual violence against [women].” Following the start of this federal investigation, the Crimson reports that Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana began holding secret discussions with final club leaders, at times citing the Title IX investigation as one reason why Harvard must seek to control student behavior at the clubs. Allegedly, at one meeting, Khurana repeatedly told attendees that the University risked losing federal funding if it did not act. Harvard’s actions against Social Organizations both in 1984 and 2016 were to ensure that these organizations are not liabilities to the school. In both instances, despite years of mounting pressure, the school only took action when they felt threatened by federal investigations.

By September 2015, President Faust publically put the Final Clubs on notice. In an interview, Faust discussed how she and Dean Khurana have “a lot of concerns about alcohol and final clubs, safety in final clubs, we’ve worried a lot about sexual assault in final clubs, and so I think a lot of these issues that are very much at the heart of our considerations about undergraduate life have a special valence and relationship to the final clubs.” These issues raised both in the Title IX investigation and Faust’s remarks concern the all-male final clubs. Issues of sexual assault, alcohol and safety are almost complete non-issues for the women’s organizations. Reflecting this, during the following six months, Faust and Khurana continued to meet with the leadership of the all-male Final clubs’ to persuade them to admit women as members. The clubs resisted and the administration’s pressure escalated. In October 2015, the Fox Club undergraduates writes to their graduate board that “Harvard has forced our hand” and they have to go co-ed.

In March 2016, the University Task Force on Sexual Assault Prevention that was created in response to the Title IX investigation released their report. The report condemns the clubs, specifically citing that the historically all-male final clubs perpetuate a culture that is “often inimical to Harvard’s mission.” Following up on the report, Assistant Dean of Student Life David R. Friedrich emailed the leaders of the final clubs, inviting them to a confidential meeting to have a “dialogue particularly in light of the recent report of the University Task Force on Sexual Assault.” He asked the undergraduate leadership to read two documents before the meeting: the Task Force’s report and an Inside Higher Ed article headlined “A Rare Focus on All-Male Groups.” At this meeting, Dean Khurana issued an April 15 deadline for final clubs to inform him whether or not they will go co-ed. Directly after the final club meeting, Khurana met with undergraduate leaders of unrecognized fraternities and sororities at Harvard. According to the Crimson, Khurana did not issue a deadline on a co-ed decision to the Greek life organizations.

In response to the meeting with the Greek Organizations, the student leaders drafted a proposal on how their groups could partner with the University to prevent sexual assault and improve the campus culture surrounding gender equity and inclusion, but never received a follow up to their action proposal.

In early May, both Dean Khurana and President Faust publicly criticized the final clubs in the media, with Faust calling the “fundamental issue” one of “exclusion and discrimination.”  On Thursday May 5th, the graduate members of the Sablière Society, which was then an all-female organization, wrote an op-ed in the Crimson about how Harvard had excluded women from the discussion on the future of the clubs. This article highlights that not only were women not included in conversations surrounding potential policies against the Final Clubs, but that Harvard has “given us no indication that it understands concerns…that women do not become collateral damage in the transition.” Furthermore, in this op-ed, the women express their fear that since the male clubs have more resources than the female clubs, if the male clubs are forced to unilaterally accept women, “there is a distinct possibility female clubs will die out. The support systems, safe spaces, and alumnae networks the women’s clubs have been striving to build will disappear. That strikes us as a tremendous waste, and an ironic one, given Harvard’s stated goals.” This suggests that on May 5th, 2016, the women’s organizations were unaware that the school was considering taking action against all social organizations, including all women’s groups.

The following day, on Friday, May 6th, 2016, President Faust emailed undergraduates that she had accepted Dean Khurana’s proposal to regulate unrecognized single gender organizations. In his email on the policy, Khurana wrote  that “the 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.” This again reinforces the lack of consideration for the women’s organizations and the purpose and value they hold.

On the day of the policy’s release, Harvard women took to social media and began posting about the value their groups hold, creating a hashtag “#HearHerHarvard.” On Monday, hundreds of women gathered in Harvard Yard in protest of the policy and to speak out on the repeated lack of involvement of the female perspective during its creation. Delta Gamma president, Rebecca Ramos ‘17, argued that the policy would “take away our place to speak openly about women’s issues and actively empower each other and other women, and in doing so, effectively turn back the clock on all of our progress.” She explained that “by removing… spaces for women, Harvard is making our campus less safe for women. The College may have discussed this extensively with the male organizations, but they have only included female organizations as an afterthought.” Other women spoke about how women’s organizations serve as “ a source of mental health support, a place to address sexual assaults.” The rally culminated with hundreds of people chanting in Harvard Yard, “Hear her, Harvard” and “Sexual assault is not our fault.”