Changes Gone Wrong
Do you like numbers? Here’s a few for you. Eighty-four years ago a man who stood just five foot two became the ninety-ninth mayor of New York City and ran the place for twelve years. His name was Fiorello La Guardia and by all accounts he was a great leader who did amazing things. They honored him by naming an airport after him, a place where grumpy people miss flights and search for lost luggage. So much for your legacy.
La Guardia was a prolific speaker and left us with many interesting quotes. One of those tied to him was “Why is it that every time you can do something good, the nice people come in and mess you up?” I thought of that quote a couple of times recently as I’ve seen people trying to take something the seems to work nicely and fix it, only to have the whole thing backfire.
The most recent incident happened at Harvard. The people who run the Ivy League school felt that some of the special clubs students join were becoming too gender specific and encouraging bad behavior. In other words, put too many boys into one room for too long and mischief will inevitably follow. So, what to do? You could force every club on campus to be coed or shut them down but that might be too controversial. Instead they had a more sneaky solution. Harvard has a new rule that if you belong to a single sex club or fraternal organization you are now ineligible to hold leadership positions on campus, be the captain of a sports team or (and here’s the real dagger) receive endorsements from Harvard to acquire prestigious fellowships. Ouch.
The objective was to go after the all boy fraternity houses and cut down on the sexist nonsense. Just one problem. Any DPW worker will tell you when you build in a new road cars tend to drive in both directions on it. So if you are going to put in a rule that hurts all male fraternities you also risk hurting the female sororities that have done nothing wrong. And that’s exactly what happened.
At Harvard a sorority named Delta Gamma drafted a letter the other day that essentially tells the people in charge they can go pound sand. Delta Gamma says if the goal of the new rule is to hurt membership or force them to let men in the door they they’d rather not exist; at least at Harvard. So that’s what’s happening. Rather than bend to this social engineering Delta Gamma is leaving the Harvard campus entirely. You’ll find them on lots of other college campuses, just not Harvard.
I’m guessing that’s not the reaction Harvard expected but one you have to respect. It reminded me a bit of the Mormon’s telling the Boy Scouts that if they are forced to let girls in, when the girls already have their own scouting option, then they are done. I’m sure the intentions were good on the part of the people running the scouts but you see what La Guardia was talking about in that quote I mentioned earlier.
Look I don’t have a dog in either of these fights because I am the very definition of a nonjoiner. I grew up in a neighborhood with a million kids running around so I didn‘t have the need to join the scouts or little league or any group as a child and when I got to college fraternity life didn’t really interest me. I was too busy working two jobs while getting my degree. That said is it really so bad to allow some groups to just be one gender if that’s what they want?
If the goal of all of this is to make things more inclusive and better, the numbers may tell a very different story. The Mormon families made up 425,000 Boy Scouts. Losing that chunk of your membership is a tough hit. The Crimson, the Harvard newspaper, did a little research and found that after the school voted in this rule change trying to force fraternities and sororities to become coed new students showing an interest in joining dropped by 60 percent.
Maybe I’m being naive. Perhaps the goal here all along is to make fraternities and sororities bend to their will or drive them off campus as they did with Delta Gamma. So far a couple plan to stay single gender and deal with the fallout after. Others are making the change and letting everyone in so they don’t face any punishment.
Here’s what I don’t get. If you had a very special young woman, we’ll call her Mary. If Mary got a 4.0 in her grades, donating time at the local soup kitchen feeding the homeless and tutored other students for free. Are you really going to keep Mary from getting a fellowship she richly deserves because in her sophomore year she belonged to a sorority that refused to let men in the door? I’m not sure what lessons they are teaching at Harvard but in this case I’d ask for my money back. Fiorello La Guardia sure would.