HARVARD’s secret clubs
As Ivy school considers ban on exclusive groups, students, faculty and alums defend secret life
HARVARD is about to get a lot less exclusive.
Earlier this month, a faculty committee recommended that the university ban what it called “pernicious” social clubs — including fraternities, sororities and “final clubs” — stating that they are hotbeds for discrimination and elitism and that their influence on campus life “is impossible to escape.”
Under such a ban, which would go into effect in fall 2018, any undergraduate found participating in these organizations would be expelled or suspended — all to uphold “the importance of inclusion and belonging,” the committee wrote in a 22-page report.
Never mind that Harvard isn’t exactly known for inclusion: The college accepted a whopping 5.2 percent of applicants for its incoming 2021 class.
The ban would affect groups including the two-century-old Hasty Pudding Club — which is now co-ed and whose alumni include President John Adams, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and William Randolph Hearst — as well as the all-female final club the Bee, founded in 1991.
But the main target of the administration’s ire seems to be the storied, all-male final clubs, where amenities can include a ventilated smoking room (Fox Club) or a squash court and sauna (Delphic Club), and stewards guard the doors of milliondollar Harvard Square mansions during raucous parties.
The rosters are as impressive as the grounds: The Fly has counted President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jared Kushner as members. John F. Kennedy was a member of the (then-all-male) Spee Club, while Theodore Roosevelt was in the Porcellian Club.
Current students and promi- nent alumni of the organizations are in an uproar over the proposed ban — lawyering up and even hiring public-relations firms, as the Porcellian did with Rubenstein Associates last year.
“The idea that Harvard is now going to exercise the same sort of control over its student body as a strictly run middle school is deeply offensive,” declared Fly Club Graduate President Richard Porteus Jr., Class of ’78.
“It should not be up to the dean and dean alone to decide when Harvard undergraduates have recess, with whom, for how long and doing what.”
THE administration’s latest stance is a more draconian version of the edict revealed last spring, in which Dean Rakesh Khurana and President Drew Faust said they would strip members of single-gender, unrecognized clubs of any on-campus leadership positions and refuse to nominate them for academic awards, including Rhodes scholarships, starting with the Class of 2021.
Originally, the administration justified its stance by claiming that male-only clubs were nefarious because of the number of sexual assaults that took place there. But when stats proved otherwise, they switched to a fight against gender discrimination, said Harvard professor Harry Lewis, who was dean of Harvard College from 1995 to 2003 and teaches computer science at the school.
Now tactics have changed again, with the committee’s new proposal battling exclusivity. But exclusivity is at the heart of Harvard’s ethos.
“I never hear any of my students complaining about not getting into a final club,” Lewis said. “But I do have people, every term, coming into my office and complaining that they wanted to get into courses and were rejected from them. The disappointment that is supposed to be so traumatizing that we have to end the exclusivity of the social clubs happens all the time . . . and it’s the faculty doing the rejecting!”
But for a select group,, the punch process, inn which sophomores are tapped for the final clubs, is one of the most important — and stressful — moments in their undergrad careers. FDR declared that not being punched by the Porcellian, the oldest and most prestigious final club, was “the greatest disappointment in his life.” (He ended up joining the Fly Club.)
Punch season begins in September and goes up until the annual Harvard-Yale game in November. Select students receive wax-sealed invitations slipped under their doors in the dead of night. For a club’s first event, 200 to 250 sophomores are invited to a cocktail party, typically at a Boston nightclub, according to a former president of a men’s club. The club then whittles down the list to 125 potential members, who are invited to an alumnus’ estate or a rented home for the day.
“You show up in a coat and tie and then you eat and change into athletic clothes and you throw a football and smoke a cigar and play croquet,” said the former president. After that, the list is cut to 50. “The next event is typically a date event at a castle in Newport, Rhode Island, that costs $25,000 to put on. You put on a coat and tie and get bused down there with your date,” he added.
Thirty punches are brought to a final dinner at the club. “That’s when they start introducing you to club traditions,” said the former president. “You sing songs and someone gets up and tells a limerick.”
Many of the clubs have gorgeous houses situated in Harvard Square and employ at least one steward, a day-to-day manager, and a chef. No members live in the mansions but, depending on the club, eat lunches and weekly dinners there.
Some clubs pull out all the stops during punch to get the sophomores they most desire — flying prospective members out for all-expense-paid trips to Los Angeles, New York City or London to meet with alumni.
Only 10 to 20 students are chosen annually for each of the seven men’s final clubs. Dues range from $100 to $200 a month for 2¹/ 2 years, although multiple sources interviewed said financial aid is easy to come by at the clubs.
“Any elitism doesn’t have to do with social economic background,” said the former president. “It more has to do with us wanting . . . the coolest kids on campus to be in our club.”
THIS isn’t Harvard’s first time in the ring with final clubs.
In 1984, the school threatened to sever ties with the thenall-male organizations unless they admitted women. When groups refused, the administration cut off access to university electricity, as well as to Harvard’s phone system. (Since then, only Spee has gone permanently co-ed.)
But the separation did nothing to stifle the clubs, which outright own some of the most valuable property in Cambridge., Mass.
The committee’s 2017 report quotes a faculty member from 1988 who observed that “final clubs are where Harvard students learn to discriminate.” It called upon Harvard to model itself after non-Ivy schools such as Williams College and Bowdoin College, which banned fraternities decades ago.
Ironically, the committee’s continued battle with the final clubs has only made them even more exclusive.
A rising Harvard junior said the clubs are cracking down on guest lists and letting fewer outsiders in. “Everyone’s terrified of pictures and [potential] lawsuits — of a student getting too drunk at the club, and that being an issue,” he said.
The all-male Delphic Club came under fire in April after it was revealed that members had hired strippers for an October 2010 punch event. The Fox Club temporarily closed in November 2015 after it went co-ed and pics leaked from a party attended by female prospects that involved nudity, an alumni member told The Boston Globe at the time. (The club soon resumed its allmale status.)
Nathaniel Horwitz, a rising senior at Harvard, said he has multiple female friends who have been sexually harassed “and even assaulted in all-male final clubs.”
“They are now pursuing litiga-
tion against the individuals, not the clubs; in some of these situations, the men were suspended, if not permanently removed,” said Horwitz, who wrote an article for Town & Country in 2016 explaining why he refused to join a final club.
When Spee voted to go co-ed in the fall of 2015, some undergraduates felt the process was sexually charged.
“Suddenly, you have an allmale group voting on women,” said one female undergrad. “The only girls who got in were the ones who had hooked up with male members and stayed the latest and partied the hardest.”
“These clubs are anachronistic bastions and have no place at Harvard or any college that has committed itself to diversity and openness,” said Horwitz, who burned his punch invites in protest during his sophomore year.
FLY Club Graduate President Porteus says the proposed ban will only exacerbate the very problem the administration says it’s trying to alleviate.
“Consider this: You are a Latino from Texas, you’re AfricanAmerican from the inner city — and we have members like that — and if you join a final club, you risk being brought before Harvard’s administrative board that could . . . expel you, and everything you’ve worked for at that point is upended,” said Porteus, who lives in New Bedford, Mass., and is a charter-school founder.
“Conversely, let’s say you’re a scion of the 1 percent of Harvard and there’s a family business to go to or there’s a lot of social cap- ital to fall back on . . . You’ll size up the risk and you’ll take it,” he said. “Harvard’s own actions will discourage first-generation students and . . . less-well-off students from venturing into new territory for them and finding out that they are accepted and valued.”
The bigger question is, how enforceable is this potential ban? After all, the organizations are unaffiliated with the college and their membership is private.
“I’m trying to imagine if the same 10 students go out to dinner on Thursday night at the same restaurant every week, is that a club?” Lewis asked. “How is anybody ever going to know, and why should we care?
“There is, in the early-21st-century university, a certain infantilizing instinct,” the professor continued. “And this would be consistent with the pattern.”
The idea that Harvard is now going to exercise the same control over its student body as a strictly run middle school iss deeply offensive. — Fly Club Graduate President Richard Porteus Jr., Class of ’78