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Altered state. Nantucket Nectars, a beverage company, now leases the former D.U. clubhouse at 45 Dunster Street.FLINT BORN |
In Harvard's version of the culture wars, the College is from Venus, final clubs are from Mars. Ironies abound in the policy disagreements between the College and the eight all-male undergraduate clubs. Although wholly independent of the College, these private institutions have, in the last decade, played an increasingly large role in undergraduate social life, and neither Harvard nor graduate leaders of the clubs are particularly happy about it.
A February report issued by dean of students Archie Epps cites a "disturbing increase in the reports of inappropriate behavior occurring at various final clubs." Epps's letter enumerates eight events that reportedly took place at the clubs during calendar year 1996, including extreme drunkenness, underage drinking, the requirement that an initiate of a club run nude through the Yard in December, injury to a pre-frosh football recruit in a fight, reports of drug-dealing at one club, lewd sexual acts performed by hired women at a final club's senior dinner, and more than one occasion of sexual harassment of women. Epps, whose own son is in a final club, says he issued the letter to "warn women and new students about the clubs, to put students in clubs on notice, and to call on alumni to reform the institutions."
The letter asks the clubs to provide adult supervision whenever club buildings are open, and to use bonded bartenders at club events when alcohol is served. It further urges the clubs to elect women as members.
The letter from Epps elicited a strong response from one club leader, who felt that it confounds legitimate concerns about the clubs with the issue of admitting women as members. "We all agree that the health and safety of our guests is paramount and that we should do everything possible to minimize that threat," says Douglas W. Sears '69, executive director of the Interclub Council (ICC), the body that governs relations among the clubs. Nevertheless, Sears says he speaks only for himself, noting that "because of the variety of views expressed by the clubs' graduate leadership, the public stance of silence on club issues has been the traditional one of that body."
Epps says that in recent years the clubs have "tipped from being final clubs to being more like fraternities." He acknowledges that the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act of 1986, which tied federal funding to collegiate enforcement of the legal drinking age, has been "a radicalizing force in Harvard's social scene." House-approved social events where alcohol is served have been strictly regulated, making independent final clubs more central to the College's party scene. Sears worries that "kids [who join a final club today] think they are buying the use of a function hall. That's not why the clubs were founded," he says. "The goal is fun and fellowship."
Already the graduate officers of at least one club have banned kegs of beer from the premises and have begun hiring bonded bartenders for all club functions. They've also set up a program of "intellectual contact" with undergraduate members. Other clubs have set limits on beer consumption. And the graduate board of the former D.U. club permanently shut the place down in 1995 as a direct result of an incident mentioned in Epps's letter (the fight involving a football recruit, which actually occurred in the spring of 1995). "In the fall of 1995," says former D.U. graduate president Louis Kane '53, "the trustees set a reasonably strict set of new rules governing consumption of alcohol and guest policy which the undergraduates said they could not accept."
Both College and clubs are fond of emphasizing legality versus principle as the situation suits. Sears says that "where Harvard students are involved, [Epps] has as much if not more authority than we do," and says the dean should take action against the "handful of bad actors who are both Harvard College undergraduates and final club members." Epps says he has taken action, while noting that graduate officers of the clubs have legal responsibility for club operations. Sears, who calls the recent disturbances a management problem, faults the College for including police officers and bonded alcohol teams among the University services denied to the clubs. (Sears says the Harvard police are more reliable and have greater familiarity, and hence, authority, with Harvard students.) The University's denial of services dates to 1984, when it cut official ties to the clubs; as a practical matter, this meant that the clubs no longer had access to the University's steam heat and Centrex phone services, which they had purchased for years. Epps calls it "ironic that we should lose our supervisory role, but the College deemed that the more important principle was that women should be treated as equal." Sears says the safety of undergraduate women (and men) should be the more important consideration.
As for the College's pressure on the clubs to elect women, Sears says that, "in its quest for diversity, Harvard has created a bureaucratically enforced homogeneity" (a sentiment echoed by critics of the recently randomized housing lottery). One club lawyer notes that members have a constitutionally protected right to freedom of association. "The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination [MCAD] held in Schkolnick v. Fly Club that final clubs do not discriminate invidiously on the basis of gender," says Sears. That decision was upheld on appeal. "If Harvard feels strongly enough to press independent bodies who do not break state or federal law by their exercise of this freedom," says Sears, "so be it."
Epps says that he is "aware of the MCAD decision, but will keep trying to influence the clubs," because they operate contrary to College policy.
Interestingly, club leaders privately estimate that about half the graduate membership of the final clubs would support the election of women should the undergraduate members wish it. At one club, more than 80 percent of the graduate membership said they would agree to the admission of women. As yet, however, no final club has successfully voted to admit women--except, of course, the all-female Bee Club. And its president, Rachel Barenbaum '98, says that she has no desire to join any of the eight all-male clubs--she just wishes that the Bee had a house of its own.
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