Richard A. Epstein, Defining Ideas, the Hoover Institution
These final clubs enjoy widespread acceptance among their members because some young people prefer to organize their social lives around single-sex organizations. To a classical liberal like myself, these revealed preferences count a great deal…. But in the eyes of progressives like Faust, these preferences should be dismissed as inconsistent with a bigger vision of a “campus free from exclusion on arbitrary grounds”… .
We should urge them instead to gain experience in both single-sex and more open environments, because no matter what the high priests at Harvard decree, virtually all normal people will be required to move seamlessly between both types of environments in their personal and professional lives. Harvard has no desire to encourage a portfolio of diverse activities. Instead, its chosen form of diversity is really a new form of totalitarian excess that limits student choice, insisting that everyone at Harvard dance to the administration’s martial music.
Robby Soave, Reason.com
Reading between the lines, it seems like “reducing sexual assault” is actually just an excuse for Harvard to take action against groups it doesn’t like—for reasons that are implicitly political…. Harvard is a private organization, and is entitled to place as many ridiculous limitations on students’ lives as it wants. But it doesn’t get to discriminate against students who join finals clubs while simultaneously touting itself as an institution that respects liberal values. There’s nothing liberal about discouraging free association.
Sasha Volokh, The Volokh Conspiracy, Washington Post
… for those who take an interest in what Harvard does as part of the enterprise of a liberal university, there’s a lot that’s troubling about the idea of penalizing people for their off-campus memberships by denying them a privilege (student organization leadership) that’s available to everyone else…. Fortunately, if you’re a Harvard alumnus, you can do something about it: vote for a slate of candidates for Harvard’s Board of Overseers. The slate consists of Ralph Nader, Ron Unz, Stuart Taylor, Lee Cheng, and Stephen Hsu. Here’s a Harvard Crimson article about their candidacy, here’s a New York Times article, and here’s a debate about their platform.
Elliot Gerson, The Crimson
The Spee Club has long prided itself for being perhaps the most progressive final club, consistently the first to champion a more diverse membership—and diverse in virtually all dimensions before this last and critical one. Indeed, fellow graduate members of the club had long advocated women membership; it was the undergraduates who until recently largely opposed it.
They are now, by my own observation, delighted….Someday, most Harvard final club alumni will look back and wonder how we could accept gender discriminatory membership for so long. Our colleagues at Yale and Princeton, in somewhat similar institutions, made these transitions some time ago and undergraduate life for members and nonmembers alike has only improved
Nice!