No more ‘safe spaces’ for women
When a Harvard task force proposed going beyond sanctions on students who are members of single-sex clubs and punishing all members of “exclusionary” private social groups – even those that are coed – it may not have expected such broad and deep opposition.
Two all-male final clubs told The Harvard Crimson they are “one step closer” to suing the university after threatening to do so over the single-sex sanctions plan, and one club president said national chapters of Greek organizations and “civil rights watchdog groups” might join a lawsuit.
More sympathetic students are speaking out against the plan as well.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is collecting their stories, including Camille N’Diaye-Muller, president of her Harvard sorority and the daughter of a Bronx public-school teacher who turned down a full Princeton scholarship for Cambridge:
When I found my sorority on campus, I found a place where women from different academic fields, political affiliations, interests, and backgrounds came together solely to support one another. It’s been the only place where I have not been afraid to be authentic and honest, and that I did not feel that my value was tied to anything other than being myself. …
MORE: Faculty warn Harvard is returning to ‘the Puritan era’
[The task force recommendations] hurt the same people they were trying to help. Future Harvard women will not have these safe spaces that I and others have found in our sororities.
The nuclear option of disciplining all club members could also set up Harvard for legal claims because the employees of the private student clubs would lose their jobs, a member of the Hasty Pudding Club and all-male Delphic Club told FIRE. (The Hasty Pudding is also under fire for its all-male cross-dressing burlesque troupe.)
Prominent Harvard faculty including linguist Steven Pinker, computer scientist Harry Lewis and biologist Richard Losick also condemned the proposal.
MORE: Accept women or else, cross-dressing men told
Losick told FIRE the proposal is “hypocritical” because the university already recognizes “a wide variety of social organizations that are de facto single-gender, single-ethnic group, single-religion, or single-race.”
Lewis, who shelved a faculty resolution against the single-sex sanctions proposal after a faculty review committee was convened, sounds like he’s having second thoughts:
[The proposal] contains one particularly significant sentence: “The President will make the final decision.” So we have a committee, hand-picked by [Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana], declaring that the matter is not under Faculty jurisdiction. … I would be very surprised if [faculty] would agree that this matter is not within their authority to decide.
He told FIRE he was in talks with “several faculty” about re-introducing his motion.
Read the Crimson story and FIRE’s post.
MORE: All-male club dumps women forced on it by Harvard leaders
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