Harvard Alums Angry About Proposed Ban on Social Clubs
“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”
Alums are the key to successful fundraising. Could this hurt Harvard’s bottom line?
The New York Post reports:
Harvard alums furious over proposal to ban elite social clubs
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…
Current students and prominent 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.
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Comments
I’m one of the alums who are disappointed that the Harvard administration would violate students’ right of free association off-campus. I wasn’t a member of a “final club,” but I knew members, and some of them were stuck-up preppies with rich parents who got them into Harvard with big donations. But it doesn’t matter what I think of them or what Harvard thinks of them, it’s their right to get together off-campus and act like stuck-up rich preppies.
Left wing pogrom. Bizarrely enough aimed at the very core of the Democratic Party. The Limousine Liberals that fund the party and are still living off their ancestors’ wealth or Crony Capitalist who designed financial rules put into place by Dodd that are designed to destroy competition.