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 clubsHarvard 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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