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Harvard’s policy against fraternities and sororities was intended to protect women. It seems to be doing the opposite
The usual destructiveness of authoritarianism. Leftist meddling in other people's lives never stops. They live for it
“Ijoined [the Delta Gamma sorority at Harvard University] because I was looking for a group like my high-school friends that shared the same values and would come together regardless of major or extra-curriculars,” says Becca Ramos, who was chapter president of Delta Gamma in 2016. “There were so many nights when we studied together into the small hours. We’d go to each other’s thesis presentations. I went to one of my sisters’ presentation on volcanoes. I knew nothing about volcanoes except that they exploded, but I was so proud of her.”
That support network is no longer available. Under new rules, introduced in 2016, members of what Harvard’s administration calls “unrecognised single-gender social organisations” are no longer eligible for campus leadership positions (such as captaincy of sports teams) or for dean’s letters of recommendation for scholarships. If the organisations went mixed, their members could escape these sanctions. Delta Gamma has closed; all but one of the other sororities have either followed suit or, in a few cases, gone mixed. But the remaining single-sex organisations have not given up. Last month, a group of them filed lawsuits, one in a federal court and one in a Massachusetts court. The university will respond next month.
Despite scandals involving sexual misbehaviour and drunkenness, America’s fraternities and sororities are flourishing. Plenty of universities welcome them on campus for the support they provide to students, says Dani Weatherford, executive director of the National Panhellenic Conference, the biggest umbrella organisation of sororities. Undergraduate membership of the npc’s sororities has increased by 60% over the past ten years. But a few universities have clamped down on fraternities. Amherst has banned them altogether; Harvard’s policy is nearly as stringent.
The motivation for Harvard’s action seems mixed. In her letter to Harvard College’s dean, the university’s then president, Drew Faust, cited “deeply rooted gender attitudes and the related issues of sexual misconduct”, for which the sororities were presumably not being held responsible, as well as “forms of privilege and exclusion at odds with our deepest values” which she accused sororities, fraternities and final clubs (the most exclusive single-sex social clubs) of perpetuating.
The policy has plenty of support. But many oppose it, too. Students marched in protest, and a sizeable minority of faculty are against it, including Harry Lewis, a former dean of the college and a computerscience professor for 44 years who taught both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. He has a lot of sympathy for the women in his discipline who join sororities. “It’s a way of getting away from the guys, who are always looking at them. There’ll be two women in a class of 20 men.” He characterises the battle as the old, liberal left, libertarians and the right against the new, more authoritarian left and the university authorities.
The argument against the administration is in part one of principle. A former Harvard administrator who regards the clubs as “pretty obnoxious” (“If I had a kid at Harvard who belonged to one I’d tell him he could pay his own tuition” ) nevertheless argues that freedom of association is important. “If we’d happily write letters for people who were members of the Communist Party or the nra, it seems lunacy to say that we’d refuse that to somebody who wanted to join one of these clubs.”
Opponents also argue that abolishing the organisations is not going to fulfil the administration’s aims. If the problem is “gender attitudes”, which presumably means discrimination against women, then the policy is counter-productive. Women are losing out more than men: while the sororities have almost all closed, the men’s organisations have not. “The men’s groups are older and therefore have a larger alumni base,” explains Ellen Rothschild, a former president of Harvard’s Alpha Phi chapter. “They’re able to turn away from the scholarships because they can rely on these outside networks.”
If the aim is to reduce sexual harassment, there is little reason to believe that shutting down single-sex clubs would achieve that. A Harvard task force on combating sexual harassment, which urged Ms Faust to “address the distinctive problems presented by the final clubs”, based its concerns on a survey in which 47% of Harvard women who had taken part in final clubs’ events had experienced sexual harassment, compared with 31% of the female student body as a whole. Critics point out that correlation does not imply causation, and that the same survey showed that 87% of “non-consensual penetration involving physical force” at Harvard took place in dorms, which are run by the university.
If the problem the university wants to address is class exclusivity, rather than gender discrimination, then the university’s policy would not mitigate it. There is no reason to believe that mixed-sex clubs would be any less socially exclusive than single-sex ones. Ms Ramos says she and her sisters at Delta Gamma surveyed the sorority and found that it was more socioeconomically diverse than the university.
Whoever wins in the courts, one sort of freedom will be the loser. If the administrators win, the students’ right to belong to whatever organisations they like will be constrained. If Harvard loses, the right of a private organisation to run itself as it pleases will be limited.
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Parental Choice in Education Is Vital
President Donald Trump issued a proclamation declaring this week, Jan. 20-26, as National School Choice Week.
The proclamation expresses concern about performance of U.S. students in international surveys: 24th in reading; 25th in science; 40th in math.
And it ascribes the cause of these disappointing statistics to the “consequences of the limitations imposed by a largely one-size-fits-all approach to education.”
It makes all the sense in the world to appreciate the value of bringing the marketplace and competition to education. Free markets serve us extremely well in delivering goods and services. Why shouldn’t one of our nation’s most important institutions — education — also benefit from competition?
It is ironic that the political left extols the importance of diversity while also wanting government monopolies.
The conclusion should be the opposite. The more diverse a customer base, ethnically or any other way, the more diversity you need among suppliers to meet and serve the unique needs of different communities. This can only be achieved in free, private markets.
Statistics on the changing ethnic profile of the students in our public schools speak for themselves.
In 1997, 63.4 percent of the students in our public schools were white and 36.6 percent were minority — black, Hispanic, Asian and multiracial — students. By 2014, 49.5 percent were white and 50.5 percent were minority. The projection from the National Center for Education Statistics is that by 2026, 45 percent of public school students will be white and 55 percent will be minority.
Parents of these minority communities should have freedom to choose an educational framework for the diverse needs of their children.
Suppliers in a dynamic marketplace will listen to those parents, try to understand the unique needs of their children and serve them. This is exactly the opposite of what you get with a government-controlled monopoly and union bureaucrats.
However, the country is not just becoming increasingly ethnically diverse. It is also becoming increasingly diverse regarding values.
At the nation’s founding, it was almost universally accepted that education would include the Bible. “One great advantage of the Christian religion,” said John Adams, “is that … the duties and rights of the man and citizen are thus taught from early infancy to every creature.”
The Northwest Ordinance, passed in the America’s first Congress in 1789 said:
“Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
This sentiment carried well into the 20th century, until court decisions began, step by step, purging any presence of the Bible in public education.
Did these decisions improve our public schools, making them more value neutral? Certainly not. They simply politicized education, replacing Judeo-Christian values with prevailing politically correct secular humanist values.
Currently, 24 states and the District of Columbia mandate sex education in their public schools. According the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 72 percent of schools in large urban districts provide education regarding pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
What exactly are the values, the worldview, through which issues such as marriage, sex and pregnancy are being taught in these schools?
Black communities have already been hurt by the secular humanism of the welfare state. Since the 1960s, the incidence of single-parent black households has tripled.
It make sense that black parents would want to send their children to Christian schools so that these values are transmitted as part of their education. Shouldn’t parents have this right?
In a country with widely growing diversity in religious identification and values, the only answer is parental choice in education. It brings the efficiencies of the marketplace and the principle of religious freedom to schools.
Parents must fight for the right to choose where to send their children to school.
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The Covington Rorschach Test
Note about Nathan Phillips, the "Indian" who harassed the Covingtom kids: At one time he talked about coming back to the United States and how he was treated, but it turns out Nathan Phillips never actually fought in Vietnam. An enterprising person obtained Phillips’ DD-214 and it appears Mr. Phillips never actually left the United States. So he is a fraud from way back
Sometimes, a three-point celebration is just a three-point celebration. Sometimes, a pep rally is just a pep rally. Sometimes, a smile is just a smile. And sometimes, a hat is just a hat.
Only among the most deranged partisans could a universal sports ritual, a common high school activity, a typical teen face and patriotic headgear be construed as evil symbols of patriarchal oppression.
These, however, are the soul-sapping, lunacy-inducing times in which we live.
Nobody loses their marbles when black NBA stars make the universal “OK” gesture with one hand. Or two. Or when the elite athletes hold up the sign to the sky, turn two of them into triumphant eye goggles, stir the pot, sweep the floor or dramatically holster their finger-trios like weapons.
It’s all in good fun.
But when reputation-destroying agitators plundered the photo collection of the Covington Catholic High School basketball team in search of evidence to bolster their prefabricated narrative that the white Kentucky boys must, must, must be unrepentant bigots, the three-point celebration transmogrified into menacing proof of R-A-C-I-S-M.
Liberal pot-stirrers tweeted celebrities and journalists an image purporting to show that the Covington kids — still under siege after being slandered last week at the March for Life rally by Native American agitator Nathan Phillips — had flashed white supremacy signs. The teens were pictured on the sidelines of a basketball court in their uniforms, paying tribute to a teammate who had just scored.
No, they did not hail him with Hitler salutes, but with the innocuous three-point, A-OK sign.
Undeterred by basketball fans who futilely tried to explain the actual meaning of the hand gesture, monomaniacal left-wing detectives marked all the Covington athletes’ fingers with cuckoo red-font circles and disseminated their fevered forensic analysis across social media with enraged captions, including this one sent to the pope:
“This is the All White hand sign. This is Covington Catholic school. Is this what they teach at this Catholic school? Is this how Jesus wanted it?”
Comedienne-turned-decapitation fetishist Kathy Griffin gleefully attacked the boys, tweeting “Covington’s finest throwing up the new nazi sign.”
The New York Daily News and U.K. Daily Mail compounded the delusional smear with sensational headlines claiming Covington basketball players had taunted a black opponent while in “blackface.” Quelle horreur!
In truth, internet trolls had ripped a screenshot from the team’s video montage of pep rallies — where students had dressed up as nerds, businessmen and Hawaiians or painted themselves blue, white and (gasp!) black at various competitions.
It’s not racism. It’s athletic boosterism.
An alum, Ryan Toler, tried to correct the record, pointing out that he was pictured in the seven-year-old photo: “I’m shown in the background of this image. ITS CALLED A BLACKOUT THEME. WE HAD SCHOOL SPIRIT. WE DO THIS TO EVERY SCHOOL NO MATTER THE RACE OR ETHNICITY. Stop trying to force a fake story to drive your false narrative.”
But the media manufacturers of racism won’t stop because the ideological incentives to convict first and verify later are far too strong. Time after time, liberals see racism where it doesn’t exist, fabricate it when they can’t find it and ignore it within their own ranks.
They didn’t stop after falsely accusing Zina Gelman Bash, a Jewish Mexican-American lawyer, of flashing a white supremacy sign at a Senate confirmation hearing last fall for her friend Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
They didn’t stop after the liberal white zealots of the Southern Poverty Law Center falsely labeled famed neurosurgeon and Trump Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and anti-jihad activist Maajid Nawaz “extremists.”
They didn’t stop after hysterically spreading campus hate crime fakery cooked up at my alma mater Oberlin College, where excitable nitwits claimed a student walking around with a blanket wrapped around her was a lurking racist in a KKK hood; at Michigan State University, where a “noose” turned out to be a lost shoelace; or at Bowling Green State University, where a purported group of Klansmen turned out to be lab equipment covered with a white cloth.
They didn’t stop after attacking my Catholic high school alma mater, Holy Spirit High School in Absecon, N.J., four years ago, when a decades-old tradition of basketball fans dressing up in goofy costumes was falsely portrayed by USA Today as racism because students wore monkey pajamas and a giant banana (others wore a green ballerina tutu, a bumblebee suit, a jack-o’-lantern outfit and “Wizard of Oz” get-ups).
The Covington hoax is more than just the epitome of fake news. It’s a cultural Rorschach test that measures the impact of Trump-hating confirmation bias on the viewer’s intellectual honesty and emotional stability. Those calling to protest, dox, stalk or kill the MAGA hat-wearing Covington kids and their families over a selectively edited video planted by a foreign instigator prove, once again, that political correctness is a pathological disorder.
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