No Castigation Without Representation

Months after University President Drew G. Faust’s controversial decision to impose sanctions on undergraduate members of unrecognized single-gender social organizations, the University is taking its first concrete steps toward implementing this policy with the creation of a Single-Gender Social Organizations Policy Implementation Committee. This committee, according to its website, will work to “[guide] the implementation of the College’s recent policy change”.

Members of the committee—who have not yet been finalized—will include students, faculty, and staff alike. Undergraduate representatives will be selected through an open nomination and selection process guided by input from the Undergraduate Council. We commend University administration for striving to include undergraduates in this historic process. It is important to note, however, that the open nomination process will be merely symbolic if the selected students do not bring a diverse set of opinions and experiences.

The open nomination process will certainly allow for breadth of prospective undergraduate committee members. But apart from the Undergraduate Council's involvement, there are no safeguards in place to ensure that student members of the committee will reflect the opinions of the undergraduate student body as a whole. If the undergraduate representatives themselves do not encompass the diversity Harvard itself has worked so diligently to craft, the committee will inevitably fail to consider the different attitudes students currently have towards the sanctions.

The potential consequences of diversity—or homogeny—go beyond the abstract affirmation of Harvard’s core liberal value of diversity. A homogenous committee would be an undemocratic distortion of reality. It cannot be denied that the campus reaction to the prospective sanctions has been mixed, with perspectives running the gamut from passionate support to indignant opposition. Multiple opinions must be represented in order for the rest of the committee and University administration to understand the different sentiments students harbor.

Membership selection aside, we would appreciate more transparency regarding the sanctions as a whole. The lack of open discussion before the policy was unveiled is at odds with the University’s efforts to have an open nomination process. At times, the discourse has degraded to disconcerting levels of vagueness. For example, Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana precisely outlined this sweeping policy this past May, yet his most recent letter to undergraduate students announcing the creation of this committee appears to invite more candid discussion about the sanctions before the policy is set in stone, and goes so far as to suggest that specific planks of the policy—such as the affected leadership roles—are still in flux. Though this softened rhetoric may seem innocuous, it may mislead students, giving them the idea that they may actually have a voice in shaping the policy when administrators have already decided their course of action.