Yale Secret Society to Admit Women

Yale University's Scroll and Key will become the fifth of the school's seven secret societies to go co-ed when it takes in its first women members next fall, students and alumni said this week.

Alumni of the "Key" last week approved a student vote taken earlier this month that decided to change the society's selection--"tap"--and admissions policies to admit women, according to The Yale Daily News.

Yale's seven secret societies accept only seniors, about 12 each year, and are Yale's equivalent of Harvard's final clubs. The societies have no formal ties to the university, own their own land, are not on a centrex phone system and are not recognized as official student organizations, said Walter Litell, a Yale spokesman. Like the final clubs, they have been accused of being networking organizations and "bastions of elitism."

The Scroll and Key's alumni include several New York mayors and former Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti. Giamatti, who is now baseball commissioner of the National League, said he thought the decision was "a fine thing" but would not comment further.

Scroll and Key's decision comes at a time when other Ivy League colleges are examining the role of social clubs on college campuses. In December, Harvard's Lisa J. Schkolnick '88 filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination charging gender discrimination against the Fly Club, one of nine Harvard all-male final clubs. At Princeton, recent incidents of alcohol poisoning resulted in the filing of criminal charges of serving alcohol to minors against five eating club officers and their two clubs.

Harvard and Yale students and alumni said they thought Scroll and Key's decision to admit women had probably been affected by the activity at other campuses and might have some impact at Harvard.

Bill Henning, a member of Yale's all-male Skull and Bones society, said one of the reasons Scroll and Key may have decided to accept women was that they were the most vulnerable to a lawsuit and that it will have little influence on the remaining all-male societies.

Henning said that Scroll and Key was legally vulnerable because it is the only all-male society that still claims a tax exemption under Connecticut law and that had been set up by an act of the state legislature.

"I don't think that the factors that influenced [Scroll and Key] are factors that will make the others go co-ed," Henning said. He said other societies would probably be "a little more resistant" to admitting women.

Sarah Chinn, a student coordinator at Yale's Women's Center, said she blamed the alumni for the all-male societies' failure to admit women. "It's the alumni who want to keep a rarified all-male atmosphere," she said.

One Scroll and Key alumnus who asked not to be identified said, "I know it will change the nature of encounters [between members] by necessity." He added "all that may enrichen the experience but it also may complicate it."

The alumnus said although there were advantages to the "platonic, single-sex relationships" that the clubs foster, he did not oppose the decision to admit women. He said he might not have voted for the change, but that his opinion "wasn't solicited."

Chinn said the societies' alumni are reluctant to accept women partly because they fear going co-ed will hurt networking at the societies. But she said another society, Skull and Bones, was also thinking of going co-ed.

The alumnus who did not wish to be identified said charges of networking are "all bullshit. There was a time when all the right families belonged but then [they were just] picking up from where they left off at the Cape."

Students and alumni disagreed on whether the Scroll and Key's decision to go co-ed will have an effect on the Harvard final clubs.

The same alumnus said Harvard final club members were not likely to take notice of the Scroll and Key decision. "Harvard's so arrogant it's not going to follow anything Yale does," he said.

But Chinn said, "it legitimizes [the arguments] if an equivalent institution does it."

And Kevin Baker, Schkolnick's lawyer, said "from a legal point of view, it indicates a growing awareness or willingness [to accept] that that kind of segregation is reprehensible."