Forget Final Clubs

Ten minutes before my economics section was scheduled to end, a boy in the back row raised a white-gloved hand and asked to be excused early. He had to go stand in front of the Science Center and sing "Billie Jean," dressed in tuxedo pants, a mauve vest, a long blonde wing, and, of course, the glove.

When the TF, somewhat taken aback, asked him why he was planning to do this, he looked sheepish and mumbled something about masochism. The other students in the room laughed, "Final clubs," one said.

The ritual continues. Despite being stripped of University funding and support, threatened with a boycott by student groups, and slammed in just about every editorial space on campus (including this one), the punch process last week appeared to be right on schedule. Students walking through the Yard saw not only my classmate but many of his brethren, most of whom were involved in activities that made performing a Michael Jackson cover seem downright straitlaced.

Will a fellow Radcliffe student please remind me why women want to be permitted to join final clubs? Because, frankly, I'm forgetting.

The easiest argument is that final clubs should be coeducational because everything at the University should be coeducational. In an ideal world, final club members would recognize that arbitrarily denying membership to half the University population must necessarily lower the quality of their applicant pool. Opening the punch process to women would give them twice as many candidates with superb leadership and fundraising skills, twice as many budding Politicos, and twice as many future presidents of Fortune 500 companies. Thus, the principal beneficiaries of rendering final clubs coeducational would, in fact, be the clubs themselves.

The members of final clubs, both on the undergraduate and graduate level, do not accept this argument. A typical defense of the clubs' single-sex policy is that woman and men are not interchangeable when it comes to membership in close-knit, private organizations.

Thus, they argue, most final clubs remain all male for a reason: their traditions and activities speak uniquely to the male environment in which they were developed.

This is, at best, a dubious line of reasoning, considering that final clubs' traditions and activities seem to consist mainly of drinking cheap beer and making snide remarks about nonmembers, both of which women are as fully capable of doing as men. The real question is, if final club members choose to cling to their beliefs, do women have a moral imperative to stop them?

The clubs are, after all, purely private organizations. They do not have a monopoly on Harvard's social life. Anyone is free to start a coed final club, and might even receive significant University support for their efforts. Other student enterprises are supported for their single-sex policies-few people suggest bringing women into groups such as the Hasty Pudding Theatrical cast, for example, in part because keeping the group all-male adds to the comedy of its productions. (This argument could be made in favor of final clubs, although, unlike the Theatricals, the clubs' attempts to make themselves the butt of campus humor appear purely inadvertent.)

A more compelling case for bringing women into the clubs is that the existing groups offer benefits that even a newly formed co-ed club could not. Given that around 80 percent of job openings are never publicized, alumni with such connections have a spectacular advantage over their similarly-credentialled counter-parts. Restricting club membership to men denies women access to this base of support, effectively penalizing them for their gender and exacerbating the discrimination that they will eventually face in the business world. If women were allowed to enter final clubs, the argument reasons, they could at least graduate from college on an equal footing with men.

This argument may be accurate in theory, but is incredibly naive in reality. Porcelain myth notwithstanding, women being accepted into a final club does not guarantee their financial success. Students must be accepted into the social milieu that final clubs provide. Since many club members do not want to admit women, opening the punch process would have to occur only in grudging response to substantial pressure from the outside.

Thus women admitted to final clubs under these conditions will be second-class members, unwanted and perhaps actively resented. Assuming that alumni who agitated for years to keep the clubs all-male will open their hearts (and their Rolodexes) to new women members without a second thought ignores the lessons of recent history. As virtually any African-American can tell you, changing the official rules that govern society will not necessarily affect peoples' opinions and prejudices, nor will it reform the informal power structures that determine so much of our lives.

For women to gain the full benefits of final club membership, the clubs must open the punch process voluntarily, recognizing their own benefit in doing so. For now, however, the specter of sexism still precludes me from stripping to a bathing suit and parading across the Widener steps in the November cold. With due apologies to all those who have been spending the week risking hypothermia, not to mention their dignity, I can't say I feel particularly deprived.