To the Punch Class of 1999: Just Try To Maintain Some Perspective

The annual extravaganza of final club punch season has drawn to a close. Gone, until next year, are the packs of sophomore guys running around in suits, unable to tell you exactly where they're going. Gone are the mysteriously fancy envelopes, delivered at all suspicious hours of the night. As a new class of male undergraduates begin their lifelong relationships with these oft-discussed institutions, it seems like an appropriate moment for a few words of (inevitably unwanted) advice. Final club members, I'm talking to you.

I know you think, especially after last year's mini-media feeding frenzy, that there are too many people with not enough information and too much to say on the subject of the clubs. Let me say right now, in the way of a disclaimer, that you may be right. I don't pretend to know it the clubs inside and out, to fully understand their current function. Let me also say that, although I am writing from a liberal, critical corner of the arena, I don't hate them--or at least, and more to the point, I certainly don't hate the guys who join them. I don't reproach them for their decision, because I definitely understand the appeal. I've often been almost glad I didn't have to face the dilemma myself (although here at the dawn of the age of Seneca, these days of exemption may be numbered); it's been tricky enough deciding whether or not to hang out at the clubs, which are--as defenders and critics alike have been quick to point out--often Harvard's only option for late-night entertainment.

Hard-line critics (and in less moderate moments, I have certainly been among them) would do well to remember that the vast majority of Harvard students are willing participants in and beneficiaries of elitism in some form or another. Otherwise we just wouldn't be here. The final clubs may be a particularly easy target, but we glass-house dwellers should think hard before taking aim with our articulately outraged stones.

That said, if you're going to join a final club, please just remember that they are a particularly easy target for a reason. Recognize the tradition of which you are now a part. Whatever their current function--and I am not inclined to believe that the clubs are quite as far removed from their origins as some would argue--the final clubs began as Old Boys' Clubs. They started popping up around the time when the Harvard student body was becoming more socio-economically diverse, and one obvious theory is that the clubs were a reaction to this new diversity, a move to protect the Old Boys' Club that once was all of Harvard College. Like all Old Boys' Clubs, the clubs had many ostensible functions (mostly having to do with good old fraternity) and one fundamental function, which was to keep the money and the power and the privilege where it had always been: with the Old Boys. It isn't pretty, and it's pretty undeniable.

Every Harvard student should probably take a minute now and then to remember that this is not normal; that we live in a bubble of special treatment that encompasses most of the country's good colleges and an always shockingly small percentage of its actual citizens. Final club members should take a lot of minutes, whenever possible, to enforce this reality check. One of the most unnerving aspects of the clubs is their potential for loss of perspective. It is so frighteningly easy to lose sight of the absurdity of a bunch of 20-year-old guys renting out Boston's fanciest restaurants, donning tuxedos and feeding their guests filet mignon, passing the wine and quieting their cell phones, dealing in sums of money with which few college kids are ever directly confronted outside of their tuition bills. It's fun and it's basically fine, as long as we all--guests and hosts--stay relatively self-aware.

There are other things which are not so fun and fine, but which are the hard facts of life. I don't suppose it's any worse for me to watch these same college guys ordering around a 40-year-old man who's been hired to staff the kegs at some big party than it is for me to eat the grapes picked by migrant workers in California. Nevertheless, it cannot be healthy for people our age (or any age, really) to get used to these kinds of power dynamics, to the peculiarities of being served by adult men in a private club for college-age guys. For that matter, members should try not to get used to a world in which men are always the hosts and women are always the guests. Harvard and the world at large have been, since the beginning of human history, men's turf, to which women gain access by currying male favor. In most parts of the outside world, this sexism no longer stands front and center.

Eventually, of course, the clubs are going to have to go. For now, they're pretty low on the list of the world's evils, but final clubs as we know them will probably go the way of WASP-only country club (if the WASP-only country club has, as I hope, gone that way). While I fully acknowledge a difference in degree between final clubs and other, more extreme branches of the elitist patriarchy, they're still on the same continuum, and the march of history seems to suggest that somehow, at some point, their number will come up. Their members will miss them, which is more than understandable: any exclusive institution is awfully nice for the people on the inside, and I readily admit that the clubs have some charms and graces all their own. Still, I have to say, I won't be too sorry to say goodbye.

Jody H. Peltason '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.