Alum's Owl Ties Draw Ire

The Owl, one of Harvard’s all-male final clubs, was unexpectedly thrust into the middle of the Supreme Court fight in Washington yesterday as conservatives criticized Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s membership in the club.

Republican activists said that Kennedy, the senior Democrat from Massachusetts, had been hypocritical for attacking Judge Samuel A. Alito’s membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), a conservative group founded in 1972 in part to oppose coeducation at the university. Alito claimed to be a member of the alumni group in a 1985 job application.

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh sought to equate the Owl with CAP on his show yesterday.

“Ted Kennedy, a member of the Owl Club himself at Harvard,” Limbaugh said, according to a transcript on his website. “Do you remember what the Owl Club was? Exactly what he was trying to make people think [t]hat CAP was at Princeton: a bunch of rich white kids who only wanted to associate with themselves.”

CAP gained notoriety for its opposition to affirmative action, homosexuality, and the increase in minority and female students on the Princeton campus.

A 1983 article in CAP’s magazine, Prospect, entitled “In Defense of Elitism,” has drawn considerable fire from Democratic senators at the Alito hearings for its attacks on racial minorities, homosexuals, and the disabled.

“It deals with the fundamental issues of equality and discrimination,” Kennedy said on Wednesday as he asked for the club’s records to be subpoenaed by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

An article in The Washington Times yesterday first drew parallels between CAP and the Owl, but a spokeswoman for Kennedy called the comparison “absurd.”

“This social club has zero in common with CAP, an organization designed to promote an agenda that rolled back the clock on equality and justice,” the spokeswoman, Laura Capps, said in an interview on Wednesday night.

Capps noted that when Kennedy graduated from the College in 1956, women from Radcliffe had just begun to attend Harvard classes.

“When Senator Kennedy joined the all male social club called Owl, there were no women at Harvard,” Capps wrote in an e-mail.

Owl President Nick Cetrulo ’06 came to his club’s defense yesterday. He said that unlike CAP, the Owl’s mission is apolitical.

“As with any finals club on campus we are a social organization established to create friendships among members,” Cetrulo wrote in an e-mail. “The Owl has a diverse membership, ranging from all political, social and economic areas.”

In 1984, the University severed ties with the final clubs after attempts to pressure them to admit women were unsuccessful. The University cited Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act, a federal law championed by Kennedy.

The senator is not the first final club member to serve in elected office. Both of his older brothers, President John F. Kennedy ’40 and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy ’48, were members of the Spee. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, joined the Fly after a painful rejection by the Porcellian, the oldest and reputedly most exclusive of the clubs.

—Daniel J. Hemel and Javier C. Hernandez contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Natalie I. Sherman can be reached at nsherman@fas.harvard.edu.