​The Harvard Imagination

After writing an essay this past fall about my decision to leave the Spee Club, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Joan Didion quote in which she decried, after publication of her fabled “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” that she had “never gotten feedback so universally beside the point.” Down the aisle, from those who liked and disliked my article, the finger-pointing was always shifted outwards. For my friends in female clubs, the piece was about the Spee’s false self-righteousness for going co-ed. To my friends in male clubs, it was about the Spee’s special place within final club hell. And for those outside the Mt. Auburn scene, it was a confirmation of their wildest fears about the big bad clubs. No matter the position within Harvard’s stratified social world, the story was always, always about someone else.

The other day President Faust announced sanctions against students who choose to join unrecognized single-sex social organization, and the criticism has been swift and vocal. The Crimson has called for sanctions solely against male final clubs, journalists all-over the country are currently rolling up their sleeves to write searing op-eds on freedom of association, and, most pointedly, female members of sororities and final clubs have taken to Facebook to reiterate the positive and empowering impact of these organizations. The sanctions, the line of thought goes, unfairly punishes women who aren’t perpetuating power imbalances on campus, and inadvertently penalizes organizations that give Harvard females a much needed respite from the all-seeing male gaze. A sanction that is supposed to tackle issues of gender inequality will actually dismantle organizations that provide respite and empowerment to the disenfranchised.

And while I hate the male gaze as much as one who has never felt its true strength can, I can’t help but feel that this logic, in many ways, tip-toes around greater issues of exclusivity and access on this campus in which we are all complicit. For example, when an acquaintance of mine in a female final club posts a photo with the caption “ain’t nobody fucking with my clique” and it receives some hundreds of likes, I see and empathize with a group of women who have found an all-female network on a campus that is rife with gender inequity and are incensed at the thought of it being ripped away. I see this photo and understand that as a man, I will never truly know what it feels like to have a space in which my gender does not limit me. Yet in this photo, I also see a group of women who are, on average, more privileged, well-connected and comfortable within Harvard’s bastions of elitism than the vast majority of this school. In this photo, I see the hundreds of other female Harvard students who were denied entry into this “clique” because they weren’t deemed socially abled, “cool” or interesting enough; who would, even if admitted, struggle to fit in within the rarefied world this clique assumes as the norm.

We can be marginalized in some ways and privileged in others. We can be discriminated by certain in-groups while still perpetuating discrimination against other out-groups. This is called intersectionality, and none of us are exempt from it.

These sanctions are, at their core, an attempt to address questions of access to capital on our campus: who gets it and why, and how the the allocation of this access affects the student body as a whole. Unequivocally, these sanctions, and the administration, have failed. They have failed to understand that co-educational spaces are not inherently equal spaces, nor will be, as long as gender inequity exists. They have failed to propose recognized alternatives to the vacuum this sanction creates for the very group it purports to defend. They have failed to recognize that the plurality of the single-sex organizations they have targeted, namely female sororities, work hard to confront and counteract issues of access. They have failed to confront honestly the multitude of factors at play on a campus in which sexual assault is the norm. They have failed to take true responsibility for creating social alternatives at a school without an off-campus scene and for a student body in which the majority cannot legally drink. Harvard students should protest these sanctions. They should fight them. But, as long as the sanctions are in place, Harvard students should also begin to look towards the future. What would a Harvard without single-sex organizations look like?

I propose that it is possible to envision a Harvard without single-sex social organizations that is just as, if not more, accessible, equitable and socially vibrant than the Harvard we have today. I propose that it is possible for the disenfranchised and marginalized to build community and find empowerment without creating exclusionary social groups. But mainly, I propose it is possible to imagine a Harvard in which exclusivity is not incorporated, upheld and perpetuated by the student body in all facets of life. Because while exclusive single-sex social organizations can be about empowerment and support, they are also inextricable from Harvard students’ constant need to see the world in terms of institutional hierarchies. Clearly defined, tangible and structured indicators of success.

We freely, vigorously and, in my opinion, detrimentally apply these institutional pressures to the scholarly, extracurricular and vocational. Why make friendship—the one realm of life that, outside Harvard, is rarely institutionalized—mitigated by status? Why turn a facet of our human experience that is supposed to be joyous, immediate and fluid into a prescribed and competitive process? How do we make Harvard a place that is, for lack of a better word, fun? Free-wheeling, open, respectful, spontaneous and fair.

Without a doubt, these sanctions unduly affect the ones on campus for whom fairness is most necessitated. But the administration’s failure does not negate the very real failure on the part of many Harvard students to have imagined, even wanted, anything beyond the status quo—to imagine what a future Harvard without exclusive social organizations could look like. Because if we can begin to imagine it in one area, what stops of us from envisioning it in the other areas of our life that so desperately demand reimagining? Our extracurriculars and our classes; our future professions and careers; even the very way we interact, view and engage with one another as peers.

It is this lack of imagination in our everyday, especially from those within certain axes of power, that holds Harvard from being the equitable and accessible place so many of us want it to be.

Eli Wilson Pelton '17 is a history and literature concentrator living in Adams House.