With its announcement Friday of sanctions for unrecognized single-gender social organizations, Harvard has capped off a year of tense relations with these groups. Here are the past year's most significant stories about Harvard's relationship with final clubs and other unrecognized groups.
Starting with the Class of 2021, undergraduate members of unrecognized single-gender social organizations will be banned from holding athletic team captaincies and leadership positions in all recognized student groups. They will also be ineligible for College endorsement for top fellowships like the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships.
With the future of Harvard’s final clubs uncertain, University President Drew G. Faust again criticized the organizations on Wednesday, calling the “fundamental issue” one of “exclusion and discrimination.”
In a tense meeting with administrators that lasted almost three hours, undergraduate and graduate leaders of Harvard’s final clubs sought specifics on the College’s plan for the clubs. Although many final club attendees left largely frustrated, administrators outlined at least one uncharacteristically specific option for penalizing involvement in all-male final clubs.
The Porcellian Club, Harvard’s oldest final club, broke its public silence Tuesday for the first time in recent memory to criticize College administrators for their recent efforts to make final clubs go co-ed and modify membership policies.
Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana has issued an April 15 deadline for final clubs to inform administrators whether or not they will go co-ed, according to three club leaders present at a Tuesday meeting with undergraduate leadership of female and male clubs.
As Fox undergraduates lobbied to admit women to their membership this fall, graduate board leaders struggled to toe the line with a group of other alumni who organized their own platform in opposition of the change.
In an email to club graduate officers, undergraduate president Coby C. Buck ’16 wrote that 31 of 36 undergraduates members in good standing with the A.D. oppose any changes in the club’s membership policy.
By early Friday morning, some sophomores—both men and women—had received envelopes under their doors inviting them to a reception next week at the Spee Club’s building at 76 Mount Auburn St.
As administrators prepare to meet with final club graduate boards, experts say Harvard can reasonably argue that it has the power to make the groups essentially defunct.
Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana says he wants to encourage undergraduates to rethink the ways in which their social organizations may be exclusive, but some worry that the College's stance on final clubs and similar groups is at best futile and at worst counterproductive.
