Franklin Roosevelt, a cosseted mama’s boy unpopular at Groton, didn’t get into the Porcellian Club even though he was a legacy—and, according to some, he never quite got over it. Mark Zuckerberg was not elected to any of the secretive all-male final clubs despite their becoming, per Ross Douthat’s Harvard memoir, much more meritocratic in the 1990s (and who, you might wonder, could be more meritorious than the boy genius behind the world’s most ubiquitous social network?). Zuck struck back by creating the least exclusive club ever and then suing his founding partner, a member of Phoenix Club. Ah, sweet revenge…
The exclusivity of Harvard’s final clubs—which brought us Facebook and the New Deal, mind you—is considered an undemocratic relic of a racist, classist world. And criticism of them is nothing new. Veteran reporter Kenneth Auchincloss, cousin of patrician writer-lawyer Louis Auchincloss, wrote in the Harvard Crimson as an undergraduate in 1958:
But it would be far too generous to Harvard’s administration to believe it’s some residual backwardness of the historically untouchable final clubs under fire now. If so, Harvard’s going about it all wrong.
Single-sex groups, all-male or all-female, are the target of Harvard’s new policy, laid out by president Drew G. Faust in a Friday morning email to all Harvard undergraduates. Starting for the class of 2021, the new policy “bars undergraduate members of sororities, fraternities and single-sex final clubs from holding athletic team captaincies, and leadership positions in all recognized student groups,” as well as from receiving College endorsement for fellowships like the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships, according to the Crimson.
It actually comes up short of what many finals clubs feared, that the administration would bar them altogether—even though final clubs are “unrecognized” by the college and off campus. Now, at least, they have “the choice” to go co-ed and spare their members ostracization elsewhere. The oldest Harvard sororities and women-only final clubs got their start late in the last century to offer women a place of their own on a male-dominated campus—sorry, ladies.
From President Faust:
All of its students? Excepting of course those interested in close-knit fellowship and sanctuary from the opposite sex.
