About 30 percent of Harvard’s 6,500 undergraduates belong to one of six all-male final clubs, five all-female final clubs, and nine single-sex fraternities and sororities. The clubs have enjoyed resurgent popularity on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus in recent years. For many, they are the hub of social life and fun. But Harvard University’s Committee on the Unrecognized Single-Gender Social Organizations (CUSGSO)—cunningly titled, with a Soviet lilt—has banned clubs entirely, finito, the nuclear option.
Back in 2016, Harvard’s president Drew Gilpin Faust and her point man, college dean Rakesh Khurana, crafted an explicit anti-club policy that imposed sanctions with penalties designed to drive the clubs out of business. Alumni objected, while the student body voted overwhelmingly to repeal the policy. Instead of dialing back, CUSGSO now recommends that Harvard’s policies take a more radical turn. This isn’t surprising since Faust has made diversity and inclusion a presidential theme since her ascension in 2007. The governing Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers, in which enthusiasm for diversity and inclusion seems undiminished, have closely coached Faust and Khurana.
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