Harvard To Penalize Fraternity Members For Being In A Fraternity

Dan Regester9 years ago

When I think inclusivity, I think Harvard. There’s just a huge range of socioeconomic classes represented on campus — all the way from upper-middle to upper. Did your family donate a building in the last five years? No? Maybe Brown is more your speed.

The school that rejects 95% of its applicants is now telling fraternities to cut the exclusivity “all male” nonsense or become automatically ineligible for leadership programs and school fellowships. Forced inclusivity of women with threats of being excluded.

From The Crimson:

Starting with Harvard’s 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.

“Although the fraternities, sororities, and final clubs are not formally recognized by the College, they play an unmistakable and growing role in student life, in many cases enacting forms of privilege and exclusion at odds with our deepest values,” Faust wrote. “The College cannot ignore these organizations if it is to advance our shared commitment to broadening opportunity and making Harvard a campus for all of its students.”

Mandating organizations that aren’t even “formally recognized” by your college to follow your college’s new regulations is about as Ivy League — and especially about as Harvard — as it gets.

Harvard is clearly not thinking things through, though. If we made fraternities coed, what are certain pledges holding onto during an elephant walk? With no dong in hand, you could argue those guys and girls weren’t getting the full hazing experience and feel excluded from the other kids that had rods in hand. Would they fishhook the girl in front of them? That really just messes up the whole dynamic. It’s called an ELEPHANT walk, not a horn poached rhinoceros walk. During soggy biscuit, the girls would be at a clear disadvantage. That doesn’t seem fair to them.

What are we supposed to do? Get rid of homoerotic hazing altogether? Seems like an insurmountable feat if you ask me. But what do I know? I was just in a misogynistic pigpen known as your everyday, run-of-the-mill, male only fraternity. There’s no room for my opinion in modern day America..

[via The Crimson]

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