Sororities, fraternities sue Harvard over social club crackdown

Harvard University’s controversial clampdown on single-gender clubs came under double-barreled legal fire Monday as six sororities and fraternities filed a pair of sex discrimination lawsuits alleging the school used threats and intimidation against students and violated their rights to free association.

Harvard’s policy of penalizing students who join single-gender clubs has virtually eliminated all-female social organizations and shut down their gathering spaces, the plaintiffs said in a federal lawsuit that was filed along with a separate Massachusetts suit.

“Women and their former all-female social clubs have suffered the most,” the federal lawsuit said. “A Harvard undergraduate could join the American Nazi party, or could create an off-campus undergraduate chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, without running afoul of the sanctions policy, or any other Harvard student-conduct policy. Those groups may be heinous but they are co-ed, so under Harvard’s rules, its students may belong without any threat of sanction.”

Three individual male students are also part of the suits, although they are unnamed for fear of retribution from Harvard, their lawyers said.

The legal challenge serves as a dramatic postscript to a multiyear fight at Harvard between the administration and a group of off-campus, all-male social groups known as final clubs. It also marks the second recent high-profile lawsuit against the university. Harvard is awaiting a federal district court judge’s ruling in Boston on a lawsuit alleging that it discriminates against Asian-American applicants.

Harvard declined to comment on the new legal challenges Monday. In the past, the university has said that the elite clubs foster an exclusionary environment on campus and that their raucous parties have contributed to unsafe situations leading to sexual assault.

This claim has been challenged by many students and alumni, and the federal lawsuit filed Monday contains perhaps the most detailed account to date of the behind-the-scenes debate between the administration and the clubs.

According to that lawsuit, the relationship between Harvard and the clubs was “cordial” for several decades. But Harvard targeted the final clubs and single-gender organizations in 2014 after Rakesh Khurana became the dean of the undergraduate college and the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights received a complaint over how the college handled allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

The lawsuit alleges that in a series of meetings Khurana had with club officials, he attempted to force the final clubs to admit women.

In May 2015, the suit says, Khurana held what was billed as a typical meeting to ensure the groups were aware of the latest school policies on alcohol and sexual assault.

Instead, Khurana allegedly told club representatives at that meeting that the university had already decided the clubs would have to go co-ed. At that meeting, according to the suit, Khurana waved a sheet of paper in the air that he said contained accounts of sexual assault.

“Khurana said that the papers in his hand were very embarrassing to the clubs and that he could not guarantee that they would not be leaked,” the lawsuit says. “But, Khurana said, if some clubs became co-ed — systematically and soon — that would help the situation. It was an unmistakable threat.”

Under the Harvard policy, starting with the Class of 2021, students who join a single-gender club are barred from leadership positions such as being captain of a varsity athletic team or receiving a college endorsement for a prestigious graduate fellowship or scholarships, including the Rhodes.

The final clubs are not among organizations formally suing Harvard, but some of them have collaborated with the legal challenge and are providing financial support, according to the North American Interfraternity Conference.

The sororities argue that they were collateral damage in the university’s mission to eliminate the male-only final clubs because Harvard created a policy that punishes not just the male clubs but all single-gender, off-campus clubs.

“Harvard attempted to tell the female students what was good for them without bothering to ask them,” Rebecca Ramos, a 2017 Harvard graduate and former chapter president of the college’s Delta Gamma sorority, said at a news conference in Cambridge.

In 2014, Harvard had nine sororities and all-female final clubs. But as a result of the sanctions, only one still exists, according to the lawsuits. The remaining have closed or become co-ed. Sororities had to break ties with the national organizations that supported them, and many saw their membership plummet.

The federal suit alleges that the university violated students’ right to freedom from sex discrimination under the well-known Title IX statute. The law bars discrimination on the basis on sex.

The plaintiffs for the federal suit are Kappa Alpha Theta and Kappa Kappa Gamma, international sororities; Sigma Chi and Sigma Alpha Epsilon, international fraternities; Sigma Alpha Epsilon — Massachusetts Gamma, the local chapter; and three current Harvard students who are members of male clubs.

The federal lawsuit points out that the new policy has also affected such groups as the all-female Radcliffe Choral Society and the all-male Harvard Glee Club and also would punish students who join groups including the Knights of Columbus, an all-male Catholic organization.

The suit also describes how policy caused harm to the three individual male plaintiffs, allegedly damaging their reputation, job opportunities, and ability to continue their leadership roles in the single-gender clubs.

The state suit, filed by three women’s organizations, asserts that the university interfered with students’ right to free association and equal treatment based on sex, as protected by the state Constitution.

The plaintiffs in the state suit are Delta Gamma and Alpha Phi, international sororities; and Alpha Phi — Iota Tau, the Cambridge chapter.

The lawsuits seek to bar Harvard from enforcing the sanctions policy.

They are the latest attempt by the single-gender organizations to fight Harvard’s policy. The final clubs, fraternities, and sororities have also lobbied Congress to protect single-sex organizations. But with Democrats soon taking control of the House of Representatives, those efforts may stall.

“We are going to fight this every avenue we can,” said Judson Horras, the president of the North American Interfraternity Conference. “This was our last resort and we knew we had to do this.”

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Racial Segregation on American Campuses: A Widespread Phenomenon

The National Association of Scholars, a group of mostly academics interested in higher education, issues only a few research reports annually, but what they lack in quantity they make up in quality; their studies are extremely carefully done, with well documented research.

A young NAS employee, Dion Pierre, has been researching the segregation of students on college campuses by race—special commencement exercises for African-American students, living and recreational facilities segregated by race, black student unions, and so forth. These practices have existed for decades on some campuses and rather than fading as racial prejudices decline (witness rapidly increasing interracial marriages), they are flourishing. The Pierre study, mostly completed, should be released around Martin Luther King Day in early 2019.

All is this is terribly ironic. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively outlawed racial segregation in our schools. Angry whites, especially in the South, fought the attempt to integrate schools, often leading to violent protests, such as when James Meredith became the first black to enter the University of Mississippi in 1962. Civil rights leaders put their lives on the line working for a color-blind, non-race determined society, most memorably King when he articulated his dream where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” The bitter struggle to break down racial distinctions in education lasted for decades, yet now universities are reintroducing segregation, making race the primary determinant of student participation in some activities, such as black student unions or race-based housing facilities.

College administrators facilitate this by constantly harping on race. They hire “diversity” coordinators in large numbers to check on the racial complexion of students, faculty, other staff and even contractors. If diversity has any educational virtue, it is in the notion that individuals will intermix with others with different traits—perhaps students coming from another area of the world, or having a different sexual orientation, socioeconomic background—or skin color. The idea is people become more tolerant, more understanding of alternative perspectives when they are exposed to individuals markedly different from themselves.

Yet having all-black dorms or recreational areas is anti-diversity. In an Orwellian twist, the diversity coordinators are stifling interaction between people of different races. A news report says the new diversity czar at my university, Ohio University, is wanting to create a workout room in the campus recreational center open only for minority students—white students, who pay student activity fees to support the center, would be excluded.

Why? Two thoughts come to mind. First, college campuses are overwhelmingly left-of-center in political orientation. A new study by Samuel Abrams shows this is particularly true of student affairs staffs, the people who run housing and allocate funds for social and cultural campus events. Some 71% of 900 respondents labeled themselves liberal or very liberal, compared with 6% conservative. There are almost 12 student affairs college administrators who are liberal for every conservative. Progressives tend to be more conscious of the group characteristics of individuals—identity politics if you will. Part of this leads to a strong conviction that the identity of historically underrepresented groups needs to be publicized and given special attention.

Conservatives or moderates are more likely to want to emphasize individual meritocracy and elimination of the evaluating people on the basis of such attributes as skin color, closer to the King position in his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Second, I think some individuals without solid academic credentials push racial diversity as a means of gaining employment and/or enhancing their income—what economist’s call “rent-seeking.” Colleges are falling over one another creating new diversity officials at cushy six digit salaries. What are they going to do besides harass campus employees in their efforts to achieve their racist agenda, getting a “better” racial complexion among members of the university community? Pushing race-specific forms of campus involvement becomes one way to occupy themselves while collecting a nice paycheck and reveling in the power they have over a cowed faculty.

It is time that collegiate racism and massive redirection of resources away from academic goals of instruction and research is confronted. The prospective NAS study is thus a potentially promising way to expose the scandal, corruption and racism that student affairs and other university bureaucrats have foisted on the American academy.

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White males are a now a MINORITY GROUP! British Universities are setting targets to recruit more after numbers plummeted

Men have woken up to the fact that a university education is no longer where the money is

Universities are setting targets to recruit more white male students after numbers fell so low that they were classed as a minority group.

Aston and Essex universities have pledged to boost numbers in their latest 'access plans' submitted to the Office for Students (OfS), the higher education regulator.

Aston says it will focus its energies during 2019/20 on white males, black British students and women studying engineering and science-related subjects.

Essex wants to increase the number of white men joining it and other local universities by two per cent.

Several universities, including Oxford, have previously launched campaigns to increase the intake of white, working-class men, but Aston and Essex are the first mainstream institutions to include white men in strategies to boost under-represented groups.

According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency data, white British students are in a minority at about ten per cent of institutions.

And on some courses, such as business, pharmacy and science-related degrees, more than 70 per cent of students are from ethnic minorities. [Indians and Chinese]

In 2016/17, 27 per cent of the UK undergraduate intake were white males, down from 30 per cent in 2007/08. At Aston, almost two-thirds of the current intake are non-white.

Official figures also show that 123 out of 149 higher education institutions have more female than male students and the gender gap is growing. Female students are a third more likely to apply to degree courses than their male peers.

While university entry should primarily be decided on merit, Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said there was a good case for giving white men special attention. 'It is a form of racism to be uncomfortable in tackling white male under-representation,' he said.

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), which has published a study on the educational under-achievement of young men, said: 'When putting together our report, we were shocked to find so few higher education institutions had these sorts of targets. The problem is so evident and we've continued to go backwards.

'Some people oppose this whole agenda. We were told we were wrong to look at gender and should care only about class.

'Tackling access to university needs a focus on gender, disadvantage and ethnicity, and it is possible to care about all three of these things simultaneously.'

The HEPI report called for a 'Take Our Sons to University Day' and also for more foundation year courses, which prepare students for degree-level study, to help to encourage young men to seek university places.

Others have suggested boosting the number of degree apprenticeships, which allow youngsters to earn as they learn.

Research has found some university staff feel uncomfortable offering programmes aimed specifically at white boys in case it is viewed as racist or leads to other groups being overlooked.

'We found that people were quite uncomfortable with the idea of running a targeted activity with this group, in a way that we've not encountered, for example, targeting young black African men,' said one study from King's College London.

'We had quite a lot of people saying, 'This isn't going to be a white-only event, is it?''

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