Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker.
Harvard’s chapter of the sorority Delta Gamma has become the first organization to shut down in response to the sanctions. Last week, the national Delta Gamma organization announced that its Zeta Phi-Cambridge Area chapter would close — a decision that was members voted on in May. The announcement is just the latest example of the difficulty all-female groups are facing vis-à-vis the school’s new rules.
While several fraternities and male-only final clubs have since voted to go co-ed, Harvard’s all-female clubs and sororities have taken a different tack. Writing in the Harvard Crimson, three members of the Sablière Society’s graduate board accused Harvard of pursuing “damage control” with all-male groups and, in the process, sacrificing “support systems, safe spaces, and alumnae networks” cultivated by female clubs. The society eventually went co-ed.
All three of Harvard’s unrecognized sororities defied the university’s sanctions and went through with their standard recruitment process the following spring semester.
One sorority said this summer that it would go gender-neutral. Now, Delta Gamma is disbanding to avoid that fate.
The impetus behind the sanctions
Harvard’s planned sanctions, announced in 2016, followed closely on the heels of a university report on sexual assault prevention that reprimanded all-male final clubs — of which there are currently six — for “deeply misogynistic attitudes.” It said that 47 percent of female seniors who attended male final club events or participated in female final clubs themselves had reported “experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact since entering college.” According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard faces three open investigations into its compliance with Title IX, the federal prohibition on gender discrimination in schools receiving public funds. At the time of the announcement, two formerly male final clubs had already voted to admit women.
Harvard proved itself willing to take drastic action to bring social clubs to heel. College and university administrators have for years wrung their hands about unrecognized fraternities and other clubs, arguing that they have little power over groups that operate outside the institutional purview of the schools. (At Harvard, final clubs cut ties with the university in 1984 when presented with the choice of going co-ed or losing official recognition.)
The new rules took effect for students arriving on campus in fall 2017, and stipulated that clubs would have to go co-ed or their members would be ineligible to hold leadership positions on campus and to win the university’s endorsement for prestigious postgraduate fellowships.
Many Harvard social groups complied with the new rules, including the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, one of the country’s oldest theater troupes, whose performances featured only men for 174 years.
Some of the all-male final clubs have been more resistant, joining hands with several fraternities to engage a law firm pursuing lobbying efforts on their behalf, the Harvard Crimson reported. They’ve set their sights on the PROSPER Act, a bill introduced in the House at the end of last year that, with modifications, could potentially endanger federal research funding if Harvard goes through with the penalties.
Delta Gamma takes a different approach
Before last week, no group had chosen a third option: closing down.
Delta Gamma’s president, Wilma Johnson Wilbanks, said in a press release that the decision to disband “does not mean that we are succumbing to the university’s new sanctions and policies regarding participation in unrecognized single-gender organizations like ours.”
At the same time, the release made clear that the sorority had been run off campus by the penalties. “We will continue to champion our right to exist on campuses everywhere. We believe the value of sorority is too great,” the statement read. “It is our sincere hope to return to the Cambridge Area should conditions for single-gender organizations improve.”
Margaret Wilson, the president of Harvard’s Delta Gamma chapter, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Whether and how women and men differ in organizing themselves socially are questions of considerable debate. A 2013 study in Scientific Reports argues that women “invest more in stable and secure networks.” Another peer-reviewed study, published in 2015, finds that women prefer one-on-one relationships while men pursue “multimale groups (in effect, clubs),” but also points to a limitation in the literature arising from data that draws mainly on online forms of sociability rather than real-life interaction.
