Making the Final Break

IT SEEMS that old habits are hard to break.

The University severed its links to the nine all-male final clubs two years ago. Despite this, the clubs maintain the ties that really count, those with the Harvard community at large. The recent news that an employee in the development office, Nancy Couch, works on her own time as a consultant to the Porcellian Club highlights the enduring place the clubs enjoy at Harvard.

The final clubs are vestiges of a Harvard which should have passed more than a generation ago. The University seems to be truly committed to making merit rather than money the salient factor in determining admission. Two-thirds of today's undergraduates, for instance, receive some form of financial aid.

But while the image of Harvard as an elite finishing school for the wealthy is one to which the University at times pays homage, it is one that doesn't quite square with the increasing diversity of the student body. The formal severing of ties to the clubs, marked the University's realization that the image Harvard should be striving to for is incompatible with the final club ethos.

NEVERTHELESS, THE attraction of the final clubs still tugs hard at many a member of the Harvard community. What Ms. Couch chooses to do on her own time is her own business. She has not broken any rules, and she is not proof that the University administrators are playing fast and loose with their decison to deny the clubs affiliate status.

Just as in the case of Undergraduate Council Chairman Richard Eisert '88, however, there is something frustrating and disappointing about the refusal of influential members of the community--students no less than administrators--to take a stand against the clubs.

Whether the clubs are University affiliates or not, they remain an influential part of the school's social life. They shouldn't. After all that has been done in the way of democratizing this school in the last 20 years, there is no reason that each semester hundreds of undergrads desperately should seek admission to these self-consciously elitist clubs--while countless others, usually women, wait for friends to invite them to club functions.

The final clubs have been stripped of their access to steam heat and the centrex phone system, but they have not lost their lifeblood: support and respect from individual students and University officials. The question in the case of Ms. Couch then is not whether her actions were in violation of University regulations, but rather why she condones the existence of final club in the first place.

The same question should be asked of every final club member by every other undergraduate. For Harvard as a community to sever its ties with the club--as the institution has already done--would require individuals to decide for them selves whether Harvard without finals club would be a better place. Ms. Couch and Mr. Eisert are but two who have made their choice in this regard. It is let to the rest of us to make our own.