Shouting Lies Against the Clubs

To the Editors of The Crimson:

If you repeat a lie often enough and loud enough, it has been said, it will make itself true. For some time now, Harvard students have been bombarded by vicious attacks on the final clubs and lurid stories of their alleged misconduct, culminating in Elizabeth Wurtzel's rambling opinion piece in last Tuesday's Crimson ["Liquor, Pot, Cocaine, Ecstasy and Sexism," 11/22/88] which insinuated that club members are somehow responsible, among other things, for the homelessness problem in Cambridge. Lisa Schkolnick's complaint (not yet even a lawsuit) against the Fly Club to the Massachussetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) is as yet unresolved. But the club issue on campus, if one can believe the front page stories about "The Boors of Harvard" [Perspective, November '88], has long since been decided in her favor. But the simple fact that well-connected people in the campus press say the clubs are nasty and reprehensible should not be enough actually to make them so.

According to the conventional wisdom, the clubs are sexist, racist and elitist institutions totally at odds with the progressive university community next door. They have wild, orgiastic parties at which, if they do not hire prostitutes, drunk co-eds are hauled upstairs for a quick screw by several members on the nearest convenient piece of furniture. "Clubbies," we are told, think of women as objects to be excluded from one's social and intellectual circles and dragged bodily into one's bedroom or pool hall. "Zealots In Protest" scream about the club's collective "closed doors and open zippers." Blacks and other minorities are seldom admitted to the secret cabal, and as if sexism and racism were not enough, no one without the right family connections should expect to be admitted. Or so the story goes.

Both of us are final club members (one of us is in his third year in a club), and the horror stories of rape and debauchery leave us mystified. We obviously cannot speak for any club but our own--until Perspective did us all the service of publishing a map of club locations, we couldn't have even told you where half of them were. But while we are in no position to generalize about "all clubs" or some generic creature called a "clubbie," neither are any of the clubs' vocal critics (although that fails to stop them). Our club experience gives the lie to SWAT's sweeping charges. There are, proportionally, at least as many Blacks, Asians and Hispanics in our club as there are in Harvard College, and neither of us has ever seen or heard of anything like a rape at our club or any other. Are our fellow club members carrying on behind our backs? We doubt it.

The only actual accounts of club misconduct published in the campus press concern the Pi Eta, but the Pi is not a final club. The anti-final club stories make titilating reading, but no one has yet been willing or able to accuse anyone of anything. It is somehow enough to accuse "the clubs" of such things, or slyly to insinuate that such abuses are "common knowledge." The collective trial and sentencing of club members in the court of campus opinion has left us a bit baffled. Critics of the clubs have adopted the desperate tactic of deliberately and viciously slandering the clubs in order to tarnish their reputation and dissuade potential members from joining. It doesn't matter to them if any of the stories are true.

Character assassination by innuendo is hardly new, but these tactics are really all the militants have left. The legal case against the Fly Club (if indeed it ever emerges from MCAD at all) is tenuous at best. Even Perspective now admits that if the clubs are really private property there is (or should be) no further debate. In a choice between the continued existence of the final clubs and government assumption of the right to tell private citizens with whom they must associate on their own private property, the clubs must win. The freedom of association guaranteed by the Constitution makes any discrimination the clubs may practice very much the lesser of two evils. Moreover, the more specific the case against the Fly becomes (hinging on such questions as non-member use of the building during vacations and the occasional use of their parking lot by Lowell students), the less likely is any ruling to affect any other club. Morally and legally, one cannot tar all clubs with the same brush.

Ultimately, of course, it is hard to find unequivocal grounds on which to condemn the clubs. Benign discrimination on the basis of sex is commonplace in our society: Radcliffe denies its externship programs programs and grant money (as well as its diploma) to males, the varsity football squad rejects aspiring female linebackers and neither sex is allowed in the other's respective public bathrooms. Militant smear tactics are the last refuge of those unable to make a compelling legal argument that will distinguish between the Fly Club and things as harmless as Wellesley College, both institutions that deny their benefits to members of one sex. When reason and sobriety are beyond one's capabilities, only slander remains as an effective political weapon. SWAT, ZIP and their cohorts hope that repetition and volume alone will be enough to make their outrageous charges into facts. We, at least, feel that they should not be able to get away with it. Christopher A. Ford '89   Ronald J. Granieri '89