Private Clubs, Public Violence

THE LATEST HARVARD symbol of choice is a black hat that reads "FCS." Ask someone wearing one, they'll tell you it stands for Final Clubs Suck.

Ask them why, and they'll tell you: The clubs were racist and anti-Semitic as long as they could be. They have been sexist from day one. And they are violent.

Naturally, you won't see final club members wearing FCS hats, and it's not just because they disagree--because you won't see them wearing hats that say, "Gosh, Final Clubs are Great!" either.

They try to keep a low profile about their membership. Clubs are a private thing, they say. They don't want publicity, they insist.

But that's a crock. They want their kind of publicity. They want people to come to their parties. But only the right people.

Final clubs really only function on the line between private and public. If final clubs were completely private, no one would know about them. There would be no complaints about unfair advantages, systematic discrimination and criminal behavior.

And if they were completely public, they could be held accountable for their conduct.

The suit Lisa J. Schkolnick '88 brought against the Fly Club was an effort to prove that, legally, final clubs are public. But the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination ruled the club had a valid legal claim to "private" membership. It was not public enough to be forced to open its membership to women.

So, unless someone blows them up, we're stuck with the clubs for a while yet. That sucks.

Their members may value their privacy, but they hold relatively public parties. Everybody knows about them. Many nonmembers--including faculty members and administrators--frequent them. And, often as not, something bad happens at them.

Everyone has a story or two or 10 they can tell about this. The guy who always has a little too much to drink and wants to pick a fight. The two guys who fought over the same woman. The one guy who went to the part of the club he was not supposed to and got thrown down the stairs and forcibly removed from the premises. (All of these have actually happened.)

The black eyes you see at Sunday brunch are the public evidence of the "private" violence associated with final club culture, and that's bad enough. But the attitude that winks at "inside" violence encourages more public and more dangerous manifestations.

That's pretty much the story of the last decade. People can no longer say and do horrible things in public, so they've flocked to private societies where they won't take flak for it. And courts have been increasingly wary about opening closed ranks, whether they're the ranks of the Fly or an exclusive country club.

The final clubs, near as we can tell, want to make sure they have a place to go where women (usually called "feminists," and usually "carping" at them) can't, unless they are there at the clubs' behest (in which case they are called "a bevy of slobbering bovines fresh for the slaughter," as a Pi Eta newsletter once put it).

They also want to have a place to do their bonding, which amounts to violent behavior that is acceptable to some as long as it stays behind closed doors.

As Harvard history shows, violence associated with final clubs occurs all too often.

The most recent incident was last March, when a bunch of Cornell lacrosse players wanted to get into a party at the D.U. They tried to go in through the downstairs entrance. They were pretty drunk, and one of them threw Gary R. Shenk '92 up against the wall while trying to get in.

Then all the guys in the D.U. came down and threw the lax players out. "It was obvious the only reason that serious violence was averted was that all the other D.U. members came to help," Shenk said. The story did not end there, though.

Later than night, two of the Cornell guys confronted Bruce C. Hilton '94 in the street, asked if he was a Harvard student, and allegedly kicked the shit out of him. They face assault charges. Serious violence, to use Shenk's term, was not averted, but merely diverted.

One of the alleged assailants claims he was roughed up when the D.U. members threw him out. Probably so, since he was drunk and had 30 guys in his face. His claim--completely wacky--is that some kind of chain letter version of the talionic law holds on Saturday night: If you get hurt, you get to hurt someone else, and so on, and so on. Private parties, public vices.

The question then becomes: Can you blame the D.U. for what happened? Legally, no, but socially, yes. Of course the Cornell men acted of their own volition and are accountable in the eyes of the law (etc., etc.).

But everyone, D.U. members especially, also acted out of defense for a system of "honor" and privilege that matches force with force every step of the way. That system makes Harvard final clubs, like all-male organizations on campuses nationwide, centers for the occurrence of violence.

This violence is exacerbated by the single-sex nature of the clubs--single-sex clubs make the line between private and public the same as the line between men and women. The guys are at home, and the women are public property.

In the past, anti-final club activists have drawn much needed attention to the misogyny that results from these clubs: systematic discrimination, offensive demeanor and, in the extreme, rape. the outrage is legitimate.

The "masters of their own kingdoms" syndrome has contributed to a remarkable rise in the reported incidence of rape in American fraternal organizations over the last 10 years.

From Peggy Sanday's Fraternity Gang Rape to studies last year in the journals Sex Roles and Family Relations and surveys by the Chronicle of Higher Education and The Washington Monthly, researchers find that fraternal organizations are the greatest culprits in on-campus violence.

There is no reason to expect that is different at Harvard. One reason frats became such centers in the '80s was the rise of the drinking age, which forced alcohol-soaked parties to "private" institutions. It happened everywhere else, and it happened at Harvard. (It happens here at Harvard: The recent surge in nationally affiliated frats on campus is more of the same.) And as long as the drinking age stays high and the public continues to pressure bastions of (white) male privilege, so will the rush to the clubs.

TAKE THE PI ETA Speakers Club, for example, a Harvard single-sex club (not officially a final club) that closed down in 1991 after years of violent incidents.

In 1979, a student was paralyzed from the neck down after he fell during a Pi Eta initiation ceremony. Hazing was outlawed since, but not, apparently, at the Pi Eta, where the annual drubbings continued.

In 1986, a woman alleged that she was raped by a Harvard student at the Pi Eta Club, according to police reports. The woman said four men were involved in the assault. Her case was not pursued by the district attorney, but the club was not immune to accusation for long.

In 1988, a woman alleged that she was raped at the Pi Eta by a guest of a club member. She sued the club for failing to supervise effectively and for establishing an atmosphere that led to violence against women. The case was settled out of court last year (likely, they settled because she was going to win), and she has since come back to campus to talk about her experiences.

The privacy that male members seek not only encourages violence against women, it almost legitimizes it as just "boys being boys." Boys are not publicly accountable for their actions; men and women are. (This is why establishing an all-female final club does nothing to address the real negative social effects of the existing clubs. It only gives the guys someone new to play beer pong with.)

YOU MAY KNOW people in final clubs that have never been violent themselves. So do we. Fine.

But those are people who are interested only in "averting," that is, diverting, violence, not stopping it. These are the people who agreed to make the punch process dry (which didn't happen), and who make sure to rush to each other's aid when something happens (thus making sure something will happen).

The people who do something to stop the violence are the ones who don't attend final club parties, who don't join if they're punched, who see the clubs' "privacy" as something more dangerous than attractive. Good guys and good women wear black hats. Hats that say FCS.