Bye Bye Bylaws

T his past Sunday, the Undergraduate Council (UC) suspended its bylaws in order to grant funding to the Asian American Christian Fellowship (AACF), a student group that openly discriminates in its elections of officers. The constitution of the AACF’s parent organization, the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship, requires that officers “subscribe without reserve” to articles of Christian faith. The UC’s decision was a serious lapse in judgment; funding a group that has a constitutionally-enshrined discrimination policy sets a dangerous precedent for future grant applications.

According to an e-mail from Lowell House UC representative Ali Zaidi ’08, who proposed the suspension, the UC should see no problem in funding a group that requires its officers to be Christian because it “has a right [to discriminate] on grounds of freedom of association.” But, in fact, the imperative to preserve students’ freedom of association would seem to support the exact opposite decision on the part of the UC. By suspending its bylaws to fund the AACF, the UC has surrendered the moral high ground. Though the grant only went to fund a milk and cookies reception open to all (not just Christians), the extension of this logic would render it acceptable to fund open events for all discriminatory student groups. The UC now has little reason not to fund open events thrown by groups that explicitly discriminate on any number of factors, such as sexual identity, or even ethnicity. From an ideological standpoint, the UC would be hard pressed to refuse money to all-male final clubs or fraternities wanting to organize their own milk and cookies receptions.

The UC’s bylaws exist, in part, to ensure all students have equal opportunities to access their own money. At its heart, then, the problem with the AACF’s inflexible rule is that it exhibits a lack of respect for the right of students to their resources. Though some would argue that it is ludicrous to ask Christian student groups to have anything other than Christian officers, mandating this in a constitution is very different from leaving the decision up to its members. The vast majority of other student groups with specific ethnic or belief profiles have no explicit provision that officers must look or act a certain way. Instead, these groups leave it up to their constituents to decide who will best represent them as officers.

Despite the lack of explicit constitutional provisions, student choice makes it extremely likely that the Black Men’s Forum will always have black officers and the South Asian Association will have South Asian officers. But these likely outcomes are artifacts of student choice, not explicit constitutional limits. Group members can feel that people of the same race best represent them even while reaffirming that anyone, no matter their race, can participate in the common mission of the group. Though the possibility that these groups can elect officers of other races is a somewhat symbolic distinction, this possibility guarantees that students don’t feel discriminated against. By doing so, it posits a base level of individual respect that groups must show before receiving money meant to benefit the entire student body.

We are not, by any means, arguing that campus religious groups, which take their spiritual missions seriously, have no place on a campus dedicated to being as inclusive and pluralistic as possible. In reality, the fact that the AACF discriminates on the basis of religion is quite ancillary to our argument. We merely believe that any overt and rigid requirements alienating a portion of the student body should not be condoned by funding derived from the entire undergraduate population. After all, even the most culturally-specific groups on campus have members that do not fit the groups’ standard profiles.

It is vital that the UC not give money to organizations that choose to rely on artificial constitutional distinctions rather than the choice of its members for the election of its officers. Future suspensions of UC bylaws should be restricted to situations that clearly merit them, lest the bylaws themselves become meaningless.