A Tale of Two Houses

This is a story about two houses, one made of concrete and glass that looms imposingly over the Charles, and another made of wood and brick that sits among similar buildings along Mt. Auburn Street. In the last four years, I’ve been privileged enough to live, or at least socialize, in both. And as a kid from a rural community in central Texas, only incredible strokes of luck could have placed me in either of them.

I was first introduced to the final clubs by the Unofficial Guide to Life at Harvard, which featured nothing more than a list of the eight organizations. Noting the apparent absence of a Greek system at Harvard, my father–who attended University of Texas at Austin–said, “Hey, Rex. These look like a pretty good deal. You should consider joining.” It seemed like reasonable advice. After all, my dad had been an Alpha Tau Omega in college and had enjoyed his fraternity days immensely. Coming from my background, joining an all-male social club seemed natural, and at the time, hardly objectionable.

By the end of my freshman year, I felt that I had a pretty good handle on the final clubs. There were a couple of clubs I partied at fairly regularly, though none was the one I ended up joining. On the other hand, I had only a vague idea about the Houses. For example, when my blockmates and I discovered we’d been placed in Mather, we went to check it out and got lost two or three times on the way. When we finally saw the building, we were appalled.

I’d been told that the House system was designed to create smaller and more intimate communities of students at Harvard. But, for some reason, I felt more isolated in my House than I’d felt in my freshman dorm. The housing folks had done a great job crafting a diverse group of first-year students for each room and proctor group–in my very typical entryway, we had a number of international students, musicians, science buffs, a few athletes, prep-school kids, and obviously, an equal number of women and men. After that year, I wouldn’t have minded continuing to live with the kids from that group. But many of us blocked with other people, and we were randomly assigned housing for a second time in our Harvard careers.

As a result of this second–and I think gratuitous–randomization, my House experience was somewhat disorienting and left me searching for a real community at Harvard. “Community,” however, can be a pretty nebulous term. Was I looking for a group of kids from Texas? Did I want to live with other white kids? Or Baptists? Or musicians like me? Or maybe kids from families with similar incomes to my own?

I can’t say that any of these thoughts ever crossed my mind at the beginning of punch season my sophomore year. I only knew that I wanted to be surrounded by intelligent, interesting, but also outgoing and–to put it simply and unapologetically–fun people.

I had no exposure to my current final club when I started the punch process. But the club’s first punch event really surprised me; I’d suddenly discovered a social community at Harvard that I truly wanted to be a part of. The members struck me as clever guys with good senses of humor who were legitimately interested in one another. I imagine that men and women in different clubs probably describe their first punch event and the remainder of their successful punch seasons in equally fond terms. In the best-case scenario, a final club member finds in his or her club exactly the sense of community that the House system fails to provide.

But as we know, punch and the final clubs as institutions comprise a system where best-case scenarios are few and far-between. Depending on the club, punches at the first round have only a 5 to 15 percent chance of becoming members of that club. Many other interested sophomores and juniors never get punched at all. Blocking groups get split up among clubs. Feelings get hurt. Sometimes friendships are irreparably damaged. And until very recently, women looking for space to call their own basically had no options.

Even these objections don’t begin to tackle the bigger issues final clubs raise in terms of the social scene at Harvard. Yes, “social meritocracy” is a somewhat dubious description of punch, which is often arbitrary and, yes, introduces an odd incentive structure with membership as the reward for sociability, wit, and audacity. And yes, there is a clear power structure at work, with male members controlling a guest space populated by male and female guests hand-picked at the door.

None of these facts are particularly pretty. Some of them seem to fly in the face of what most Americans believe about gender, merit, and discrimination. In my experience, members of clubs do discuss these issues frequently and seriously, and not merely in hypothetical terms.

Why, then, if I know and agree with some of these common objections, am I comfortable being a member of a final club? First of all, no acceptable alternative is on the table; after all, final clubs do fulfill an important, albeit inflated, social role at Harvard. If the final clubs disappeared, the University would buy up the land, and not a single square foot of it would be dedicated to student social space. The new library administration building across from Felipe’s should serve as a glaring reminder of that, as should the current “renovation” of the old Pudding building on 12 Holyoke St. Going co-ed is another option frequently touted, but this suggestion doesn’t recognize that final clubs are ultimately controlled by old-school graduate trustees, nor does it address questions of social elitism.

Second of all, and more importantly, none of these objections is persuasive enough to convince me that I should leave an organization I care so deeply about. Final clubs are dynamic institutions that do change over time, and rarely from outside pressure. Many members feel that they can much more effectively participate in the debate from within.

Some might ask why eight mansions scattered around campus serve as dedicated social spaces for such a small number of students. I’d like to pose a different question: Why have 12 (much bigger) Houses failed to live up to their full potential as social spaces?

I’ll take it a step further and offer up a possible solution: The University should de-randomize housing and give rising sophomores greater say in choosing their social communities. At one point in the not-so-distant past “What House are you in?” wasn’t a vapid question. Adams was artsy. Eliot was snooty. Lowell was brainy. Mather was jock-y. Sure, there are potential problems with racial self-segregation and intra-house homogeneity, but flattening these wrinkles with the iron of randomization was a quick and ultimately careless fix, one that has resulted largely in the social sterilization of Harvard.

Unfortunately, in an attempt to pick up the social slack, final clubs have instead taken the heat.