Flotsam & Jetsam

Sam Smith - The Washngton Post reports that "Harvard University will maintain a controversial policy set in 2016 that penalizes undergraduates who join fraternities, sororities and other single-gender social organizations...The policy — which bars undergraduates who join such organizations from student leadership roles at Harvard-recognized student organizations and sports teams — would continue to further gender equity on campus.

"The decision was announced by President Drew Faust and Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Bill Lee at a faculty meeting and in a statement sent to the university community. They said that  Students in the class of 2021 — this year’s freshmen — and students admitted later who join such groups cannot receive recommendations from the Harvard College dean for elite academic opportunities after graduation, such as the Rhodes Scholarship."

The article brought to mind your editor's different experience with Harvard when he was there in the 1950s. Having gone to a co-ed high school and having four sisters, not allowing women, for example, to join the college radio station seemed to me another example of a sort of prep school childishness. It wasn't a moral issue, just common sense.

But then I crossed the line. Unable to find a Harvard crew for a sailing race on Lake Medford, I called a friend at Radcliffe and asked her to join me.  The problem with this was that I won the race and the guy who came in second filed a formal complaint with the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association. There was a formal hearing and I had my first place removed for having a woman crew. Again, I wasn't pressing a cause, I just needed a crew.