Harvard Rules (35 page)

For all these reasons, there is a vacuum in the college's social life, and that vacuum is filled by a peculiar Harvard phenomenon known as final clubs.

The tradition of private men's clubs at Harvard dates back to 1791, with the founding of what is still the university's most exclusive club, the Porcellian. Now there are eight clubs, all of them still men-only, with names like the Fly, the Fox, the Phoenix, and the Delphic. Their multistory, elegantly furnished clubhouses are discreetly scattered about Harvard Square on immensely valuable real estate. Collectively, the final clubs are said to be the second-largest property owners in Cambridge. The university would love to buy their land, but it cannot; each club is privately owned by its alumni. For many years, the clubs were connected to the university through utilities such as the electric and phone systems. But in 1984, anxious about the legal ramifications of the clubs' discriminatory policies, Harvard severed its official ties with them. While the university administration probably wouldn't mind if the clubs disappeared altogether, it can't do anything to make that happen, and in some ways it can't afford to. Club alumni are wealthy and powerful—probably more so than Harvard alums who weren't club members—and wouldn't take kindly to hostile actions on the part of their alma mater.

Unlike Yale's secret societies, such as Skull and Bones, which aim to foster an intense but secretive bonding experience among their members, Harvard's final clubs are primarily social organizations. (They derived their name because they were once the final step in an ascending hierarchy of Harvard clubs.) Every year, the clubs “punch” their new members from the sophomore and, less frequently, junior classes. Punches attend a series of competitive social events during which their numbers are whittled down. The twenty or so men who make the cut at each club become members of a circle that's exclusive even by Harvard standards. “There's a lot of social cachet that comes from being a member of a club,” one Phoenix member explained on the condition that his name not be used. (Members are discouraged from talking about their clubs.) After he was admitted, he said, “girls I'd never spoken to would come up to me on the street and say, ‘Congratulations.'” Final clubs have another big perk: their alumni networks help members find employment after graduation.

And, of course, members get a key to some of the most luxurious facilities on campus. With libraries, dining rooms, studies, poker rooms, bars, and the like, the clubhouses feel like comfortable upper-crust remnants from a bygone era. Though zoning regulations prohibit residency in the clubs, most have bedrooms that are pressed into service as needed. Private chefs prepare meals for the young men several times a week. It's slightly bizarre to see such extravagant spaces inhabited by such young people, as if the children have taken over the mansion while their parents are out of town. “The clubs,” Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison once wrote with unintentional understatement, “are not the best preparation for living in a democratic society.” But they are not meant to be. Instead, they serve as a bulwark against the encroachment of meritocracy, a means of further solidifying an already privileged position.

On weekends, the clubs throw open their doors and host parties, rowdy, alcohol-fueled bashes that dominate the college's social life, both for those who are invited and for those who aren't. Because the clubs don't open themselves up to just anyone. Students usually need to be on a guest list to gain entry, and as a matter of course, the lists consist of a few male friends of the members and the prettiest girls on campus. (The Phoenix, for example, allows each member to invite seventeen women.) While most students say they find this weeding-out process offensive and contrary to the merit-based methodology by which they gained acceptance to Harvard, the invitees go anyway, because of the lack of other activities and because the clubs serve alcohol. Since most college students are under the legal drinking age of twenty-one, the Cambridge bars regularly ask for proof of age; final clubs do not, not least because that would exclude most of their own members from drinking. Cambridge bars close at 1:00
A
.
M
. The final clubs do not. Some of the parties have particular themes. The Fly has an annual Great Gatsby bash; the Owl slums it with a yearly “Catholic Schoolgirl” party, at which female guests are expected to arrive thematically costumed. At most of the clubs, women can enter only by the back door and are permitted only in certain rooms.

Invariably, final club parties serve as a nexus for students—particularly male students, given the generally high female-to-male ratio—cruising for sex. Equally predictably, they have become a locus for date rape. Every year produces new rumors of another woman raped in some upstairs room late at night after drinking too much. “It is…almost a platitude that rape and the conditions for its persistence are found within finals clubs,” wrote
Crimson
columnist Madeleine S. Elfenbein in May 2003. If the victim wants to pursue the matter, she can take it before the university's Administrative Board, colloquially known as the Ad Board, which handles student disciplinary matters. (They can also go to the Cambridge police, of course, but few do.) Accusations of date rape are frustratingly hard to prove or disprove, and the college struggles with their resolution. Since Harvard has no control over the final clubs, the university can do little to tackle the problem.

The clubs' most widespread effect, however, is to polarize the campus between those who join them or are invited to their parties, and those who don't get punched and aren't invited. If you're a male junior wandering around campus on a Saturday night wondering where all the cutest girls have gone, they're probably at the final clubs, dancing and drinking with guys who, apparently, rank higher in the social pecking order than you do. Inevitably, the social disparities cause tensions among friends and roommates. The irony is that few involved with the final clubs, neither members nor guests, sound entirely comfortable with their existence. “In my ideal Harvard, I wouldn't have the clubs,” said the Phoenix member. “But there aren't many other opportunities for fun.”

Everything is competitive at Harvard: applications, academics, extracurricular activities, social life, sex. And while of course this is to some extent true at any college, and in life itself, at Harvard that competition is ramped up. Because, although these students sit atop the educational pyramid, they're still young, still developing the emotional maturity that enhances judgment and helps weather stress. The combination of competition at the highest level and all the psychological and emotional challenges of young adulthood is a potent recipe for unhappiness and, sometimes, worse.

Many students seem to have a love-hate relationship with Harvard. They respect its history, its tradition, its power; students refer to that moment when they tell outsiders where they go to school as “dropping the H-bomb.” But they also feel oppressed by the weight of the university's past. They are encouraged to be individuals at an institution whose oft-cited glorious history obliterates individual importance. Sometimes they long to rebel—but rebellion seems foolish when all around them they see the rewards of conformity: the power, wealth, and prestige that come to those who play by Harvard's rules.

The students do, however, have their subversive moments. It's telling to consider the three rituals that, according to campus tradition, every Harvard student endeavors to participate in before graduating. All three protest against Harvard's self-importance, reminding the institution that its hallowed halls ring empty without the sounds of flesh-and-blood human beings.

The first ritual is to have sex in the dimly lit stacks of Widener Library, amid the millions of dusty volumes and the book-lined carrels of solitary, diligent graduate students. This is not easy, as the windows of opportunity during which a couple can escape detection are of short and unpredictable duration. Library employees are constantly re-shelving books, and then there are those midnight oil–burning grad students. Of course, the risks are what make it exciting. So is the sense of bringing crazy, irrational life to a place filled with the august works of the dead. It's a much healthier—and potentially more comical—version of the anti-intellectual impulse that led SDS to threaten to burn the Widener card catalog in the 1960s.

The second ritual is called Primal Scream. Every semester, at midnight on the evening before exams start, hundreds of male and female students run around the interior perimeter of the Yard—stark naked. This is courageous, and not just because hundreds of other students and some faculty members gather to watch, but because fall-term exams take place in January, arguably the coldest month in New England. Wearing only sneakers, yelling and screaming and shivering, the students streak around the Yard, a course of probably five or six hundred yards. It's not a sexual demonstration or an act of physical braggadocio; no one looks good running naked. It is, rather, a wonderfully human outburst, this posse of Harvard students cutting loose in a manner that is inherently unpretentious and deliberately dumb. Primal Scream is that rare thing at Harvard, a
communal
act. Even if for only a few minutes in the thick of the night, it makes people feel that they are part of something both human and humane—like the tent city that sprang up in the Yard during the Mass Hall occupation.

The third ritual involves the bronze statue of John Harvard located in front of University Hall in the Yard. Engraved with the words
JOHN HARVARD
,
FOUNDER
, 1638, the 1884 statue is a stopping point for tour groups, whose guides refer to it as “the statue of three lies.” John Harvard wasn't the founder of the college but its first large donor. The founding date wasn't 1638, but 1636. And because there are no surviving paintings of John Harvard, sculptor Daniel Chester French had no idea what he looked like, and so he used as his model a comely young graduate named Sherman Hoar, class of 1882. Hence, three lies.

Because it makes a picturesque backdrop for a photo, the statue of John Harvard is probably Harvard's most popular tourist attraction. In fall and spring, it's rare to walk by without seeing visitors snapping pictures of each other standing in front of it. Usually they partake in another ritual—rubbing its left foot for good luck. So many thousands of people have rubbed that foot over the years that its dark bronze color has been polished to a shiny gold, considerably brighter than the rest of the statue.

But there's another reason why that part of the statue is colored gold, one that the tourists don't know. The third rite of passage for Harvard undergrads is to urinate on John Harvard's left foot. The act involves some athleticism, as the statue rests on an elevated base that would require climbing for anyone wishing to relieve him or herself on its foot. But anyone walking through the Yard late on a weekend night can see students gleefully baptizing John Harvard with their urine. Such blasphemy, of course, only happens in the dark. When the sun rises, the rebellions disappear, and the polishing starts anew.

“On Monday mornings, I see all these visitors eagerly rubbing that foot,” one tour guide said, “and I wish I could tell them what they're really rubbing. But of course I can't.”

 

The culture of Harvard, and student reactions to it, matter for two reasons. First, because Harvard shapes its students' understanding of the way the world is and ought to be. As Summers said, the students are malleable. For four years, they are instructed that the way to get ahead in life is to compete relentlessly and individually—indeed, that competition is the essence of life. And then, they go out after graduation, some 1,600 strong every year, making their way into leadership positions in banks, law firms, businesses, the media, and governments, and they apply the lessons that Harvard taught them, shaping the world around them as they were shaped. It may not make them happy, and it may not make the world a better place in which to live. But it keeps them on top. And, very frequently, it makes them wealthy—so that they can, in turn, give back to Harvard, and help it stay on top as well.

And second, the culture of Harvard matters because Larry Summers' vision for Harvard's future didn't address or ameliorate the tension between its students' prowess and their discontent, but amplified it.

By the end of 2003, Summers' specific agenda for the university was clear—reforming the curriculum, boosting the sciences, globalizing the university, and launching the massive expansion of the Harvard campus across the Charles River, in Allston. Progress was being made on all fronts. As part of the globalization effort, for example, FAS dean Bill Kirby had taken direct control of the study abroad office. He aimed to facilitate studying in other countries, something Harvard had previously discouraged on the grounds that foreign academic programs did not meet its standards. Kirby was also preparing four different committees to study aspects of the curricular review. And the university was bidding on yet another large chunk of land in Allston.

But gradual progress was too slow for Summers. Always impatient, he wanted things to change faster. The people who worked for him talked about how Summers wanted to create “a legacy.” He was already thinking about how he would be remembered in the pantheon of Harvard presidents, possibly already considering what he wanted to do after Harvard. If his next move was already on his mind, then he didn't have much time to effect a legacy. Everything had to happen fast.

The president of Yale, Richard Levin, once wrote that “in Yale Time, the day (at least the weekday) has four parts: classes, extracurricular activities, study, and hanging out, generally in that sequence, although sometimes (I hope not too often) the hanging out part starts early in the evening and displaces the study portion of the day. Each part of this daily cycle is an essential element of the Yale experience.”