Dr. Richard Vedder
Dr. Richard Vedder, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University, authored a column in Forbes headlined “Boys Will Be Boys — Except At Harvard.”
…Harvard, which one half century ago was all men itself, thinks single sex associations are wrong and punishes kids who want to join fraternities and sororities. Since 2016, students belonging to “unrecognized single-gender social organizations” are overtly discriminated against, being no longer eligible to have campus leadership positions like captaining sports teams, or even getting letters of recommendations from deans for scholarships. A few other elite schools (Amherst for example) have gone even further, banning fraternities. While then Harvard President Drew Faust announced the new policy, she fomented about “forms of privilege and exclusion at odds with our deepest values” and “deeply rooted gender values.”
My first problem with Faust’s position is rooted in the word “our” in the previous sentence. She assets that schools have “deep values.” Schools are associations of individuals of widely different values, and trying to assert a uniform set of values for all students is authoritarianism found in Communist and Fascist dictatorships, but not usually in a nation reveling in its individualism and the right to defy convention and authority. Louis XIV said “L’etat est moi.” Is Faust or her successor Lawrence Bacow saying, “Harvard –it is me?” Is 17th century France the model for university governance at Harvard? Good universities delight in attacking uniformity of views, promoting the freedom of association that goes with academic discourse and social interaction. Vive la difference!…
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