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The Delta Gamma sorority at Harvard University has decided to close its doors instead of complying with the university’s new co-ed requirements.
In 2016, Harvard University told the school’s Greek life affiliates that they must either become co-ed organizations or forfeit members’ opportunities to hold leadership positions on campus and to win the university’s endorsement for prestigious postgraduate fellowships. According to The Crimson, beginning with the class of 2021, the school’s policy will ban undergraduate members of these groups from certain leadership positions, athletic captaincies, and postgraduate fellowships.
Just one week after the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority announced that they would now be Theta Zeta Xi, Delta Gamma, which was established at the university in 1994, has decided to shut down altogether.
The choice to disband was made in a May vote by members of the local chapter.
via The Washington Post:
The dissolution of Harvard’s chapter of Delta Gamma, established in 1994, highlights the ongoing debate — which has roiled the Ivy League campus — over gender discrimination, sexual harassment and freedom of association. In particular, it reveals the difficulty that all-female groups face in responding to penalties designed to stop forms of mostly male predation that have brought schools into conflict with federal law.
In announcing the planned sanctions against individual students in 2016, Harvard proved itself willing to take drastic action to bring social clubs to heel. College and university administrators have for years wrung their hands about unrecognized fraternities and other clubs, arguing that they have little power over groups that operate outside the institutional purview of the schools. (At Harvard, final clubs cut ties with the university in 1984 when presented with the choice of going co-ed or losing official recognition.)
The sanctions followed closely on the heels of a university report on sexual assault prevention that upbraided all-male final clubs — of which there are currently six — for “deeply misogynistic attitudes.” It said that 47 percent of female seniors who attended male final club events or participated in female final clubs themselves had reported “experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact since entering college.” According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard faces three open investigations into its compliance with Title IX, the federal prohibition on gender discrimination in schools receiving public funds.
Over the past three years, Harvard University organizations such as The Oak Club, the Sabliere Society, the Seneca, and the Spee Club have also become gender neutral. In late July, the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority officially became a gender-neutral organization called Theta Zeta Xi.
