More Concern over Segregation at Harvard
Posted on March 31st, 2008 in Uncategorized | 23 Comments »
In the Washington Post, Ken Goldstein argues that allowing segregation in order to accomodate religious sensibilities is a slippery slope.
First it’s only one gym, then a swimming pool. Next might be the demand that women at Harvard wear a little more clothing — you know, just a reasonable amount more.
Finally these Muslim women, denied the opportunity to pursue higher education in Muslim-dominated societies, will demand the separation of men from women in classes.
Perhaps Harvard will accommodate them — reasonably, of course — by establishing a women’s college to insulate these acutely sensitive women from the pernicious influence of men.
They could call it Radcliffe College.
Meanwhile, the story is picked up in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Taha Abdul-Basser, the Muslim chaplain at Harvard, said said both episodes were indicative of the growing number of Muslims in the US.
“There are some people who are not just comfortable that Muslims, by virtue of the change of demographics, are going to become more and more visible.”
This argument may be generally true, but in the context of the Harvard situation, it is hilariously wrong. It is not, in fact, the non-Muslim Harvardians who are uncomfortable with Muslim students. It’s the Muslim students who are uncomfortable with American cultural norms and values (i.e., segregation bad, integration good).
This debate is really about an issue that Harry Lewis has been trying to inject into the university crucible for years now: In an increasingly global university, what values can and should Harvard teach its students? Or does it just espouse “tolerance,” even when some values conflict with fundamental American beliefs?
In, for example, America and the Curricular Review, circa 2002, Lewis wrote:
We have just come through a year in which America has been reminded of her dependence on the rest of the world, and of the fact that her fundamental values of freedom and equality are not accepted universally. We rely on these freedoms more in this old University than anywhere, especially the freedom to speak and to have a rational argument, an argument in which distinctions are respected and broad labels are avoided. I wonder, when we finish redesigning our general education program for the next generation of students, whether America will have any special place in it, and if indeed if it will have a motivating force behind it at all. It seems to me that in this free society, we should want to teach young minds how to learn, but also to inspire their souls to grasp and to sustain the best humane ideals that our shared heritage has given us.
In the context of the debate over gym segregation, those words seem prescient.
23 Responses
3/31/2008 1:23 pm
“First it’s only one gym, then a swimming pool. Next might be the demand that women at Harvard wear a little more clothing — you know, just a reasonable amount more.”
Ken Goldstein (whoever he is) is out of his mind. We will never reach the point where Muslims demand Harvard women “wear a little more clothing,” let alone the chance that anyone will ever take this seriously.
3/31/2008 2:19 pm
All slippery slope arguments are inherently ridiculous, because they basically say nothing. Too much water will kill you, so drinking it is a slippery slope toward dying. The suggestion that our “humane ideals” and ability to have a “rational argument” are threatened by the accommodation in question is intellectual voodoo.
3/31/2008 2:53 pm
Then it’s also intellectual voodoo to claim that giving bus fare to the ROTC cadets will grievously injure gays and lesbians at Harvard.
My Globe piece takes no position on which alternative is preferable, accommodating both Muslim women in the gym and ROTC students at Harvard, or neither. I say simply that no rational argument has been put forward for cutting one in and cutting the other out.
3/31/2008 4:26 pm
Wonder what went on in the mind of The General Counsel, my friend Bob Iuliano, when, as I presume, he approved what amounts to segregation of a gym at Harvard. He is a thoughtful person, is very rational, and has a good sense of history, so this is very puzzling. What rational argument is there for The University to approve something as discriminatory as this? What was President Faust (someone who grew up in a geographical area that, for the most part, was segregated by the color of a person’s skin) thinking?
This move can be spun in many different ways. It does, however, eventually come down to a discriminatory practice. Hasn’t all the verbiage from Harvard over the past several years condemned policies such as this one? Perhaps I’ve missed something.
Harry Lewis has it exactly right… why “this” and not “that.” Where does this all end? Harvard says it does not discriminate on the basis of religious beliefs. This decision would seem to give lie to that.
My wife has told me that when she was a first year student at Cornell in 1970, the main gym was off limits to women at certain times. Thirty-eight years later and we still have the same practices at Harvard. That is difficult to believe.
3/31/2008 4:40 pm
I think the word “discrimination” is the problem here. It assumes too much. I am a white male Harvard student. I approach the gym. Sign says, “Muslim Women Only 10am-11am Today”. Disappointed, I turn around and head back to my dorm to wait an hour before returning. Am I the victim of “discrimination”? Sure. But equating this with Segregation, as in Whites Only toilets or Jim Crow laws, is intellectual laziness. Context matters. I have no view on the ROTC comparison; I’m insufficiently informed on the details. But I do think that it is legitimate to treat those who are in a position of social/political/religious vulnerability — as Muslims are in this country — differently from those who are not. This can go too far, of course, can lead to true reverse discrimination, or a PC hell. But the way this issue is being framed to me smacks of white western liberal male alarmism. You’d think they were a protected minority or something.
3/31/2008 8:33 pm
The use of “discrimination” may seem silly, but it’s justified by the fact that Harvard used “equality” to justify the policy. It is not silly to argue about principles on which Harvard says it is relying.
Remember, the gym is not being reserved to Muslims; it’s being reserved to women. Indeed, part of the justification for the policy is that many non-Muslim women feel more comfortable working out without men ogling them. So the question raised by Mr. Goldstein is really whether women are “in a position of social vulnerability,” to excerpt LGD’s language. That was the premise on which Radcliffe continued to exist for 22 years after Harvard went coeducational; with Radcliffe around, women could have everything men had, and a little bit more. They were more than equal, as it were. Harvard is using the need for protectionist structures as an argument for closing the gym. If that is a legitimate reason for keeping men out of the gym, single-sex math classes should be on the table, shouldn’t they? And single-sex housing? And so the bigger question is: Having had one notion of gender equality for quite awhile, and gone in another direction in the gym case in order to promote “equality,” should Harvard now extend the new “equality by exclusion” principle to other areas? And are such protectionist structures the best way to educate women (and men) for life in world society after they graduate? And finally, should we be teaching that it is in women’s best interests, given their vulnerability, for protectionist, exclusionary structures to be universal in society, not just in our university? How far does the new “equality” principle go?
3/31/2008 9:27 pm
Are the women claiming the need to be protected? I don’t think either ‘segregation’ or ‘protectionism’ is at issue; this is a community question just like the question of coed bathrooms. As it happens we live in a society where gender separation in bathrooms is the norm, and gender separation in exercise is not. Is this American norm re excretoria defensible, to the level of strictness that Harry would have us maintain? Or should we un-slippery the slope all the way up to the level of forcing absolutely equal access to every space on campus? Who are the Kroks, for that matter, to reject altos?
I think if a critical mass of women feels nude in the workout space they have a right to let people know how their cultural norm is different from that of the host society. They have no right to be accommodated, but surely they can ask, and reasonable people (videlicet, as always, Harry Lewis and Susan Marine) can disagree.
I know Bob Iuliano’s thinking very well, and can assure you that he does not see it as his job to ‘approve’ or ‘disapprove’ anything the school’s leadership decides. He is a lawyer, not an educator; he is there to provide information to educators to help them make their decisions. The school does not REPORT to him, Sam, just because he happens to be its lawyer.
If we wanted the community to be run by ‘professionals’ (lawyers, psychologists, management “experts,” and financial-services guys) surely we’d get rid of tenure and call it a day. As it happens I’d rather turn the place over to Harry again, even though I disagree with his no-compromise posture re Muslim gyno-fitness, and disagree STRONGLY with his taking that posture into the press.
How come I no longer have to login? Gives me the creeps.
All the condolences an imperfect stranger can offer, Richard, on the loss of your father.
Standing Eagle
3/31/2008 9:28 pm
“Harvard used “equality” to justify the policy”
Where? That’s unfortunate indeed, if it happened.
3/31/2008 9:53 pm
I quote that line about “equality” in the Globe piece. To be fair, this was not a high-level policy statement; it was an email sent by the athletic department to students who asked for an explanation, or perhaps a broadcast email, I am not sure which. But it is the only explanation that has been offered, and it is actually not clear if the decision got made at that level or somewhere higher up.
Also, SE, I am quite clear in the Globe piece that the strict way is not the only way of construing equality. It’s just that Harvard has had that one way of construing it for 30+ years now, and this new policy is inconsistent with that. As I indicated, that doesn’t make the new way wrong, any more than fraternities are wrong. But it is inconsistent, and in particular inconsistent with the strict interpretation being applied to ROTC. It therefore demands an explanation of the new meaning of equality. We are all groping in the dark trying to put words into Harvard’s mouth at this point (sorry for that mixed metaphor!).
3/31/2008 10:03 pm
Creeps me out too. You get to the bottom, and there it is - exposed!
3/31/2008 10:05 pm
The thing is, HL, your argument might have been (was actually) thus nuanced — but bringing it up together with ROTC, in the Globe, meant you played right into the hands of our cultural warriors, on whom nuance, common sense and reasonable accommodation are always lost. I don’t know if that’s what’s meant when SE says he disagrees with your taking this into the press, but I do believe that’s the outcome.
LGD, the undergraduate, has the sensible approach-wait an hour until it’s his turn, and maybe in that time he’ll get some reading done for section —
3/31/2008 10:25 pm
For the record, here is the full email from the Athletic Dept: “These hours have been put in place for equality reasons. Whether it is for overall comfort or religious purposes we wanted to offer an opportunity for women to work out without the presence of men.”
People who know my record as dean know that I am not anti-Muslim. The first time I nearly got fired was for coming to the defense of Zayed Yasin and those who chose him to be commencement orator.
I am puzzled by the last couple of comments about venue for this discussion, which suggest that blogs are the place where subtleties can be argued in an nuanced and subtle way and one should avoid doing that in the Boston Globe because it gets all the right-wing extremists who read that paper too excited.
The ROTC parallel is inconvenient, but no one has explained to me why it is wrong. As long as the argument goes that Harvard will have absolutely nothing to do with a discriminatory organization, even one operating under a form of discrimination voted by Congress and signed into law by the President, and any Harvard student who wants to participate in it can do it at MIT on their own nickel, then I say: Curves is a terrific gym. As I said earlier today, my piece is silent on whether I’d prefer both or neither, but no fair brandishing the need for strict construction of a nondiscrimination principle in one case but just telling everyone to relax about a reasonable accommodation in the other.
3/31/2008 10:36 pm
“The ROTC parallel is inconvenient, but no one has explained to me why it is wrong”
Could it be simply that, as a society, we pay greater deference to Organized Religion, which means that we do a little more for religionists than for members of other groups? I mentioned, in an earlier post, the example of kosher corners, counters, in House dining halls. Yes, non-Jews may partake of the goods if they don’t defile the space. But it’s a deference paid to a religion that we wouldn’t make for non-religious groups (ROTC at MIT doesn’t ask for a gun rack by the dining room door).
P.S. No one could, in any way, construe your Globe article, or posts, as anti-Muslim.
4/1/2024 5:56 am
SE
The comment in your third paragraph about approve or disapprove is so nuanced, that it seems as if it could be the work of an HLS graduate.
By the way, I never said, nor suggested, that “the school” reported to him.
4/1/2024 9:34 am
EADW,
On the one hand we have a group said to exclude men from workouts on the basis of religious law. (After reading the Mahtani piece, I wonder if that is even accurate, but it is the way the matter has been presented.) On the other hand we have a group excluding gays from military service on the basis of US law. As have said, I think it is wrong to characterize this in religious rather than gender terms, and I am very sympathetic to Mahtani’s take on this, that the Muslims never made a big issue out of this request and don’t deserve the heat they are taking on it. But as you have drawn the distinction along the line of “Organized Religion,” I have to ask: Is that what you mean by “we do a little more for religionists than for members of other groups,” that the university should defer to a religious law on a matter of exclusion but never, under any circumstances, to mere US law?
4/1/2024 10:43 am
Well, the law is not my strong suit, to put it gently. Mahtani’s piece is smart: Harvard could have made it a gender issue, like MIT’s swimming pool, and said “women-only” at QRAC for X hours per week. And almost certainly there’d be no scandal or furor. In other words, make the “reasonable accommodation” but don’t explain why you’re doing it! But that hardly seems like good management, and wouldn’t work for ROTC, the arguments against which I have never found very convincing or moving.
4/1/2024 11:04 am
SE has hit the nail on the head, with the comparison between “segregated” bathrooms and “segregated” exercise facilities. This is indeed an issue touching upon community. Framing the debate in terms of “discrimination” automatically cedes ground to the aforementioned cultural warriors. I am always puzzled when folks who enjoy the benefits of culturally superiority reach for the weapons of the dispossessed when addressing issues like this. Rich, next time you open the door for a woman in front of me, and then walk in ahead of me, I am going to go to the barricades!
4/1/2024 1:17 pm
LGD speaks fairly good sense.
Harry, what DO you think about this way of parsing the difference between the ROTC issue and the gym issue? One has to do with discrimination in terms of identity, the other has to do with cultural norms of comfort. In other words, ROTC is like a Christian student club excluding agnostics, whereas the QRAC three hours a week is like a dorm hallway bathroom.
As I’ve said, I agree with Harry that ROTC is not like that Christian group excluding non-co-religionists, since its discrimination is mandated by Congress. I think an exception should be made for ROTC. But I don’t think it’s that hard to construe the gym issue as having NOTHING to do with equality (whoever in the athletics dept. wrote that e-mail should be thrown under the bus) and just being about accommodating a cultural norm — in other words, an administrative judgment call rather than something involving big principles.
It used to be that House Masters were the place where judgment-call power resided. It makes perfect sense that Howard is the driving force behind this — it’s just the kind of reasonable parochial thing that House Masters are supposed to be able to do in their own fiefdoms. The difference is that this time the Dean of the College was too apathetic, exhausted, absent, or whatever, to stop him from implementing his idea on a College-wide facility (albeit one that’s under-used and far away from most of students’ daytime activities).
Does Evelyn Hammonds know how to handle House Masters? I very much doubt it. Nobody can handle House Masters, although there are those who knew how to ignore them and waste their unique strengths.
Standing Eagle
keen on the COLLEGE
4/1/2024 1:22 pm
And I should clarify, Harry, that my beef with your airing this matter in the Globe was in the elevated stature that it gave to the issue of a few hours a week in the QRAC. ROTC is a big deal; basketball in halter tops is not. Your piece was only newsworthy cuz Islam was involved — just as Summers’s impolitic nature only became newsworthy when ‘Are women smart?’ became involved. I think we need something stronger than a topical war-of-civilizations news hook to entitle us to bring out hobbyhorses on any given occasion to receive the kind of global attention this thing is getting.
Yes, Summers was impolitic (which should have been fatal to his presidency anyway); and yes, ROTC is exceptional (and should be on campus). But using wedges like gender and religion to get attention to those matters in the media is in the long term (in my opinion) counterproductive. Whether Harvard was hurt by the Summers flap I don’t know; but I believe the spectacle hurt America at a time (not yet over) of national crisis. And I believe Islam-baiting is unfortunate even when triggered by the least Islamophobic among us (and yes, of course, Harry is no Islamophobe).
SE
4/1/2024 3:50 pm
SE,
One of the fascinating things about the past few days is how many people have told me, in essence, that I have made a mistake by taking people at their word. It started last Tuesday, when a friend said my logic was unassailable, but of course my premise was wrong, as the nondiscrimination issue was just an excuse, and if it ever went away, he’d find another excuse for keeping ROTC away. I countered that I had more confidence than he in the bona fides of many people who insist that this is the ONLY issue (Richard Thomas, for example, in an earlier thread of this blog). Now in terming ROTC a “big deal,” I wonder if you likewise mean there is something more than sexual orientation nondiscrimination at stake, such as guns perhaps. At the same time, to credit your trivialization of the current issue as “basketball in halter tops” requires discrediting Harvard’s explanation that what is at stake is “equality.” Still stuck as I am in a pre-post-verbal framework, I try to go by what people say and try not to substitute thoughts others might think they should have had instead. Taking people at their word, I conclude that these are both nondiscrimination issues (and by the way, LGD, the nondiscrimination principles make no mention of advantaged and disadvantaged groups being treated differently).
4/1/2024 5:30 pm
Yes, I think you made a mistake in taking Harvard at its word if you took Harvard’s word to be expressed by an athletic department flack at a time when there is effectively almost no Dean running the show, and creating a message for everyone to stay ‘on’. In a leadership vacuum incoherence is much more likely than malice — and the incoherence in this case is not in the definition of equality but in allowing someone to use the word at all, when it’s clearly irrelevant.
When I say ROTC is a big deal I mean only that it involves the US government and is a purposely symbolic exclusion that makes Harvard, more or less purposely, into a lightning rod. Harvard cannot spare the moral authority for such symbolic acts at this juncture (and in fact never really could).
Basketball at the QRAC is not purposely symbolic, and only becomes symbolic if someone takes it to the Globe.
Your real issue, it seems to me, and I could be wrong, is with the FAS and its stance on ROTC. You and I agree on that; but in bringing in all these other issues you’re not pointing out that ‘equality’ is slipping at Harvard, you’re pointing out that there simply IS NO LEADERSHIP in the College. This has been true since Gross handed everything over to Pat O’Brien back in the day.
But there is leadership in FAS and it should be taken to task ongoingly for the ROTC ban, which — again we agree — is bad education policy for an American school.
SE
4/1/2024 6:18 pm
SE,
“When I say ROTC is a big deal I mean only that it involves the US government and is a purposely symbolic exclusion.” Which is, I think, another way of saying what I said, that “politics determine what forms of discrimination are inoffensive.” Pax.
4/11/2024 10:07 am
When women are excluded, it’s sexism.
When men are excluded, it’s defended.