Wedge

Tonight the Council may try to legislate discrimination out of undergraduate organizations. It will talk about an addition to its proposed series of Rules for Undergraduate Organizations explicitly forbidding such discrimination. The intention of the proposed clause is fine, but its adoption can do more harm than good.

At many other schools, undergraduate organizations such as fraternities handle a major part of student life. Students live and eat and spend their Saturday nights in clubs or fraternity houses; undergraduate offices frequently become the particular property of a specific fraternity. In such schools, admission of a club can make or break a student's life.

This is not true at Harvard. Only about 15 percent of the College belongs to organizations which worry about discriminatory "qualifications" for admission; only one group has a discriminatory charter. These groups are purely social clubs; their function is severely limited by University Hall restrictions requiring students to pay for room and board in College buildings.

A Council regulation forbidding discrimination would state in legal terms what these groups already know, the discrimination is becoming an unpopular standard for picking your associates. It would probably make the bias of one group tacit rather that overt. That is all. And the measure would be an-other restriction on the freedom of undergraduate groups. This one abridgement of freedom would imply the Council's right to make any such abridgements, to put restrictions on what an organization can do, or what it can say, or where it can meet. A rule forbidding discrimination, which might be a good rule, can set up a fine precedent for regulating polities or policies, a precedent that we fear.