Kudos for the Council

To The Editors of The Crimson:

As a second-year member of a student council that rarely engages in heated debate, I was pleasantly surprised when Sever 113 resounded with arguments and counter-arguments last Sunday night. However, I was disappointed with one of the arguments employed. Opponents of the resolution asserting that "final clubs, which currently bar all women from membership, are an embarassment to the Harvard Community..." argued that council members do not have the right to take a stand on this issue because they were not elected as political representatives.

This is hogwash. Whether a candidate runs on a platform that is anti-apartheid or anti-pu pu platter, whether his or her campaign is political or apolitical, there is an implicit understanding between voters and their choice that the former trusts the latter's judgement in volatile issues like this one regarding the Fly Club. By definition, all governments are inherently political. That the Undergraduate Council identifies itself as a "student government" at the beginning of every schoolyear (when it encourages students to run for office) underscores this truism.

To say that the council has eschewed political issues in the past would be nearly symptomatic of amnesia. The campaign for an open meeting with the Harvard Corporation (to discuss the possibility of divestment from South Africa) and the push for students' rights to affect the tenure process have dominated council agendas since I have been a member. Although U.C. efforts to have an impact upon Harvard, national or world politics have proved fruitless, one cannot deny that the efforts existed. Taking a stand on political issues like that of the final clubs enjoys incontrovertible precedence; having an impact on such issues enjoys none.

Citing the Undergraduate Council's illegitimacy on a political body might have helped forge a narrow victory for the final clubs at last Sunday's meeting, but such a tactic will not work at the dinner table, where each individual is entitled to state his or her own opinion. If friends and members of the Fly are to successfully defend their integrity on campus, they must answer critics' moralegalitarian arguments. Only the First Amendment guaranteeing "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" will serve as an effective line of defense. Members and fans of the Fly must refocus the debate so that the injustice to men who merely choose to associate with other men on their own private property is brought to the forefront. In a state as liberal as Massachusetts, the Fly Club must explicitly invoke the First Amendment before the MCAD. Otherwise, the Fly might very well get SWATed. Steven Frederick Grover '89