Then, when the punchee must choose one among several invitations if he is an especially desirable prospect, the Club whose dinner he attends may feel reasonably sure he will accept if elected. Voting is held the following night, and those who escape the blackballs are notified of their election at 8 a.m. the next morning. They must accept or refuse by noon, and in the intervening hours the club members wait anxiously behind the front door to greet the accepting sophomores (outside on the steps, for they are not yet official members).
The initiation dinners come either in December or in early February. Then, in the presence of a great many dinner-jacketed graduates, the new members are brought into the Club building for the first time, are made to undergo initiating rituals of varying degrees of pomp, ceremony, and drunkenness, and are given the symbolic Club ties and front door keys. On most occasions, initiation nights turn ultimately into alcoholic brawls, and the University Police place them high on their winter social calendar. The Cambridge Fire Department also is usually summoned to provide entertainment for this event. Hook and ladder teams descend noisily on the Fly Club in response to false alarms turned in from the box on the Fly's wall by gleeful members of rival clubs.
It is these occasional explosions of the Clubs into the general life of the University that produce vocal resentment against the Clubs and the "Clubbies". The stock image of the Clubbie casts him as a preppie snob, with well-cut clothes and well-combed hair, who retreats into his club sanctum in order to be among his own kind and cut himself off from his rather unattractive, socially awkward classmates. He is seen as a collegiate version of the senile, plush-leather-armschair-sitters of London's clubs--rather disdainful of the academic life, of the University, and of participation in any extracurricular activity except the Lampoon or athletics.
In some cases this bitter stereotype comes unfortunately close to the truth. But it is far from a general rule. A great many members have strong interests in some outside student activity and make the Clubs only a part of their undergraduate life. They find in the Clubs privacy, good food, and pleasant company in relaxed, comfortable conditions--all of which the Houses often fail to provide--and see in them an opportunity to get to know a small group of people fairly intimately. Academically, according to a tabulation made some years ago by Dean Watson's office, Club members are about on a par with the college norm, except for a rather horrifying dip during the punching season.
Whether or not individual Club members are snobbish and unpleasant (and in most cases they are not), no one can deny that there is a strong undemocratic tinge to the system which rubs off on anyone who joins it. The Clubs generally draw the men of so-called "good family" and upbringing, and though they are not bound by restrictive codes, only the most exceptional Jew or Negro would have a chance of being accepted.
There is no pretense of electing a man solely on the basis of intellectual merit or creative attainments. But no matter whether one is repelled by the Clubs' undemocracy or accepts it, this alone is a weak argument for abolishing them. Belabored with the charge of undemocracy, the club man will merely reply, "So what if I'm undemocratic. I've got a right to choose my circle of friends as long as I'm not doing anyone else any harm."
The University administration, on its part, is far less concerned with the airy ideals of democracy than it is with the practical effects of the Clubs on their members and on the college. Dean Bender, one of the most sensible of the Clubs' critics, points out that entering a Club can easily isolate an undergraduate from the rest of University life. For the Club members, college becomes a highly limiting experience instead of the broadening one it might be. As far as social contacts go, the Clubs are simply little St. Paul's or Grotons or Miltons all over again. Bender calls them "little bastions" where all are of one social background, one economic status, even one geographic area.
The Clubs tend to cut the Clubbies off from the rewards of creative undergraduate activities--dramatics, publications--at which they might otherwise spend their time, and they rob these activities of the benefits of the Club members' participation. In extreme cases, men go through Harvard and their lives enjoying little personal contact with people outside the Club world. But the lure into this breezy Clubbie limbo can easily be overcome, and there are more and more Club members today whose college interests and acquaintances are fairly well shuffled. It also can be argued that the Clubs, where interests differ but social background is the same, are no more confining than the dramatic or athletic cliques, where interests are the same and social background makes no difference.
Whatever effect the clubs may have on their members as individuals, their effect on the college as a whole is practically nil, and this is probably the system's strong point. At Princeton, where every undergraduate must join a club in order to eat, everyone must submit to Bicker's embarrassing process of social rating. The same is approximately true of any college where there is a widespread fraternity system. Some bitterness and bad feeling are bound to result when there is pressure on everyone to join and the club system is a matter of college-wide prestige. This is what Harvard has successfully avoided. With only 14 per cent of the undergraduates in Final Clubs, an overwhelming majority of students have no concern for clubs at all. There is certainly no college prestige involved in joining a club--if anything, there is a loss of it.
In any one Harvard class, there will be a small group interested in joining a Club. Most of them will be elected, and the disappointments will be few. In the much larger category of men simply uninterested, there will be no disappointments because they frankly have no desire to join and no need for doing so.
Ironically, it is the most repellent qualities of the Clubs that give the system this advantage. Their snobbishness, their secrecy, their uncreativity, their preoccupation with an isolated social world all tend to dissuade most undergraduates from any any wish to join. Dean Bender, in the same breath as he criticizes the Clubs for "narrowness," feverently hopes "that the Clubs never start getting democratic." If the Clubs were to elect people on a basis of creative merit, he points out, then undergraduates might really begin to care about joining. The Clubs would become a generally recognized elite, and the punching season would become a bitter college-wide scramble. There seems little chance, however, that the Clubs will take a turn in this direction.
Despite the dim view that University Hall may take of the Clubs, there is little likelihood that Harvard will ever officially abolish them. In the first place, the administration takes quite seriously Harvard's tradition of giving students free reign until they interfere with others.
Secondly, there is a strong suspicion that the Clubs could never, realistically, be destroyed. Greek letter fraternities were outlawed 100 years ago, and the present Clubs simply sprang up in their place. And of course there is the crass but major consideration that much of the Universitiy's financial support comes from wealthy Club alumni who might be reluctant to feed the hand that bites them.
By all appearances, the Clubs will last as long as they can support themselves. Already they have survived a good many hard knocks from the outside: the one-two punch of the 1929 Depression and the founding of the House system, for instance, before which time members usually ate three meals a day in the Club, enjoyed special benefits such as theatre ticket services and private Club railway cars for the Yale football game and crew race, and generally ran up bills of $150 to $200 a month.
World War II came as another shock to the system. The Hasty Pudding Club, normally the first step towards Final Club membership, was turned into an Officers' Club, and undergraduates were speeded through college in an accelerated military program.
Today the Clubs' problems are not so dramatic as wars or depressions. Rather they are the result of gradual changes in the College itself. With rising standards of admission at Harvard, less and less "club material" from the Eastern prep schools is being accepted into the University. And the "preppies" that do come are often so interested in their academic work or else forced to spend so much time on their studies that they don't use the Club as much more than an occasional convenience. There is a good deal of grumbling from graduates in the Club lounges that "Things are not what they used to be here. In my day, you could come into the Club and find the bar filled from five o'clock till midnight."
Nor is the new type of "Clubbie" interested in devoting a lot of time and money to the punching season, and Club presidents often have to scramble around to recruit members to attend the various punching functions. Of course there is still a hard core of devoted members who haunt the Clubs morning, noon, and night--but they seem to be a slowly-dying breed.
A great many of the more liberal Club members are also eager to dispose of some of the stuffer rules of the Club game. Abortive movements have recently been started in some Clubs to admit ladies more frequently, and a few members feel that the Clubs would enjoy a friendlier place in the College if classmates could be brought in for meals. At least, they say, older guests should be invited more often. But these movements generally run into polite but firm opposition from the graduates, who remember a day when the Clubs were close-knit little bands of intimate friends, which might be broken up by frequent intrusions of outsiders, no matter how attractive and pleasant. The Clubs, tradition-bound as they are, are strongly tied to graduate opinion.
The punching season also seems to be lagging in a world gone by. There once was a time when practically all the sophomores punched were convinced from the very start that they wanted to join a Club. They had been brought up in families or schools where the Clubs were considered an integral part of a Harvard career. But this is no longer true today. A great many punchees have little idea of what goes on in a Club and, because of the general mystery that surrounds the Club's inner workings, they are never really told. And so they join for rather shallow reasons--all their friends are doing it, or they hope their Club connections will help them later in a business career. Later some of shot-in-the-dark types grow to like Club life, but a few are disillusioned.
Finally, the Clubs are being caught in a financial squeeze of varying proportions. Real estate taxes are extremely high, the upkeep of those massive brick buildings is pretty exorbitant, and the maintenance of a steward and staff of waiters and cook does not come cheap. The average Club bill totals between $35