"It was budget mud wrestling," he said. "It was mainly for females, although a few males were involved."

The sources said they speculated the handful of graduates at the club that night informed members of the graduate board the next Monday.

The next day, the signs appeared announcing the club's closure.

Graduate and undergraduate relations in the A.D. have been notoriously tenuous, especially since Jan. 20, 1999 when the club closed to non-members, setting off a series of guest policy changes in many of Harvard's eight all-male final clubs.

Last May, when the club closed to members for the first round of renovations, Club President Stephen Ranere '00 said some of its undergraduates had been unresponsive to the new policy and that the closure would prevent any further damage to the building.

"It lets us think about what we want to have the club for," Ranere said at the time. "They [the graduates] wanted to let us take a breath."

But when the club reopened for the 1999-2000 school year, the problems persisted.