The Hasty Pudding Social Club has applied for recognition as an official Harvard student group, with plans to open the first round of its fall punch process to all undergraduates.

Student group status would allow the 206-year old social institution to continue to use the now College-owned 12 Holyoke St. Hasty Pudding building.

It is “highly likely” that the social club’s application will be approved by the Committee on College Life (CCL) later this month, said Associate Dean of the College David P. Illingworth ’71.

Yet the focus of the social institution will not change, says Social Club President Andrea L. Olshan ’02.

To potential punches, Olshan says, “We ask you what activities you’re interested in, what distinguishes you and makes you a person I want to be in a party with or I want to have lunch with.”

The social club’s decision to apply for official student group status comes after more than a year of discussion with the University, which bought the Hasty Pudding building from the group’s graduate board, the Institute of 1770, in the spring of 2000. The Institute of 1770 is the umbrella oranization encompassing the Hasty Pudding Social Club, the Theatricals, the Krokodiloes and the Radcliffe Pitches.

With the building came a centuries-old tradition of exclusive luncheons and a feathered, sequined all-male Hasty Pudding Theatricals Cast.

“This is just one of these Harvard anomalies we’ve all inherited,” Illingworth says.

And as architectural plans for a Faculty of Arts and Sciences-funded renovation to the dilapidated building take shape under the direction of Boston-based firm Leers, Weinzapfel and Associates, College administrators and students are now forced to walk a tenuous line between the merits of tradition and the mandates of College policy.

The College does not recognize any group that discriminates on the basis of gender—a rule the Theatricals is able to circumvent by having women involved in non-performing aspects of their annual drag production.

And even though the social club will continue to subjectively select their members, the group will be able to use College space because the first step of the punch process will be open to all undergraduates.

“We’re trying to tread this ground between totally throwing out these traditions and just letting them do exactly what they’ve always done,” Illingworth says. “We need to adapt these old traditions into something that’s at least somewhat consistent with the rest of the College.”

A Secret Society

The renovations to the Pudding building, now slated to begin this spring (a full year later than originally planned), will convert the storied address into a state-of-the-art theater and space for student groups.

The social club, which was founded in 1795 as a 21-member secret society, faced a difficult decision last year—to remain independent from the College and lose access to the Pudding building or to become a student group in order to lobby for limited 12 Holyoke St. space.