Fox Club Again All-Male After 'Provisional' Membership Revoked for Women
Efforts to fully integrate women as members of the Fox Club have repeatedly stalled. In August 2016, a resolution to alter the club’s by-laws to allow female members narrowly failed to garner the two-thirds majority it needed to pass. Undergraduate members also voted against adding women to the club in a separate, non-binding vote in May 2017.
The Fox’s reestablishment of single-gender membership comes just two months before the arrival of the Class of 2021, the first to be affected by an administrative policy penalizing involvement in single-gender final clubs. That policy, announced in May 2016, will bar members of single-gender social organizations from holding leadership positions in recognized student groups and from receiving College endorsement for several prestigious fellowships like the Rhodes and the Marshall.
Administrators had already started pushing clubs to become co-ed in the fall of 2015, though, when undergraduate Fox leadership cited administrative pressure as a key reason behind their decision to unilaterally add women to the club.
“Independent of the undergraduates’ sincere desire to admit women, Harvard University has applied tremendous pressure on all of the clubs to go co-ed,” Fox undergraduates wrote at the time in a letter to club graduates explaining their decision. “We now believe that our individual reputations and careers, as well as the reputation, autonomy and existence of the Fox Club going forward, are at serious risk if we do not act.”
Efforts to fully integrate women as members of the Fox Club have repeatedly stalled. In August 2016, a resolution to alter the club’s by-laws to allow female members narrowly failed to garner the two-thirds majority it needed to pass. Undergraduate members also voted against adding women to the club in a separate, non-binding vote in May 2017.
The Fox’s reestablishment of single-gender membership comes just two months before the arrival of the Class of 2021, the first to be affected by an administrative policy penalizing involvement in single-gender final clubs. That policy, announced in May 2016, will bar members of single-gender social organizations from holding leadership positions in recognized student groups and from receiving College endorsement for several prestigious fellowships like the Rhodes and the Marshall.
Administrators had already started pushing clubs to become co-ed in the fall of 2015, though, when undergraduate Fox leadership cited administrative pressure as a key reason behind their decision to unilaterally add women to the club.
“Independent of the undergraduates’ sincere desire to admit women, Harvard University has applied tremendous pressure on all of the clubs to go co-ed,” Fox undergraduates wrote at the time in a letter to club graduates explaining their decision. “We now believe that our individual reputations and careers, as well as the reputation, autonomy and existence of the Fox Club going forward, are at serious risk if we do not act.”
