Word: deans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...college such as Harvard where parietal hours are strict and privacy scarce, the Clubs might seem ideal locales for entertaining dates. But stern self-imposed rules, plus Dean Watson's knotty chaperoning regulations, have kept the appearances of women in the Clubs to a rarity. Only on special occasions, such as Yale or Princeton football games or one crew race in the spring, may girls be admitted. Abuse of this rule brings heavy penalties--usually club expulsion; this and cheating at cards are considered the cardinal sins of the Club world. (Except at the Porcellian, where card-playing is prohibited...
...official punching season, lasting about six weeks from October until early December with a three-week moratorium for hour exams, is governed by strict rules set up by the Club presidents in consultation with Dean Watson. Each club is limited to a certain number of "major functions"--large formal dinners or Sunday outings that feature lunch and a traditional touch football game at a graduate member's country home. But the number of Hasty Pudding Club lunches or of small dinners seating no more than six is unlimited, and as the competition between Clubs becomes tenser, the punching chairman frantically...
...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...
...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...
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...