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THE HARVARD UNDERGRADUATE COUNCIL was working its way through a night of routine business last November when sophomore Jason Lurie, an officer of the Harvard Secular Society and a member of the council, dropped his bombshell. Did the Undergraduate Council realize, he asked, that it was approving grants to openly discriminatory organizations?

The organizations were the more than 50-year-old Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship (HRCF) and the much newer Harvard Asian Baptist Student Koinonia (ABSK). Clauses in their constitutions specified that their leaders—though not their members—must affirm an evangelical Christian statement of faith.

The council's policy did not support groups that "discriminate on the basis of ancestry, nationality, creed, philosophy, economic disadvantage, physical disability, mental illness or disorders, political affiliation, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity."

Before Lurie spoke up, no one had ever put the two policies together: "Unless a student is Christian, he or she may not be an officer of HRCF," Lurie said. "This rule is indisputably discriminatory."

Council members, taken aback, postponed their decision and effectively turned matters over to David P. Illingworth, an associate dean who oversees extracurricular groups. Illingworth, an affable Harvard insider who happens to be an ordained Episcopal priest, told The Harvard Crimson that the university's position was "quite clear: student groups should not discriminate for membership or in the choice of officers… . I have offered to work with [HRCF] to develop constitutional changes which would bring them into compliance."

Soon Illingworth and the HRCF leadership stopped talking to the press. (Illingworth, who has since left his position as associate dean, did not respond to requests for comment.)

The same semester, Rutgers InterVarsity Multi-Ethnic Christian Fellowship had submitted a constitution similar to that in use at Harvard. Based on that constitution, administrators informed leaders in September 2002 that their fellowship would not be "rerecognized." Translation: their access to campus meeting facilities and proceeds from student activity fees would be cut off. (Rutgers vice president for student affairs Emmet Dennis did not respond to a request for comment.)

Officials at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), who had learned of the Rutgers case, began an investigation of UNC's four InterVarsity-related groups. (Eventually they broadened their scope to other groups.) On December 10, a UNC administrator wrote the InterVarsity fellowship that it must "modify the wording of your charter or I will have no choice but to revoke your University recognition."

The conflicts at Rutgers and UNC were different from that at Harvard in two important respects.

A private rather than public institution, Harvard expects its student groups to be independent of national organizations like IVCF (although since its founding, HRCF has been informally connected with IVCF). But at Rutgers and UNC, which are state universities, the student groups are full affiliates of InterVarsity's national organization. Hence the schools' policies must pass the same constitutional muster as all government entities.

As a result, whereas the dispute over HRCF's "discrimination" began publicly but soon went off the record, at Rutgers and UNC it was just the reverse. On December 28, after several months of fruitless private negotiations, IVCF president Alec Hill authorized a lawsuit against Rutgers.

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October 2003, Vol. 47, No. 10