Increasingly, however, since the 1960s, the answer to that question has been "no." "When the chosen junior opens up, a Bonesman will slam him on the shoulder and thunder: 'Skull and Bones: Do you accept?' " "They'll pound loudly on the doors," wrote Ron Rosenbaum in a 1977 Esquire essay on Skull and Bones, to which he does not belong. It is one of the most important rituals in a group for whom rituals, in reality, are all that remains. This would have been the week when new juniors - only 15 each year - are tapped, or chosen by graduating members of the senior class. He would not say whether the lawyers were Bonesmen. They have begun to communicate with several prominent lawyers, said one current senior. The current senior class, several of whom spoke - naturally none of whom would be quoted by name - said they are planning to sue the organization for breach of contract. In New Haven, Bones alumni board members changed the locks on the heavy door to the society's secret tomb over the weekend. "After there has been more time for reflection by all those concerned, I hope that the newly elected class will be allowed to fully use all facilities." Boren (D-Okla.), one of many Bonesmen in Congress and a member of the Yale Corporation, the university's board of trustees. "The decision of this year's club to accept women members should be respected and accepted," said Sen. The issue of admitting women to men's clubs - which has been fought at New York's elite Century Club and Princeton University's Tiger Inn, among other bastions of male repose - will clearly intensify the debate about the future of Skull and Bones. Buckley Jr., one of the nation's most prominent Bonesmen, who has included devoted Bonesmen as characters in his novels, said yesterday he never discussed Bones. If challenged on the subject, they are supposed to leave the room.īush had no comment on the situation yesterday. University officials take no position on their actions and play no roles in their affairs.īut the Bones rebellion has shocked the campus and many of its devoted members, all of whom received from the current, now-locked-out seniors a six-page, single-spaced letter addressed to "Most Worthy Alumni."įew Bonesmen, which is what they call themselves, would talk on the record because Bonesmen are never supposed to admit they are Bonesmen. Only one other society, Wolf's Head, remains all male. Secret societies, which once governed social life at Yale, have become to many students silly remnants from an elitist past. Sidney Lovett, the secretary of the Skull and Bones parent organization, the Russell Trust Association. That caused the alumni board, the most anonymous part of this furtive organization, to crush the rebellion with a speed unseen since Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968. Last Friday, for the first time, this year's seniors did. Since the first women were admitted as Yale undergraduates in 1969, Skull and Bones members have frequently debated the propriety of initiating women. But with its ceremonial phrases and clandestine rites, it is also one of the last. Luce and Potter Stewart as well as President Bush - has been the most powerful secret society in the nation.
NEW YORK, APRIL 15 - Turning back a rebellious attempt to admit undergraduate women into Yale University's most ritualistic secret society, the alumni board of Skull and Bones has for the first time in its history locked current members out of the "tomb" they use as their club.įor more than a century and a half, Skull and Bones - whose initiates include the late Henry R.
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