It has been over a year now since the Committee on Community and Diversity at Dartmouth released its report which concluded that little had changed since the 1989 report of the Committee on Diversity. The CDCD felt compelled to present that report's conclusion that the Coed Fraternity and Sorority system "tends to encourage excessive drinking, anti-intellectualism, sexism, racism and homophobia -- precisely those types of behavior which the College is actively trying to correct" as its own conclusion. In addition, the CDCD called on the College to create a committee which would investigate the role of the CFS system.
And it has been almost exactly a year since 90 students, faculty members, staff members and alumni sent an open letter to Dartmouth College's administration explaining the role Dartmouth's CFS system in general, and its fraternity system in particular, play in perpetuating sexism, homophobia and classism on campus. The letter also described how the CFS system creates a climate conducive to sexual assault. It concluded by calling on the Administration to eliminate the CFS system and create a new social system more consistent with the College's stated values.
In the year that has passed, the College has done nothing to address these issues -- and the Administration has stated that it will not address the questions the CDCD report raised about the CFS system until it has finished dealing with the report of the Committee on the First-Year Experience. While the College has maintained its comfortable silence, fraternities have continued to engage in abusive behaviors, and members of the Dartmouth community have continued to suffer as a result. Yet the College continues to hypocritically claim that it believes in equality and seeks to create an environment conducive to intellectualism.
The role fraternities play in creating a climate conducive to sexual assault and harassment and in creating men who are more likely to commit these crimes has been well documented. The combination of fraternities' exclusion of women, their use of initiation rituals which establish a hierarchy based on sex, gender and sexuality and an institutional ideology which accepts traditional concepts of gender and supports rape myths causes fraternities to create brothers who are more likely to rape or harass women. Men's control of alcohol in fraternities and the presence of other men who will not condemn and may support a brother who rapes or harasses a woman make fraternities spaces where sexual assault and sexual harassment are more likely to take place. Not all fraternity brothers rape and harass women, but all fraternity brothers are complicit in the creation of a rape culture -- a culture of sexual violence.
Sexual assault and sexual harassment represent the ultimate violation of women's rights -- the violations of their rights to control their bodies, to be free from fear of violence and to basic human dignity. Yet the College continues to recognize and support fraternities which promote these behaviors.
Fraternities also create an anti-intellectual climate on campus. Fraternity domination of the social culture at Dartmouth leads to fraternity domination of the entire student culture. Organizations that wield cultural power define the terms of public discourse and define which voices will be heard and privileged within that discourse. The voices of those who are excluded from those institutions are defined as marginal and are ignored. In order to compensate for their lack of power, marginalized groups develop and refine more sophisticated analyses. In response, the dominant fraternity culture rejects analysis and intellectual discourse, associating them with the people who use them to subvert the fraternities' power. Anti-intellectualism becomes a part of the dominant student culture. The College continues to recognize and support fraternities while claiming it is trying to promote intellectualism at Dartmouth.
Some may argue that the freedom of assembly grants men the right to form fraternities, but the right to individual or organizational self-determination ends when the "self" in question "determines" that it should be allowed to engage in abusive behaviors or create an unjust social system. Dartmouth College is under no obligation to support or recognize organizations whose purposes and activities conflict with the College's central purpose and central values. But the College is obligated to do its best to protect its students from violence and harassment and to create an institutional culture which is consistent with the College's values of equality and intellectualism.
Dartmouth should immediately de-recognize and withdraw all support from fraternities and should create a committee to investigate sororities and coed houses to determine whether they can and should be reformed, abolished or allowed to continue to exist. Fraternities have no legitimate place in the Dartmouth community.
