Topliff lounge was packed tight. Looking across the crowd it was obvious that this was not a random assortment of Dartmouth students. First off, there were a lot of males. Secondly, quite a few of those males were wearing their fraternity logos on their caps. The caps stood out, even scattered as they were, throughout the audience.
The program featured a video and a cassette tape that portrayed "Hell Nights" taking place at two different Dartmouth fraternities from seven and eight years ago. Professor Tom Luxon had been invited as a guest speaker. There should have been no question that it was his program to run as he saw fit. But instead, some audience members, perhaps disgruntled at the negative portrayal of the fraternity system, tried to assert control over a situation that was not theirs to have. In the end, Professor Luxon didn't stand for it and made his exit.
Luxon began by asking everyone to refrain from "polemics" and instead, to act as "anthropologists" making observations about the materials at hand. He first showed a videotape which took place in the basement of a fraternity during "Hell Night." There was no sound, so Luxon did some explanation during the sequence of the video. Having repeatedly viewed the videotape, Luxon mentioned that the purpose of his commentary was to offer explanation, and to point out aspects the audience might miss, especially since presumably everyone other than himself was seeing it for the first time.
In the video, there was the "expected" drinking and booting. However, the added twist was that many of the pledges (or brothers, as the case may be) were dressed up as penises, some with condoms, some that ejaculated things like cheese whiz. One guy was presumably dressed as a woman who had undergone a mastectomy. He wore a shirt covered with fake blood-- on one side a fake breast hung out, on the other side, a torn hole, seemingly representing the lost breast. As if this wasn't disturbing enough, another brother was first shown sucking and licking the breast. He then circled around to the back of the other guy, and groped the breast. Finally, his other hand came around in mock pretense searching for the second breast -- the "missing" one. It was shocking and enraging to view this image.
Nevertheless, the audience laughed.
Professor Luxon was so appalled he blurted out, "You find this funny??!"
Still, the laughter continued, as pledges on the video were given a drink that was spiked with a chemical that induced vomiting. Soon the pledges on the screen were indeed vomiting, while some audience members in the lounge at Topliff were chuckling and crying out, "Yeah!" and "More! More!"
When I had first walked into Topliff, I started out with a limited knowledge base about what goes on behind closed doors at the fraternities here. I had heard rumors, and some stories from friends who are currently brothers in different houses. I might have dismissed the video as an extreme example of events that happened enough years ago that they were removed from the fraternity system as it stands now. I wanted desperately to believe that people now are somehow more educated, more informed, more open-minded, more intelligent about issues such as the abuse of alcohol, the abuse of women and the abuse of themselves. But the audience in the lounge in Topliff took all that away. It wasn't just one or two people laughing. It was enough to make me wonder if this was the Dartmouth I stand so proudly behind.
The final straw came when someone called out, asking Luxon to stop his commentary, to let the audience have an "objective" view of the tape and decide what it was they were seeing for themselves. This effort to stop Luxon's explanations was incredibly ironic: The brother who made this statement was obviously not coming from an objective view himself.
Luxon was asked to be silent, which would have left only laughter in the room -- was this how the audience was "choosing" to see the video? For some of us the sound of that laughter was entirely sickening, heavy with the weight of misogyny and insensibility. Professor Luxon choose not to stand by it. As he stood in front of the group, the TV now buzzing behind him, his voice shaking in outrage, he asked for an apology. The two men who had spoken against him stubbornly refused to give him one, even through the protests of the audience. One shrugged it off, "I don't think I was rude," while the other now stayed silent.
Luxon was right. He didn't have to take time out of his own schedule to spend an evening with a room full of antagonistic students. His purpose was to educate, and to open the lines of communication in a system full of secrets. He recognized the inability to reach these goals in such a setting -- where the videotapes were in fact becoming sensationalized -- and so, he opted to leave.
On the way out, I heard some guys sarcastically saying, "Boy, that was mature!" in reference to Luxon's exit. I wondered if they saw the behavior of the audience as particularly mature, or perhaps they had already become so desensitized to it that they no longer recognized it for themselves.
Perhaps, if Luxon chooses to show the tapes again, students could come as individuals, instead of members of a group, ready to finally listen and learn. It's ironic that before Professor Luxon, Professor Jere Daniell was speaking about Dartmouth's history. Luxon was simply continuing that program, trying to present a moment in time in Dartmouth history. For once, there was no denying it. There was actual footage. No matter how hard people try, the first thing that they have to realize is that the history of the fraternity system is not all good. And after all, how else are we going to learn about the mistakes in our past?
