To the Editor:
Once again, John Strayer has gone off his rocker. Last term, in an effort to justify his sexual frustrations, John wrote an article debunking the paucity of sex that occurs on Dartmouth's campus. This term, in his article "How Do You Self-Identify?" he seems to have once again tried to drag down the Dartmouth community, this time in order to justify his own identity crisis. Strayer, once again, specifically tries to discredit the fraternity system, and once again, he fails.
Let me speak by personal example. I am not part of a "little, highly separated community that interacts [with the others] on certain special occasions." Granted, I have a small group of very close friends. This group of friends, however, is not the lone group of people to which I relate on a regular basis. For instance, I play ultimate frisbee, I am in a fraternity and I go to Thursday Night Christian Fellowship. None of these groups, however, defines my identity. None even approaches a definition of my identity.
Let me note, here, that Strayer does make one valid point. He states that some people, those whom he has "come to despise," have trouble finding their identity, and attempt to find it by joining some group or another. Strayer points out first that the fraternity system is the easiest place to find this phenomenon. I beg to contend that the only reason he finds this blunder so evident in fraternities is that his view toward the Greek system is so twisted that he cannot see fault in any other group structures. At least the Greek system at Dartmouth forces people to wait one year before joining in an effort to prevent that identity confusion which Strayer rightly condemns. Most other groups at Dartmouth do not allow this delay, and thus are much more likely to muddle the incoming freshman, "initially lacking an identity" as Strayer says.
Finally, I must point out that I speak not as a member of the Greek system, nor a member of any other group. I answer not the question, "What do people back in my community think about this article?" as he would expect. I answer what I think of this article, and only those shallow enough to judge this book by its cover will assume that I speak for my demographic group rather than merely as myself. As Strayer would have it, though, I am either a frat boy or a choir boy, a DOC frisbee pothead or a basement-dwelling mysoginistic beer guzzler. Thank you, John, I am none of these. I am Dan Mazzucco, sophomore at Darmouth College, and that's plenty identity for me.
In conclusion, I would like to point out that this is in no way intended to be a personal attack on John Strayer.
