I opened up this week's edition of The Beacon eager to see what it had to say about the fraternities on campus, particularly mine. What I found surprised and disturbed me more than a little bit.
The "Frat Guide" was meant to be "humorous as well as informative." What it wound up being was dishonest, disrespectful, and misinformative. It is one thing to make jokes about a house by mentioning their smell or the quality of their physical plant. It is another thing entirely to knowingly lie and perpetuate the false stereotypes of which all fraternities find themselves victims.
Let me try to explain that a little better. Houses smell bad. That is an incontrovertible fact. The brothers don't mind, and everyone jokes about it. However, to say of a fraternity that "according to some, the brotherhood unity has been slipping" is a purely opinionated and judgmental statement that serves no purpose but to cause undue embarrassment to the brothers of that house. What a supposedly respectable publication like The Beacon was thinking when it printed such a statement is completely beyond me.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Ask a brother in any house how they felt about their review, and I guarantee they'll find something that is just not true. If I want to make a characterization of a house, I can say that they have been known to wear outrageous clothing around their parties, and campus for that matter. On the other hand, if I want to destroy a house by talking trash about them, I can print that they had a "member accused, and subsequently acquitted, of rape." What good has that done anyone? How have the readers learned any more about this house because of that?
What such statements really do is take away a fraternity's ability to make its own impression. Readers look at a compilation like that and hopefully are independent-minded enough to find out for themselves. Unfortunately, this school of 4,000 white kids who all dress the same (I'm going to keep using that same reference over and over) is not as independent-minded as most would hope. Some people buy into stereotypes, others become the victims of stereotypes, and eventually these things become intractable. Luckily, I happen to be an independent thinker and am capable of deciding for myself. But I still dress the same as everyone else. I think.
Given the fraternities' already tenuous foothold on campus in the recent years of the Freedman/Pelton era, such blatant disrespect and malevolence does nothing but further exacerbate the situation. Two people have died in the past two months due to fraternity hazing, although not at Dartmouth, thankfully. But the Greek system gets enough bad press as it is without having to worry about being deliberately misrepresented.
In reality, every fraternity on this campus has more to offer to any student at Dartmouth than can be summed up in a paragraph. As a matter of fact, I believe that most brothers would not even be able to put into words what their fraternity is about because it just wouldn't do it justice. I won't dare to speak for the entire Greek system at Dartmouth; I'm a '00 and I just don't know that much about it yet. But I know that what was handed out door to door on Tuesday evening was not even remotely representative of what fraternities are like.
So, to the editors of the Beacon and the people who compiled that wretched attempt at humor let me say this: You have wrongfully insulted me. You have lied about others deliberately. You have done this to get a laugh. But what you have not done is embarrass me. Instead you embarrass yourselves for daring to be so stupid. I don't know whether you've ever been in our house or not. I don't know whether you want to or whether you even care enough to find out about it. But I do know that you obviously don't know how to be responsible in your work, and, as far as I'm concerned, it is my dear happiness that you will never get to call me your brother.
