Talk about life imitating art imitating life. In Animal House, Otter says: "You can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? Isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you bad-mouth the United States of America!"
So, if you think what happened at Psi Upsilon fraternity was wrong, if you think what happened at Zeta Psi was appalling, well, you must be a commie pinko or a fascist pig. Or maybe you're just someone with at least a shred of conscience, a morsel of morals. Let me first say that I have gained a lot by joining a fraternity. When I look back at my time at Dartmouth, I will remember fondly all the good times I had in my fraternity, and all the close friends I made out of my brothers. But my memories will be tinged with the crimson stain of embarrassment; after what happened at Zeta Psi, no Greek member can escape the shame of the system to which he or she belongs.
It didn't have to be Zeta Psi and it didn't have to be "sex papers." It could have been anything. You could walk into any fraternity on almost any given night and, if you looked hard enough, you could find something to be appalled about. Even the Inter-Fraternity Council's response was obscene. IFC President Eric Powers points to the attendance of a couple of guys in Greek letters at the "Take Back the Night" rally and calls it a clear sign that "Dartmouth fraternities are already approaching the right path of action." In other words, according to Powers, it's okay for Greek culture to not merely condone but actually promote sexual assault, misogyny, and intolerance as long as a few brothers put down their pong paddles long enough to stand around at a sexual assault awareness rally. Glad to know we're on the right path, boys, I feel better already.
I used to love being in a fraternity. When the Student Life Initiative came out, when administrators talked about ending the Greek system "as we know it," I wondered why anyone would want to do that. As I became more and more absorbed into Greek life, however, I began to see the dents in its shining armor.
Pong isn't the problem. Wednesday night meetings aren't the problem. The tenement-like conditions most brothers dwell in aren't the problem. The politically incorrect parties, the hazing, the exclusivity, these are all problems, true, but they're not the problem. You could fix all these things and still there'd be incidents like the ones at Zeta Psi and Psi Upsilon. The biggest difficulty I have with the Greek system is that, through its nature, through its very structure, fraternity culture suppresses dissenting voices. Not every fraternity member is a delinquent misogynist. Obviously, there are students on this campus who do fit that mold, students who mistake sexism, racism, and intolerance for expressions of free speech. But this is Dartmouth, a prestigious college that attracts some of the world's best and brightest young men and women. If we were all bad people we wouldn't be here. So why, at a time when Coed Fraternity Sorority Council organizations are supposed to be on their best behavior, have there been so many horrendous incidents? Because the Greek system, as a whole, is mired in this "boys will be boys" attitude that implicitly promotes the type of backwards behavior that occurs in fraternities.
What, then, is a fraternity member to do when he discovers that everything going on around him doesn't fit within his moral code? He could speak out against every little thing that was at odds with his ethics. He could depledge, if he found that the negatives of being in a house far outweighed the positives. At times I've thought about doing this. It would require, however, more fortitude than I possess. It would require strength behind my convictions, courage equal to my desire. It's funny how you can be man enough to join a fraternity but not man enough to leave one.
In "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," James Joyce writes, "Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world, a mother's love is not." Maybe there was a time when I loved the Greek system with motherly unconditional love. And maybe Joyce didn't have the Dartmouth Greek system in mind when he was writing, but if he ever stepped foot in a Webster Avenue basement or observed the deplorable things brothers are capable of doing, he would know that "stinking dunghill" doesn't begin to describe what we have on our hands here.
