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The Dartmouth
July 18, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Dreams of Personhood

During the course of the three years of the post-Student Life Initiative era, Greek controversy has inevitably centered around one or another of the buzzwords that have trickled down from ineffectual administrative letters. Right now, the word of choice seems to be "exclusion."

I am a brother in a fraternity at Dartmouth and I recognize the enormous benefits that the Greek system has given me. Not only do I have a group of friends that I can generally depend on to be there for me when I need them, but I am also allowed the benefit, along with the rest of the student body, of a truly student-controlled social space. On the whole, the Greek system is a positive and necessary force on Dartmouth's campus; it transforms a small rural town with miserable weather into a fun place to go to school. Dartmouth is better with the Greek system today than it would be without it.

I believe that most of the arguments currently used against the Greek system are invalid. Take exclusion, for example. In the Feb. 12 issue of The Dartmouth, in a letter entitled "A Question of Priorities," Associate Professor of English Thomas Luxon writes in response to Katie Greenwood's Jan. 30 column, "System Failure:" "Two people in our community are hurt and angry. One articulates her hurt and her anger those who lay claim to a formalized sisterhood -- turn on her and accuse her of hypocrisy and vindictiveness." While I would be the last to doubt that sorority rush is flawed, people ought to be allowed to choose their friends and they do this with their unaffiliated groups of friends all the time. I consider certain people my friends; there are others I do not get along with. It is a fact of life.

Furthermore, the most hurtful incident of exclusion I've experienced came from the English department, when I was excluded from their Ireland and Scotland Foreign Study Programs because I apparently fell into the dumber-and-less-interesting people who are in the two-thirds of the top 1 percent of U.S. college students. Exclusion is not a fun part of life, but it is a part of life. I sympathize with Greenwood's friend, but I do not believe that three sorority sisters trying to decorate someone's door should serve as an epitome of insensitivity and exclusivity.

Nevertheless, the single-sex Greek system is inherently flawed and nothing has confirmed this fact in my mind more than an email I recently came across. It was a piece of writing that was intended for the internal viewing of a Greek organization, but ended up being circulated among outsiders. In this case, however, the message came from inside a sorority.

"Sorority Q has officially boycotted Frat Guy B," the message read. "You may remember this sketchy young man from such episodes as "Fun in the Sorority Q Library" or "Hooking-up with Sorority Girls Q: How to do it." If sorority members hook up with this particular student, "you WILL be castigated publicly by the members of this house. Plus, you will have to live with the fact that you got Sorority Girl A's sloppy seconds!"

I believe that every single-sex Greek organization on this campus has some massive flaw, some dirty little secret that could get it derecognized. And nearly every one of these flaws is the spawn of a system of divided gender politics, of divided gender interaction, of "studs" and "sluts," of "empowered" women and "chauvinistic" men.

Three years ago, President of the College James Wright announced a plan of lofty ideals, one which was to make the college's social life "substantially coeducational." But the twin golden calves of tradition and the old boys' network have prevented any real change that will make any real difference. As the Initiative has been diluted to a crusade to take away college students' beer, the essential problems of the antiquated system will never be addressed. The prevailing campus gender discourse matches that of the 15-year-old girl's slumber party and the 15-year-old boy's locker room and it will persist so long as the current system's divisive form does.

I love my house. I will always fight for its ideals of friendship, its connection with the past, its student-controlled social space. It doesn't bother me all that much that it's exclusive, that I am allowed to choose who should join us in the future. I reject many of the arguments against the Greek system, but I also recognize that each piece of the system is flawed and that the system as a whole promotes a silly mindset of opposition and inequity. Only a system that is more "substantially coeducational" than the current one will ever erase the self-perpetuating mindsets of pre-coeducational Dartmouth. Perhaps one day we will emphasize personhood before sisterhood and brotherhood. The Greek opposition posits many arguments against the current system, for its inequity, its exclusivity, its anti-intellectualism, its alcohol abuse -- but it misses the most simple reason for major change: we, as an extraordinarily select group of amazingly talented people, are capable of so much more.