Katie Greenwood's editorial, "System Failure," in the Jan. 30 issue of The Dartmouth has sparked a huge response on both sides of the issue. Ms. Greenwood argued that the sorority system is biased against minorities and students on financial aid, and that any social system "predicated on exclusion" is fundamentally flawed. Several current sorority members and alumnae of our sororities have been writing to protest what they feel was an unjustifiable and highly biased attack on "The System." If there is indeed bias inherent in the sorority system against minorities, or students on financial aid, or personal friends of Ms. Greenwood, then those discriminatory policies do need to be addressed. However, nobody in the past few days has written to condemn the sororities' greatest sin: the inexplicable exclusion of men.
Some might say this exclusion is of no more significance than the demographic statistics Ms. Greenwood provided comparing financial aid recipient and minority membership in the sororities to the college in general. However, the Gestapo tactics our all-female Greek houses employ to keep out male members are far worse. Consider this exchange, which took place when I went to register for rush at the table in Collis Commonground:
Nick: Hi, I want to rush a sorority.
Woman: What?
N: So, I fill out some paperwork and stuff? What do I need? (readies pen)
W: I'm sorry, this is sorority rush. Fraternity rush is later, and follows a different, more easily understood process.
N: I don't want to join a fraternity. I want to join a sorority.
W: You mean a coed house?
N: No. I mean a sorority.
W: Um You know sororities are for women, right?
N: Sure.
W: (silent)
N: Is there a problem?
W: Men can't join sororities.
And she wouldn't even let me register! Imagine my shock to discover, even in these enlightened times, that our all-female Greek houses exclude men! Sure, sororities hide behind their computerized selection process for the issues Ms. Greenwood cares about. But who would have thought, almost 25 years after going coed, that Dartmouth's all-female Greek houses would still ban over half the student body from membership? And for what? Is my sole X-chromosome not as good as your pair?
Where is the College for me now? Surely the administration would have swept down on the sororities, had the woman behind the registration table told me, "Minorities can't join sororities" or "poor students can't join sororities." But exclude men -- men! -- from an all-female Greek house, and the principle of community remains silent, nothing more than a hunk of plastic hung on our walls and decorated with some meaningless words.
Furthermore, since the College has imposed a ban on new single-sex Greek houses, I can't start my own sorority -- even though I'm sure I could find 40 other guys who'd like to join one. So that entire portion of the college experience has been foreclosed to me.
As if this overtly anti-male policy within our all-female Greek houses were not enough, the discrimination doesn't stop there. Our sororities will not allow non-Dartmouth students to rush, either! In fact, our sororities deny membership not only to anybody who is not female and Dartmouth-affiliated, they will not accept as members anybody who is dead, imaginary or an animal incapable of rational thought. They won't take plants, inanimate objects, celestial bodies or eternal and incorporeal substances like the number seven. Sorority sisters, are you comfortable associating with a group so exclusionary that it would deny membership to Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the greatest champions of civil rights in the history of the world, simply because he is male and dead?
