It's obvious what the football team must do when Beta comes back. No, not win the Ivy League championship (though they should do that, too). The team should really rekindle ties with the house that historically has been theirs and take advantage of the clean slate represented therein.
Beta has served some time in the penalty box; since it's been gone, the game has changed a little. Do you know the leading cause of temporary probation for fraternities? It's not fighting, nor is it discrimination or sexual assault; the penalties for those are stiff, and rightly so.
No, the leader is violations of the Dartmouth College keg policy -- the impractical, wasteful, expensive Dartmouth keg policy that came about as a result of the last round of administrative interferences with student life.
I'll quickly make the case for kegs from the administration's perspective. Kegs of beer are cheaper than cases. Kegs are reusable -- whereas, unless you chew tobacco, cans are not. It's hard to get beer out of kegs. It takes half an hour to fill a rack for a game of pong from a keg. With cans, it might take thirty seconds. Kegs are heavy and hard to carry, which means they're a pain to transport. In fact, other than the low price, it's a wonder why any student would want to use kegs at all.
Except, of course, for the fact that they look cool, contributing to our legacy of drinking.
Chi Heorot is tied for first in number of keg violations since 2003 with seven, for which they have received a total of 24 weeks of social probation. That amounts to an average of three and a half weeks per violation -- an entire third of a Dartmouth term in the dog house every time they get caught with a keg.
The other front-runner, with seven keg violations, is Gamma Delta Chi. They're currently trying to avoid a probation term of fifteen weeks, which is equivalent to a term and a half. Since 2003, GDX has had seven keg violations for which they have received an astonishing 43 weeks of probation. That's only nine weeks short of an entire calendar year -- an average of just over six weeks of probation per violation. Psi Upsilon has committed three violations but has only received four total weeks of probation. Theta Delta Chi had two violations and has received six weeks of probation.
While GDX is an outlier (and I can only speculate on the reasons why the Administration hates those guys so much), the general trend seems to be that the length of a single probation term increases with the number of violations -- exponentially -- which seems to unnecessarily punish the goofy, happy-go-lucky houses like Heorot and GDX that get caught the most.
I was the president of Heorot over sophomore summer. I sat with a College dean as she explained to me that she was handcuffed to a policy that unjustly punishes stupidity over malice.
Brothers mean well, but they just can't count too good. Four kegs, six kegs -- honestly, what's the difference?
Fraternity members are just trying to have a good time. They've never asked anyone for anything except a place to live, which they'll gladly pay for, and a place to drink, which they'll gladly pay for, too; is it wrong for them to want to pay just a little bit less? Is it wrong for their frugality to indirectly decrease the size of Dartmouth's ludicrously large carbon footprint?
The sauce on my food court dinner soaks through the bottom of those cardboard to-go boxes, but you don't hear me complaining. We've all had to make sacrifices.
Bring the kegs back. They shouldn't have concerned you in the first place. There's no reason to mandate the way our beer is dispensed. Changes around here must happen organically, from the bottom. Student culture will change when the students need it to. If there was ever a problem with student culture, according to the administration, kegs weren't it -- we were.
