Matthew Ritger's recent article on rush ("The Gospel According to Matthew," Oct. 9) unleashed a flash flood of opposition. Our own dear columnist, Kevin Niparko '12, was particularly affronted ("Gospel According to Whom?" Oct. 14). Although Ritger expressed his views a tad outrageously, I think that this is always a necessary step in sparking discussion. When his views were attacked as though they were more than an attempt to wake people up, as though they represented an actual cry for bloodshed, I was intrigued. Why did so many frat-apologists bristle defensively? Perhaps it was because Ritger pointed out the fundamental social cruelties, the nasty substratum of sewage the exclusion, the hazing that make their fun possible.
It is hard to believe that Niparko is so righteously indignant at Ritger's intentionally outrageous call for a pledging death that will bring down the Greek system. Ritger's commentary is an example of philosophy with a hammer saying something consciously shocking in order to provoke discussion and make a few neurons pop. I imagine Ritger would feel terrible if someone actually died during rush, per his prophecy as all of us would but the hypothetical example of someone dying during rush serves to shake us up and make us consider whether the nature of what we're participating in is worthwhile.
Niparko's argument is psychologically necessary for those who've already sunk their bids and successfully integrated themselves into the social system with fluidity and ease. They tend to claim that "outliers" (as Niparko dubs Ritger) are simply pissed because their ambitions have not been fulfilled within the current system. Thus outliers despise what they secretly wish they had.
But, of course, someone whose ambitions have actually been fulfilled within the current system (like Niparko) would need to think this way. If he thought otherwise, he would need to admit that the outliers don't criticize the frat system because they are dejected losers, but because they actually think that frats and sororities are, in some ways, an affront to the dignity of human beings that they rot away our compassion and natural sympathy for one another.
Unlike Ski Patrol or DREAM, or the other organizations Niparko cites to back up his case for exclusivity, frats and sororities don't function as meritocracies. The "merits" which determine one's membership boil down to pure superficialities to looks among sororities, to a certain bro-like attitude among frats and to the subtle but real distinctions of race, class and sexual orientation among both.
Also, it is mildly catty of Niparko to flag Ritger's references to drug use as a way of impugning him. Drug abuse is something that, in my experience, people resort to when they are out of hope. It is the hopelessness instilled by the nature of socialization at Dartmouth that drives many people to abuse drugs.
I never had much interest in rushing, because I think that joining a Greek house is ultimately somewhat limiting. I want to have a broad base of friends based on mutual understanding and not on arbitrary social nonsense. I don't demand the abolition of the frat system, by any means. I've enjoyed what the frats have to offer in many ways. But what I do demand is a Greek life that is fair and equitable and in comportment with our basic humanity. The outrage of sorority rush, in which a quarter to a third of all the girls who run that gauntlet have their hopes crushed, and the similar inequities of fraternity rush, are not in line with the 21st century. They are abominable relics of the past.
Last year I wrote an editorial that ever so gently suggested that sorority rush was, say, a bit unfair ("The Treehouse Effect," Oct. 27, 2008). I received more hate mail for that particular column than any previous (I love hate mail, and would write the same column again), but none of it was, tellingly, sent directly to me. It was circulated in a great orgy of cattiness within the sorority houses and then forwarded to me by female friends in those houses. I was charmed and amused.
But in this fierce current of hate I noticed a trend that I also sensed in Niparko's rebuttal of Ritger: a desire to distort what was said out of wit into hate for the Greeks. This is not so, folks, and I hope that whenever you encounter it, it sends your B. S. detector spinning.
