Strolling along Webster Avenue last weekend, I thought I had stumbled upon the abandoned set of an archaic, low-budget Western film. After all, with their locked doors and modest cardboard signs that read "For Brothers Only," the fraternities could easily have been mistaken for lifeless one-dimensional facades. In just five quick minutes I was denied entrance into 10 Greek organizations and found myself on the corner of North Main Street gazing dumbly at Baker Tower, transfixed by its neon green glow.
As I stared into the viridescent light, I felt like Jay Gatsby watching Daisy Buchanan from across the water, painfully aware that his dream for the future was receding before him. I longed for my idealized conception of the fraternities flowing Keystone, lineless pong tables and clean floors that, like Daisy, they neither deserved nor ever possessed. Indeed, at Dartmouth, where alcohol is the reason many of us get up in the morning and pass out at night, H-Po's draconian new policy ("Stricter alcohol plans outrage Greek orgs.," Feb. 5) makes it especially easy to romanticize frat parties. United by fear and nostalgia we forget they are sometimes privy to bullish meatheads who jostle and yell at one other in frantic attempts to score girls.
With this in mind, Giaccone's plan is a terribly quixotic attempt to mitigate the incidence of alcohol poisoning and inebriated sexual assault in the Dartmouth community. Instead of facilitating constructive dialogue and bilateral reform, the policy threatens to unwind the tightly knit social fabric of the Dartmouth community and strengthen the Greek system.
That's because it's not the quantity of alcohol consumed or the pong with paddles or the flair that distinguishes Dartmouth's fraternities from those at other schools. Rather it's their unparalleled warmth of community that makes up for even the coldest of winters. In my short time here I've hung out in every fraternity on campus. None of my friends at other schools can say the same. Unfortunately this all changes now that any fraternity kind enough to open its doors to the poor and huddled masses risks annihilation via a fine up to $100,000.
By severing this link between unaffiliated students and fraternity brothers, the great irony of Giaccone's proposal is that more students may eventually pledge Greek organizations. If "brothers/sisters only" events become the norm, unaffiliated students (myself included) who are ambivalent about the Greek system must either join frats to ensure an open tap and a game of pong or risk falling by the wayside entirely. The sad truth is that at the end of the day, Dartmouth students don't have many other social outlets (sorry Student Assembly Bingo).
This problem is compounded by the reduced knowledge, incomplete information and skewed perceptions upon which students will have to rely when choosing their Greek organizations. Pledging could become like three-card Monte, with students blindly wagering three years of their Dartmouth experience on a few choice experiences and some random postings on Bored@Baker.
Ultimately, the policy's efficacy contingent largely on the degree to which it is enforced remains indeterminate in the long run. With consistent pressure from students, alumni and the administration, Giaccone may yet realize that when fighting fire with fire, everyone gets burned. If the plan is scrapped or downsized so that the most significant change on frat row is that IDs will be required at every door, then this crisis will become a cumbersome, but overblown, nuisance. For now, however, the solitary can of Keystone crushed and rectangular that blew past me Friday night remains a sorry testament to rosier days.
In the end we can only hope that Dartmouth's narrative does not conclude like Gatsby's, whose glorified dream of a life with Daisy seemed so tantalizingly close that he did not know it was already behind him. Lest the old traditions fail
