In her recent column, Dani Valdes takes a shortsighted and illogical stance against Greek life on campus ("Letting Go of a Broken Past," April 30). Valdes displays a fundamental disconnect from reality by naively encouraging our college to commit budgetary suicide in order to appease a vocal minority who want to abolish the Greek system, as many of the alumni who donate consistently to the College are proudly Greek. By scaring prospective students and their parents, Valdes is achieving little aside from deterring those who would be most receptive to her cause from matriculating.
Dartmouth is not perfect, and neither is its Greek life. But we are one of the few colleges with completely open houses, where any student, affiliated or unaffiliated, can hang out at any fraternity and even enjoy a beer purchased by its members. Compared to the Greek systems at other colleges, especially the social clubs of our Ivy brethren, Dartmouth's Greek houses are remarkably open, friendly, safe and inclusive. Harvard University's exclusive Finals Clubs, for example, do not have to answer to the school's administration and rarely allow males who are not members into their elitist domains.
The social fragmentation that Valdes suggests is "inherent to the Greek system" is inherent to any large group of humans. Like-minded individuals often termed friends group together on any college campus in the United States. Greek houses are merely an institutionalization of this phenomenon. And on this campus, fraternities and sororities can just as easily facilitate unification and foster diversity. Joining a fraternity allowed me to become friends with peers from as far away as Africa and Eastern Europe, an opportunity I likely would not have had otherwise.
Furthermore, Dartmouth's fraternities and sororities reduce the significant risk posed by hard alcohol consumption by exclusively serving beer in their basements. Abolishing Greek life would only drive students to drink hard alcohol in their dorms, where they would not be monitored, thereby making our campus drinking culture more dangerous. Consuming beer in large social spaces monitored by Greek members who have been trained to manage social drinking and who have incentives not to let anyone get dangerously drunk is much safer than pounding shots in a small dorm room.
Hazing is, at its worst, problematic. Andrew Lohse has pointed out some of the universally detrimental hazing practices that must be eliminated ("Telling the Truth," Jan. 25). But Greek houses have already begun to re-evaluate and reform their pledge term practices. On campus and inside Greek houses, dialogue has been opened, committees have been formed and most importantly, the problems with hazing have been identified. However, as an issue of personal choice that has no direct effect on the broader campus community, hazing simply does not deserve any more direct administrative attention.
Of all the issues raised by Valdes, sexual assault is the most deserving of attention, precisely because it does what hazing does not it hurts innocent victims and inflicts widespread damage on our community. The administration must collaborate with students to get to the root of this systemic problem. But the arguments that fraternities engender violence and that hazing somehow encourages sexual assault are illogical and bereft of evidence. Eliminating fraternities will not eliminate rape. Sexual assault will be a problem anywhere that has large quantities of students with access to large quantities of alcohol.
That said, this is neither an endorsement of the status quo nor an argument for blind adherence to tradition. Greek houses must make substantive changes to phase out malevolent hazing, the entire Dartmouth community must unite against sexual assault and the administration must equalize gender relations by recognizing more local sororities and building alternative social spaces, such as an on-campus bar that serves only beer.
But in asserting extreme options such as annihilating Greek life or mandating that all houses have open or coed membership should be "on the table," Valdes displays an inability to understand the scale and the nuance of Dartmouth's social problems. While reform is certainly necessary, there is still much to admire and cherish in our inclusive, diverse Greek system.
Greek life is a convenient scapegoat for campus ills. The houses on Webster and Wheelock are not blameless, but if we truly want to solve the social problems on this campus, we must dig deeper.
