This article is featured in the 2025 Freshman Special Issue.
If you’re new to campus, you might look at the Greek letters on the sides of buildings up and down Webster Avenue and wonder what goes on behind those walls. Are those institutions good, bad or a bit of both?
The answer depends on who you ask. The archives of this newspaper are filled with pages of opinion columns and investigative reporting on the subject. Greek life inspires strong opinions, and students, faculty and alumni have fought hard for and against its presence on campus for most of its existence.
Greek life has made the headlines again and again: the ones people remember are the boldfaced announcements of big changes. As much as what has changed, however, it is worth noting what remains the same: Greek life is still a central part of campus life as it has been for a significant part of Dartmouth’s history.
Greek life has changed shape but traces its lineage back to all-male secret societies in the early 19th century. Since sororities only emerged in 1977 at Dartmouth, the first nearly century and a half of Greek life history is a history of fraternities.
The Greek system has grown in power and influence over the decades, and Dartmouth is among the most fraternity-dominated schools in the country. The fraternities at Dartmouth have an extensive and influential alumni network, and many alumni who speak positively about their experiences.
The darker side of Greek life, including complaints about violence to their members and visitors to their houses, has also been talked about for decades. Police reports and newspaper articles include many allegations of hazing and sexual assault, as well as attempts to abolish or rein in the system that have come and gone.
The beginnings
As University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Nicolas Syrett writes in his history of fraternities, “The Company He Keeps,” modern Greek life was born in 1825 at Union College in New York. There, five men met to form a secret society, holding a formal initiation and naming their group Kappa Alpha.
Colleges in the 19th century, including Dartmouth, taught their students Greek, and the early fraternities took Greek letters for their names because students spent a large part of their time studying the language, according to Syrett.
Greek life arrived on Dartmouth’s campus in the 1840s with the establishment of Psi Upsilon and what is now Kappa Pi Kappa. By the 1850s, Syrett writes, fraternities had a “firm footing on virtually every college campus in New England.”
From nearly the beginning, those groups, by nature secretive and gender-segregated, were both celebrated as sources of camaraderie and challenged as undemocratic and discriminatory, according to Syrett.
There was pushback from administration and faculty, who disliked the secrecy. It was also a time of “anti-Freemason fervor,” Syrett writes, and while the fraternities had little in common with the rites of Freemasonry, the fact they styled themselves “secret societies” immediately associated them with Freemasons in the 19th century imagination. As early as the 1840s, the Michigan faculty wrote letters to New England colleges asking for advice on how to suppress the Greek system.
The economy and society of early 19th century New England shapes the early story of fraternities, Syrett writes.
Fraternities, he notes, were founded at a time when the “available land in New England was dwindling” and the economy was precarious. Fathers who would have passed down land to their sons were often unable to do so, and were “increasingly unable to provide their sons with the social networks that would help them succeed in the market economy,” he writes.
“Fraternities and the brotherhood they offered provided these social ties and helped allay the anxiety brought on by an uncertain future,” Syrett writes.
The fraternities modeled themselves on earlier campus literary societies, popular organizations which they would supersede, with a few distinctions: they were smaller, more exclusive and secret, and explicitly tied to a national community of fraternities at other schools.
One of the appeals of early fraternities was their belonging to a national community, Rauner special collections librarian Morgan Swan wrote in an email to The Dartmouth.
“It would also make sense that Dartmouth students were interested in participating in a social network that extended beyond the physical boundaries of their geographically isolated campus,” Swan said.
The literary societies, which provided libraries to their members and had existed at the college since the 1700s, died out at Dartmouth in the 1880s as fraternities grew and the College eliminated its library charges.
The 20th century
By the 1920s, the College was a campus dominated by the Greek life system, with the majority of students part of a fraternity. The newsletters of Dartmouth fraternities from the time tell stories about friendships, celebration and wealth: Delta Kappa Epsilon’s newsletters from the time, for example, recount two weekend long parties and a trip to Bermuda.
The darker side of fraternities was present then, too. Dartmouth president Ernest Martin Hopkins sought to regulate hazing, even personally writing to fraternities asking them to pay for damages to the Etna Cemetery where at least one fraternity had conducted a preinitiation ceremony.
The death and trial of Raymond Cirrotta ’49, killed by drunken fraternity brothers who were charged only small fines in response, was a moment of reckoning for Greek life at Dartmouth in the 1920s. The fact that so many people associated with the case, including the county solicitor and defense attorneys, were Dartmouth alumni and members of fraternities added “fuel to the fire” of public criticism of the case, Syrett wrote. It was a tragedy extensively covered by the national media that provoked debate about the role of fraternities, privilege and alcohol at the College.
A few years later, during World War Two, fraternities at Dartmouth closed as the College oriented almost exclusively to training Navy men. Reopening the fraternities after the war had been a close call due to the many controversies surrounding them, President John Sloan Dickey said in an oral history interview later.
It was during this period that debate about racially discriminatory clauses by national organizations led to debate on campus, among other reasons contributing to Dartmouth’s fraternities localizing in the 1950s. A 1949 poll by The Dartmouth and several other campus organizations showed a majority of students were against the clauses. Alpha Theta was the first fraternity to derecognize their discriminatory clause and localize.
Swan added that he thinks the Dartmouth Christian Union’s focus on social justice issues during the post-war period probably had an impact. The new Director of Undergraduate Religious Life, Rev. George Kalbfleisch, had been a chaplain in the US Navy during WWII and Swan believes he was “instrumental in shepherding this newfound emphasis” by members of the student body.
It took some time for fraternities to regain a central place on campus after the war.
Swan said he suspects that the “resurgence of fraternity life on campus in the 1970s” was influenced in part by the introduction of co-education on campus and also by the college administration’s commitment to creating a more diverse student body.
Swan added that, in the 20th century, Greek life experiences played a role in generating the loyalty alumni feel for the College.
“Dartmouth students have historically been recognized for their zealous loyalty to the college during the 20th century and I think that the fraternity system has contributed to that, for better or for worse,” Swan wrote.
In 1978, the film “Animal House” hit theaters, becoming a smash hit and ingraining in popular culture a particular image of what fraternity life looked like at Dartmouth. Chris Miller ’63 was one of the writers, and he wrote a memoir in which he claimed the film was inspired by his time as a student at the College.
That same year, debate about Greek life made the front page of The Dartmouth, bearing the headline “Faculty votes 67-16 to abolish frats.” The vote was the one of several over the decades, but without action from the Board of Trustees had no concrete consequences.
In the 1990s, debate about abolishing or reining in Greek life reignited. A 50-page essay written by Scott Straus ’93 arguing that fraternities promoted misogyny, homophobia and anti-intellectualism, published in an abridged form in the left-wing student newspaper The Bug, was a central part of the debate among the student body. A November 1992 cover story in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine spotlighted sexual assault on campus and included an account of how the “fraternity question” resurfaced the preceding spring when a rally in front of Parkhurst called for fraternities to be abolished.
That spring was a moment of loud debate. Pieces appeared in the pages of The Dartmouth arguing for and against the abolition of Greek life. At convocation that year, student assembly president Andrew Beebe ’93 called for a mandatory coeducational social system.
Renewed debate
The headline was boldface type on the front page of The Dartmouth. In 1999, College President James Wright and the Board of Trustees proposed an end to Greek life “as we know it.” His decision was described by the newspaper as the most significant change at Dartmouth since coeducation.
In 1999, the announcement of the “Student Life Initiative” made national headlines. At Dartmouth, there was a series of pro-Greek rallies and significant pushback from alumni.
The initiative, not to completely abolish Greek houses but to make them “substantially coeducational,” was unofficially paused, though some of its recommendations were indeed implemented in the following years. For example, the College removed bars and alcohol taps from houses and created more freshmen dorms.
In 2000, the faculty voted 81-0 to again abolish the Greek system, but it was also not implemented.
In January 2012, an opinion piece in The Dartmouth, and subsequent Rolling Stone article that spring described hazing allegations by Andrew Lohse ’12. That year, students and faculty members spoke out against the Greek life system.
Less than two years later, the 2014 Homecoming Issue was also themed around Greek Life and featured a front page editorial calling for the system’s abolition. In 2015, President Phil Hanlon ’77 announced the Moving Dartmouth Forward Plan, including the introduction of the housing system, to provide alternatives to Greek life.
Since then, official moves towards reform or abolition have ebbed, though the death of Won Jang ’26 in the summer of 2024 once again sparked debate about the role of Greek life on campus.
Kent Friel ‘26 is an executive editor at The Dartmouth.
