Knospe: Talking Greek
(10/18/22 8:00am)
Despite comprising 64% of eligible students, Greek life at Dartmouth has a peculiar knack for wiggling its way out of campus discourse. To be sure, there is no shortage of surface-level conversation; we fill in friends on where we went over the weekend and we discuss the latest fraternity scandal, but we rarely talk seriously about more foundational aspects of Greek life. Students eagerly interrogate institutions for their sexist and exclusionary pasts in Canvas posts and midterm papers, but seldom acknowledge just how strange it is that our primary social spaces are gender-segregated. And for all our academic talk of “power dynamics,” it’s remarkable how little “pledge term” is recognized as a paradigm case.