Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/01/31/dartmouths_fraternity_row.php

Dartmouth's Fraternity Row

Monday, January 31, 2005

Editor's Note: The following essay ran in The Dartmouth Review on February 17th, 1999, immediately following the announcement of the Student Life Initiative.

Courtesy Dartmouth College Library

— Dartmouth's fraternities, circa 1915. —

Dartmouth College has for a dozen years attracted national attention not alone for its fine academic work and the achievements of its graduates but because it is a groundhog of sorts, a kind of P.C. super-vane, which tends to advise us seasons ahead of anybody else what it is we're to do in order to be upright.

Most conspicuous, at the beginning, was Dartmouth's idea that it was unconscionable to continue to use an American Indian as its mascot. That argument went on-&-on for years and still simmers, but for all intents and purposes the Indian is gone. There followed a long series of offenses, synthetic offenses, neo-synthetic offenses against race, color, creed, and sex; out of which rose a student weekly, The Dartmouth Review, remarkable in America for signalling the desire of a body of students to voice a conservative position in the clamor of liberal trendiness.

With the election of a new president, there were those who thought that the ideological offensive had ended, or at least slowed down. But last week Dartmouth announced that from now on single-sex fraternities would cease to exist. An announcement that categorical in character caught the attention of what in academic terminology they call the 'Greeks.'

One learns from the ongoing commotion that notwithstaindg the tidal wave of coeducation, all-male fraternities continue gradually to expand. At Dartmouth one-half of the upperclassmen are members and there are all-female sororities which, too, are to end.

In substitution for what? The usual things, expressed in the usual vacuities ("improved social spaces").

The single concretely-phrased objective is to eliminate "the abuse and unsafe use of alcohol."

In a longer statement, the president of Dartmouth announced that it was not his "fantasy" to make Dartmouth dry. You might as well fantasize making it empty. Both would happen at the same time.

The social routine at Dartmouth (we learn) is that the fraternities are always open, sponsoring two or three special parties per month.

Everyone who wants to come in, does so—with the single exception of first-semester freshmen, freshladies, freshbraves, you take it from here. After that, they come in and if they desire to drink some beer, they go to the cellar of the building (there are about twenty) where the springs of malt run headily.

Enter the term 'binge drinking.' It has only recently become a household term, and means drinking too much. But pollsters require definitions. Accordingly, it crystallized that a binge drunk was a man who had consumed five drinks at a single occasion or a woman who had consumed four. It was not, in the study, specified that these drinks should have been imbibed within a of one hour or five hours.

Many Dartmouth students, male and female, emerge from fraternities as binge drunks though their coordination is such as to permit them to walk over a tightrope while conjugating irregular Latin verbs.

Which does not mean that there aren't just plain drunks coming out of fraternities at Hanover, but does raise the question, can you remove the drunks by removing the fraternities?

Manifestly, the answer is no. At Dartmouth a student caught wobbly on campus at night is given draconian treatment, much more severe than if picked up by local police. It can include a five hundred dollar fine and commitment to spend time at alcoholic abuse centers.

There was considerable student protest when the ukase was announced. It is an interesting stylistic touch that it was given without embellishment: This is not a call to a plebiscite on the question, the president announced. There is a tradition for this in academic idiom. The president of Yale, seventy-five years ago, miffed that the student body had overextended the pew-holiday associated with the Junior Ball, announced after prayers at the morning assembly: "As for the Ball, there will be no Ball."

The settled thought of alert Dartmouth-watchers is that what we have here is not really a serious attempt to alleviate the pangs of lonely freshwomen, nor to hit back hard at demon rum. It seems one further venture in the ideologization of life. Don't countenance situations where men and women are formally seperated. We won with the co-ed bathrooms, now let's go for the fraternities. And the whole thing on the binge-drinkers—blame it on them.

Dangerous stuff, because by such reasoning one might end by blaming binge-drinking on Dartmouth.