To Youth and Liberty

By Steven Menashi | Monday, October 30, 2000

After the student occupations of university buildings at Columbia in 1968, Richard Nixon warned that the protest was 'the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the universities of the country.'

'If Mr. Nixon were alive today,' writes columnist Anna Quindlen in the October 23 issue of Newsweek, 'perhaps he would be surprised to learn that the revolutionary struggle is now in defense of beer, basketball, and bad behavior.' Among other things, Quindlen bemoans student resistance to the elimination of fraternities: 'Any number of colleges have identified the fraternity culture of long nights and endless kegs as a source of problems...but students respond badly to any attempt to curtail the Greek system,' she writes. 'Americans of my parents' generation were horrified by what happened at Columbia in 1968: the files destroyed, the dean held hostage. But if the actions were questionable, the impulse had meaning.' Today's defense of campus Greeks, presumably, does not.

'Bad behavior' at colleges is as old as, well, colleges. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Polonius worries that his son Laertes will engage in drinking, whoremongering, or other unseemly carousing while at college. 'Such wanton, wild and usual slips,' he observes, 'are companions noted and most known / To youth and liberty.'

Yet, even though fraternities have been around for two centuries, it's only recently that colleges have launched a concerted effort to destroy them. In the last decade, anti-Greek initiatives have emerged at Dartmouth, Bates, Trinity, Bowdoin, Hamilton, and Bucknell—to name only a few. At Colby and Middlebury, students of now-illegal Greek societies hold meetings in secret—if they get caught performing fraternity rituals, they'll be expelled. This isn't benevolent concern about destructive behavior; it's an assault on fraternities, and an ideological one.

Last year's Report of the Committee on the Student Life Initiative said as much when it explained that Dartmouth intended to engineer a campus 'based on Dartmouth's Principle of Community,' which Dartmouth's students are obligated to obey. If students fail to abide by Dartmouth's prescribed community values, students and student groups 'must expect to see their freedoms restricted, for the good of the community as a whole.' The Committee proposed that each Greek organization adopt a statement of purpose that will swear allegiance to the College's academic mission, the value of 'diversity,' and community service. In other words, Greek societies should promulgate the ideologies of college administrators, most conspicuously multiculturalism and feminism— 'improving gender relations' was the original justification for the Greek initiative.

Fraternities and sororities, for starters, value single-sex housing—against the academic notion that all such distinctions should be eliminated. And fraternities tend to disagree with the dominant politics. A 1999 study by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan found that only a third of Greek students supported racial preferences in admissions, compared with 44 percent of the campus at large.

But while colleges' hostility to Greeks often proceeds from political differences, it's their very existence that threatens the universities' ideological programme. As David Easlick and Thomas Short have written, 'Fraternities encourage students' attention and absorb their energies in ways that distract from the inculcation of guilt and anger. More important, fraternities provide a social setting—in which their members can share their reactions to campus events and discover that they are not alone in doubting the doctrines so insistently promulgated. This provides much needed psychological support for independent thought. Fraternities, in short, have become a sanctuary for campus heterodoxy, and that is why there are those who feel they must be stamped out.'

In truth, the war on fraternities isn't about ending drinking or bad behavior, it's about ending dissent. It's about enforcing prescribed values. And it's a real betrayal of the values students embraced in 1968.

'I graduated from college in 1968 and the whole point of going to college then was to get institutions and parents out of my life,' Harry Lewis, Dean of Harvard College, told the New York Times. 'I worry about the narrowing impact that such a well-supervised college experience might offer... There is something troubling about students working so hard to fulfill the dreams of others. It makes it harder for them to discover something of their own, get excited, and pursue it.'

'This kind of paternalistic, selective intervention in young adult lives seems to me very bad faith from a generation—my own generation—that secured the treatment of itself as young adults, free to do what they choose with their lives,' says Alan Charles Kors, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. 'An important and prestigious university that presents itself as a free university ought to treat its students as young adults, and ought to respect categorically the right of their students within the law to have whatever voluntary associations that they choose.'

Though the historical circumstances are less dramatic, students today are protesting for the same causes they did in 1968: free speech, respect for private conscience, freedom of association—some sense of undergraduate liberties and responsibility for their own lives. Instead, colleges again try to treat students like children.

Just after the original anti-Greek edict from the Trustees, a student editorial in the Brown Daily Herald read, 'As politically correct and anti-establishment as we might be at Brown, we still value the right to make choices. Increasingly, students at other schools are losing that right... Dartmouth is clearly taking the easy way out. It is trying to mold its current student body into a planned social network that is artificial at best and dictatorial at worst.'

Dartmouth more PC than Brown? Perhaps Mr. Nixon would be surprised by that, too.

To Youth and Liberty

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