Paternalism and Illegality

by Steven Menashi

Dartmouth's paternalists are at it again. James Wright and the Dartmouth Trustees want to remake the College in their own image and, in the process, have ignored the sentiments of Dartmouth's students and alumni. Wright plans to eliminate all fraternities and sororities within the next five years.

That Wright opposes the continued existence of the Greek system at the College is unsurprising. Indeed, Wright recommended the elimination of fraternities twelve years ago, when he chaired a special committee on Dartmouth social life. Many in the administration and faculty have long resented Dartmouth's image as a social school and one that is politically conservative. In their unremitting hostility toward Dartmouth's culture, they have altered admissions policies, toyed with the curriculum, and censored traditional symbols and songs. Unsuccessful so far in their aim to reshape Dartmouth's social environment to their liking, Wright and his comrades have decided to destroy the institution at the heart of Dartmouth culture: the Greek system.

Wright's social engineering project, like most of its kind, will have to overcome overwhelming popular opposition. A survey of over 300 students by The Dartmouth Review found that 89% of Dartmouth students oppose the Trustees' plans. A similar survey of over 2,000 students by The Dartmouth echoed the Review's findings.

“The Trustees are giving students the opportunity to reimagine social life and residential life at the College,” Wright told The Dartmouth Wednesday. “And the Trustees are prepared to invest money to meet [their] aspirations.”

The students, of course, given their druthers, would choose to maintain the same system they have enjoyed for 158 years. Make no mistake about it: the College is investing money to meet the aspirations of Wright and the Trustees — the students be damned.

No students were consulted or even informed of the plan before it was released on Wednesday. It was released, moreover, as a done deal. “This is not a referendum on these things,” says Wright. “We are committed to doing this.” Wright appeared at Alpha Delta fraternity the day before the announcement and, though the conversation focused on social and residential life, he made no mention of his plan. The administration neither respects students as individuals nor cares about their opinion; they expect to change students' lives by administrative fiat.

“The young people who attend Dartmouth College are adults,” says Claire Ebel, Executive Director of the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union. “Their choices — and their right to make choices — should be respected; they should not be subject to the dictates of administrators.

“There are people who loathe the fraternity system as elitist and exclusionary, and they may have a good reasons,” she said. “But I think it is unwise to prohibit adults from making choices about their lives and their participation in voluntary organizations.”

More than unwise, it may be illegal. “As a private college, Dartmouth can deny recognition to any group if it does so on a nondiscriminatory basis,” Ebel said, “but it cannot bring about the elimination of all single-sex fraternities and sororities. Any fraternity or sorority that wishes to continue its existence as a member of the Dartmouth community, as an entity independent of the College, would certainly have the right to do so.”

If Dartmouth allows students to live off-campus, it may not prohibit students from living in off-campus fraternity houses, since such a policy would discriminate against students on the basis of constitutionally-protected association.

Dartmouth College may, however, require that all students live on campus, eliminating off-campus housing. In that instance, fraternities and sororities may remain as independent, off-campus organizations; the College would be forbidden by law from taking disciplinary action against students for participation in those organizations, even if they are single-sex.

“Dartmouth College cannot forbid students from joining the Unitarian Universalist Church, they cannot forbid students from joining Amnesty International, and they cannot forbid students from joining single-sex Greek organizations,” said Ebel. “The College cannot, in sum, tell students that they may not join in association with people who share a philosophy, a religion, or a set of goals.”

The legal problem, though, is not the particular policy that the College holds, but the harm done to students on account of discrimination. “If a student were subjected to disciplinary action for participation in a single-sex fraternity or sorority, a constitutional challenge based on the rights of free association would be appropriate,” Ebel said.

The reason, of course, is that in disciplining students for membership in single-sex Greek organizations, the College would be practicing discrimination. The College cannot, for example, admit students who are members of the Southern Baptist Convention, but expel students for membership in the Catholic Church; it cannot expel members of Students for a Democratic Society while allowing members of the Christian Coalition to remain at the College. Such a policy would be discriminatory against people for their support of a particular religion, philosophy, or belief.

Free association is fundamental to a free society because it allows freedom of conscience to become meaningful on a social scale. Freedom of religion would be useless, for example, if Jews were prohibited from associating in synagogues to pray. “In the age of the Palmer raids,” observes Ebel, “it was the right of association for workers being threatened that was the genesis of the ACLU.”

Thus, even privately-owned accommodations, like Dartmouth College, may not — and, perhaps more importantly, ought not — discriminate against people on the grounds of constitutionally-protected association. The College cannot discipline a student for membership in Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority any more than it could discipline her for membership in the Democratic Party. Both organizations represent her commitment to a group based on shared principles and goals.

It is these very shared goals that are being slighted and ignored by the College and the Trustees. Even the Women's Resource Center will tell you that single-sex environments are important in facilitating openness and a feeling of safety. Fraternity and sorority members will tell you that the friendships and support network they found in their organizations were instrumental in their personal growth. What's more, Greek societies often maintain a social and political agenda, which they express through community service projects and activism.

Therein lies the threat to Wright's regime: that fraternities and sororities are a vehicle for independent-minded students to discuss issues and affect social change. In this way, they represent an obstacle to the Marcusian project of indoctrinating students; the Greek system represents an important forum for dissent from prevailing campus orthodoxies.

David Easlick and Thomas Short write in a recent article: “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.”

So Wright wants to do away with the fraternities because, in a time when colleges seek to indoctrinate students, the Greek societies facilitate political dissent.

“Many of our colleges are now controlled by egalitarian faculty and administrators who came of age in the 1960s, and who rejected fraternities and sororities as impediments to their plans to change the world,” writes William Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury. “Now that they are in charge, they want to impose their distorted image of the Greek system on today's generation of young people.”

Simon is right to point to the 1960s, but Wright and his comrades represent only one side of the '60s ethic. As University of Pennsylvania Professor Alan Charles Kors and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate wrote last year, “The '60s may be long past for most Americans, with various and diverse legacies left behind, but strangely enough, the best aspects of that decade's idealistic agenda have died on our campuses — free speech, equality of rights, respect for private conscience and individuation, and a sense of undergraduate liberties and adult responsibilities. What remain of the '60s on our campuses are its worst sides: intolerance of dissent from regnant political orthodoxy, the self-appointed power of self-designated `progressives' to set everyone else's moral agenda and, saddest of all, the belief that universities not only may but should suspend the rights of some in order to transform students, the culture, and the nation according to their ideological vision and desire.”

Wright wants the frats gone because they deny him control over campus life. Indeed, the students' overwhelming display of opposition to the Trustees' decision this week has shown that the fraternities provide a significant corrective to the autocratic designs of the administration.

James Wright and the Trustees of Dartmouth College have emerged as enemies of liberal education: they seek to quash independent thought and mandate that students conform to their social agenda. They do not seek to enlarge the mind, but to confine students by force to a narrow moral vision.

The students, in contrast, are the inheritors of the real legacy of the 1960s. Dartmouth students have proved themselves to be not the apathetic Gen-Xers we see in the media, nor the rowdy buffoons that the administration considers them to be. Rather, Dartmouth students, by rejecting the College's paternalism, have proved themselves to be people who care about freedom of conscience and association, and who oppose social engineering and authoritarianism in all their forms.

Wright and the Trustees hope to re-engineer Dartmouth into their own ideal of an educational institution. Their frustration in doing so attests to the success of liberal education at Dartmouth: these are students who cannot be re-educated or indoctrinated and who won't be controlled by a self-appointed intellectual elite. They are, in short, independent thinkers — and that's why Wright hates them.