A History of Lies

Dartmouth's propaganda machine wants you to think that they have no concrete plans for the “new social system,” that “nothing has been decided,” and that any changes will be “up to the students.” This, of course, is not the case.

The set of recommendations that constitute the Trustees' plan to end Dartmouth's Greek system “as we know it” are the culmination of a two-decade long anti-Greek initiative. To pretend that this sort of initiative does not know where it is going, and will need to rely on student direction (as the Trustees claim) is a ridiculous assumption: it ignores the decades-long persistence of their plans.

In 1987, President Freedman formed an ad hoc College Committee on Residential Life at the College — chaired by James Wright. The Wright Report (as the committee's findings quickly became known) was strikingly similar to the precepts outlined by the Trustees' last week. The Wright Report called for the long-term conversion of fraternities and sororities into College-owned residential halls. In their place, Wright's committee proposed the creation of co-educational residential clusters, with substantial programming budgets and “common academic interests” — along the model of the East Wheelock cluster. (The purpose was to increase the intellectual and social interaction of Dartmouth's students.) The Wright report, of course, ignores the fact that more than twenty such groups, residential units built around common interests, already exist at Dartmouth — they are called fraternities and sororities.

Wright's committee, of course, wasn't really concerned with the intellectual progress of Dartmouth's student body; if it was, it would recognize the positive role Greek houses can play. What it was explicitly concerned with, instead, was the elimination of Dartmouth's reputation as a drinking school, and so the elimination of the fraternities.

Both that report and the current plan ignore an important and fundamental reality: national statistics consistently confirm that binge drinking and deaths from drinking are equally likely to occur at schools that have fraternities and at those that do not have fraternities. Even the administration admits as much.

The Wright report also recommended that rush be delayed so that students could not join Greek houses until their sophomore spring, and that fraternities be closed during sophomore summer. There is no cohesive rationale behind these proposals; their sole aim was to further disable the Greek system.

The Wright Report was followed by a 1994 report from the College Committee on Diversity and Community, which further condemned the fraternity system as encouraging “anti-intellectualism, sexism, racism, and homophobia”—in other words, the standard charges the College uses to attack any group it opposes.

The 1989 Committee on Diversity, the 1997 Task Force on Social Life, and the 1998 College Committee on Alcohol and Other Drugs have also prefigured the recent Trustees announcement.

The point of all this history is that the Trustees are to be taken seriously — very seriously. The administration has apparently reduced all of its problems with Dartmouth, all of its perceived flaws, to a single variable: the existence of the fraternity system.

The Trustees have convinced themselves that there is a fantastically simple dynamic at work here: an intellectual campus and a social campus are two irreconcilable concepts. An intellectual campus is responsible for academic esteem, serious thinking, diversity, and good things like that. A social campus mainly promotes drinking and intolerance and death. The Trustees, then, taking too much advice from parochial academics like James Freedman and James Wright, have resolved to destroy the Greek system.

Unfortunately for President Wright, things simply aren't that simple. Since President Freedman took office, the average SAT score and class rank of Dartmouth's entering freshman class have increased markedly. Karl Furstenberg, the current Dean of Admissions, was hired with the explicit charge to admit more “intellectual” students — students who wouldn't join fraternities. Despite all of this, and the implementation of sophomore rush, membership in fraternities and sororities has also increased substantially in the same time frame — and fraternity and sorority members do better in school than their non-Greek counterparts. It seems, then, that intellectualism and the Greek system are not antagonistic; they might just be complementary.

What the Trustees are hoping is that the flurry of media attention surrounding the recent hazing-related deaths at MIT and at Louisiana State University and the health community's rhetorical myths about binge drinking (ably debunked by William F. Buckley, page 2) will help nudge Dartmouth's alumni into agreement. They hope to convince the alumni that fraternities today (for it is fraternities that are the target here, not sororities) are an entirely different animal than they have been in the past: that they are dangerous, anti-intellectual, sophomoric, bestial, and abusive places where nothing happens but hazing and unhealthy drinking.

Protests like the literate and intelligent rally staged at Psi Upsilon over Winter Carnival, then, are useful, because they make an important point. They show alumni that the Greek system is highly popular, that its members are smart and thoughtful, and, most importantly, that Dartmouth's fraternities and sororities will not go down without a fight.

The early evidence shows that Dartmouth's alumni are responding to these popular protests — and not to misleading College propaganda. Hundreds of alumni have already pledged not to contribute to the College so long as it continues to try to dismantle the Greek system, and many more have already withdrawn their contributions.

The twenty-year persistence of the administration's efforts to dismantle the Greek system shows that President Wright and his cronies are in it for the long haul. The powerful response the student body has offered gives evidence that the system will not go quietly. The final decision, though, will be made by the alumni, who will say with their wallets whether or not they feel passionately about traditional Dartmouth. Let us hope that they do.

— The Editors