A Night at Panarchy

by Andrew Grossman

With our present Greek system possibly soon-to-be in shambles, now may be the time to assess the future alternatives for the many students who are currently members of Greek houses. Although the Trustees have promised us an alternative system, no light has yet been shed on what form it will take. Perhaps it will be a giant, campus-wide SuperCluster or maybe an army-barracks type system. Perhaps it will resemble Panarchy, the real heir to the Delta Tau Chi crown, to hear people talk.

Oddly enough, the Pan seems to largely support President Wright and the Trustees' decision regarding the elimination of the Greek system “as we know it.” A recent party featured pro-administration posters and banners.

Maybe it's all the drugs or something so simple as mercury poisoning. Why aren't they scared about the possible elimination of off-campus housing alternatives? Maybe they know something we don't.

Earlier this year, when I asked upperclassmen to tell me abut Panarchy, I came away even more confused than before. “Those crack-fiends,” I was told, “are insane. Don't let them take your wallet.”

Another well-meaning student explained, “Stay the hell away from there! What are you, crazy? Just stay away from those rotten bastards.” Group auto-erotic asphyxiation was mentioned. Truly, my curiosity was piqued.

I'd heard all sorts of messed-up stories of the Pan: they were all heroin addicts; yearly goat sacrifices, bloodletting, unbridled free sex (well, maybe not so weird until you get a look at the house members), saran-wrap Crisco-twister parties. The few members I know all have weird rainbow-colored hair and rebellious piercings, many of them invisible to the casual observer. I was even told that they listened to “strange music,” whatever that is. They're trendy, underground, modern post-modern darlings. The odd-ball cultural elite of the campus. More information, I needed more information.

I spent a long night at the Pan sometime in the first half of fall term. As I walked over with a friend from my dorm (who is pretty strange himself, truth be told), he answered my questions about the anti-frat. “They're basically just nice people,” he said. “Sure, there are drugs at the Pan, but where aren't there? Oh, and watch your wallet.” I thought to myself of my dorm. Would I ever make it back?

The building itself is majestic. The tall, white columns look monumental, as if the house was an ancient and displaced refugee from the antebellum South. Inside, we ascended a tight spiraling staircase, stopping at a small, oddly-shaped door off of a cramped hallway.

Things seemed okay so far; although I felt like Alice wandering through a world of spatial extremes, nothing too bad had gone down yet.

The room itself was huge. Big. Giant. Possibly larger than my floor in the River. I was told that this was the president's room.

Her name was Jessica, or Jennifer, or something yuppie and slightly pretentious like that. It was a hippie Shangri-La. Beads, blankets, and, well, bongs.

A very nice bong in fact. I was sure someone there had a bag of grass. It wouldn't be long before we were getting into that rotten stuff. To begin with, though, we took drinks. Although all the major alcohol groups were represented here at the dry Pan, there were no mixers.

As the only Freshman in attendance, I was sent down to the kitchen for ice.

There was a couple making out on the couch of the pleasantly furnished television room in front of CNN; an anchor was analyzing the Starr report. Cigars, telephone calls, girlish naiveté, groping, moaning, pulsing: you know the drill. After returning with the ice, I sat down on one of several couches in the corner, a highball of straight gin in hand.

The group in the room was certainly a diverse lot: aside from several white boys and girls, there was at least one person of each of four minority groups in attendance. At long last I had found diversity at Dartmouth, outside of Collis, at least. Hey, maybe the Pan is cool. Maybe it is the future, men and women of all backgrounds of all types, living together as an intellectual oasis in the Dartmouth desert.

Then again, maybe not.

We talked about music, specifically techno. One of the guests, a graduate and former Pan president, had DJ'ed a dance earlier in the night. Is this a great job for an Ivy League graduate? Forget Dean Witter and Anderson, this man was a bona-fide DJ.

It was actually pretty boring.

Everyone seemed pretty impressed that I, so early into my freshman year, was at the Pan,. “Usually we do a better job of scaring them away.” I was beginning to fall asleep.

What was I missing? I had heard about gay-porn weekends, mounds of cocaine, strange religious/sexual initiations, and ceremonies involving sodomizing livestock (which, as an animal rights activist, I was prepared to criticize as “barbaric”).

One of the guys there said he was gay. Another may have as well, but he spoke so slowly and unintelligibly that it would have been hard to discern. He may have been saying, “with a gray veil...”but I was unable to tell.

I became less and less impressed with the Panarchists as the night wore on. One by one, they slumped into the couches in silence. There were no political discussions, and not even a single mention of Marx. Even as creative loners, these losers were failures.

Even the techno conversation quickly fizzled. I think a couple of people were talking about how neat Magic is for a few minutes, but that didn't even last. What a happening Saturday night! I began looking for magazines, books, something, anything. What bores!

After a short, confused argument, several of us embarked on a quick trip down the street to Foodstop (“We specialize in food”), ostensibly to cure the munchies.

I had had enough, however, and was planning on returning to my dorm, where someone might be up for a game of Goldeneye or something. At this point anything would have been more exciting than sitting on the couch at the Pan.

Everybody's heard the cocaine-party story (quickly: sell land to college, use all the funds — tens of thousands of dollars — for a single night of ridiculous coke-addled decadence) and the gay-porn extravaganzas (convert young, impressionable freshmen; untellable debauchery), but what they don't hear is how lame the place is.

Maybe the Pan has its own PR department; I can't see how else these strange myths circulate.

What if Panarchy is closed down and the Panarchists are forced to live among the rest of us? Should we expect a wave of depression to sweep campus? Somebody should alert Dick's house to stock up on pills.

Their subtle infiltrations of our organizations could cause widespread yawning and boredom. At least now they segregate themselves, presumably as a service to the community.

Frankly, I'd rather go to bed early than party at the Pan. Is this enough to make Panarchy suck, though? Aren't Alpha Theta and Phi Tau just as lame if not more so? Well, yeah, but they don't have Billy K (campus-super-activist Bill Kartalopoulos), and they know they're not cool or happening.

This misconception is insidious. It would be a bad thing if the administration got the idea that coed houses like Panarchy are “cool” or “hip.” They're not even studious, just sort of whiny and depressed. If this is the future of our residential system, then surely we're all doomed.

Is this the future of Dartmouth's social scene? President Wright and the Trustees seem to think that co-ed houses are the ideal, but Dartmouth has four co-ed houses and three of them are horribly underpopulated.

There is a co-ed option at Dartmouth, and frankly, President Wright, there's a reason why no one is taking it.