Deliberate Misreadings

Another week, another outrage from Dartmouth’s stalwart-against-change Greek system. We’ve had rallies; there’ll likely be more. Community healing events have already been scheduled for the days ahead, this time by the campus feminist groups—after all, the ball’s in their court this time as it was in racial minorities groups’ last time.

Like many students, I’ve had enough—campus intrigue is a game that grows tiring, even more quickly than I realized a week ago when people were still talking about Psi Upsilon and "Wah-Hoo-Wah."

So now Zeta Psi’s in the hot seat, having been caught in the game of—what was it again?—distributing among house members a crude newsletter expounding on one another’s sexual peccadilloes and conquests. Like the CFSC and the IFC, I am shocked, astounded, and appalled. That those nice young men whom I once thought were so well-groomed would do such a dirty thing!

Let’s be honest: the behavior is institutionalized. It goes on in every house on campus. A certain sorority devotes a portion of each of its weekly meetings to "Sex and Sleaze," during which the sisters recount, even act out, each other’s "hook-ups" and not-quite-on-the-level dalliances. One fraternity is even rumored to hold what’s being referred to at large as a "gang-rape" video, though I’ve been told by a smirking few that all acts therein, not matter how unpleasant, were consensual.

Even in the womens’-resource-center-approved co-ed houses, I’ve heard stories that would make the most-liberated man or woman blush.

All that’s different now is that the cat’s out of the bag; fraternities, sororities, even co-ed houses have got to go.

The explanation is simple: the kind of brother- or sister-hood (the College calls it "sibling-hood") that Greek houses foster is incompatible with the goals of a truly enlightened community. Among brothers or sisters, our guards are down, we say things we otherwise mightn’t to strangers or professional colleagues. In a house or roomful of close friends, offense only strikes with difficulty, so often is it deflected as humor. And humor, of course, can disguise the most nasty and vile and contemptuous sorts of behavior, of the kind that we can no longer tolerate.

In one word, the problem is camaraderie. How were the brothers of Zeta Psi able to become so close to one another to not take offense—to not even consider offense—when their house-mates attacked, in such vulgar fashion, that most dear to an adolescent man, his amorous forays. The women mentioned in Zeta Psi’s internal newsletter were only pawns in a game of mutual antagonism, the power struggle between brothers for pride and recognition, hard-coded into even the minds of the most-sensitive (or so they claim) men.

We are clever animals, though, and can escape what nearly seems to be evolutionary, biological, determinism. If we all agree to be mature about this, we can avoid the very behavior that got us into this mess to begin with (indeed, one email circulating around campus urges women to join hands in a mass-cuckolding). We must keep our guards up, at all times, to protect against the sort of relationships (described by the less-enlightened as "bonds" and "rewarding") that make us comfortable and, therefore, both dangerous and endangered.

A young lady last night, in the midst of protest, kicked through one of the doors of Zeta Psi. Let us hold her as an example of the strength and resolve that we will need in the near future, of the anger and indignation we must be able to summon at will, of the hostility and distance we must all keep between ourselves to prevent us from lapsing into brutish humanity.

So, then, it’s agreed, the fraternities must go. And the sororities, too. And it is resolved that residential living must follow soon after into oblivion. Only when we are able to regard one another as colleagues and professionals—no more, no less—will the transformation be complete.

Hillary Miller and your ilk, we salute you even though we’ve not yet reached the trough of understanding you. But that’s the point: we shouldn’t need to understand. We’re all human, but, still, we can rise above it to regard each other as simple sets of demands.

And my demand is that you listen instead of manufacturing crises.

— Andrew Grossman
Editor-in-Chief