The Axeman Cometh

9:05 a.m., February 10. My alarm went off and I woke up in my fraternity house to my roommate's shouting — “Are you kidding me...!?” The entire campus went into collective shock — sorority members wept openly, fraternity members shook their heads numb in disbelief, and classes were deserted for the rest of the week. It was as if the apocalypse had suddenly reigned down on Hanover on some otherwise ordinary Wednesday morning.

While the timing of the announcement was swift and unexpected (a sort of guillotine approach to campus administration), the Trustees have been mulling it over since the early 1980's. Ryan Clark's article (see page eight) details the very deliberate evolution of the attacks on the Greek system and the long series of appeasements made by fraternities.

The 1987 Wright report (named, coincidentally enough, after our current president) in particular seems an ominous, almost carbon-copied, precursor to the Trustee's Five Point plan.

After a careful reading of Wright's proposal, last year's presidential selection becomes very intriguing. Dartmouth certainly could have found an administrator with a national reputation — this is the first school that James Wright has ever run — and there was a strong push to hire a female president.

So, why then, James Wright? An outgoing, earnest sort of character, he's always had a natural rapport with students. After serving as Dean of Faculty for several years, he has their unflagging support.

After living in Hanover for close to thirty years, he is hardly an outsider — the label that dogged his predecessor and friend James Freedman. And, finally, Wright was seriously committed to getting rid of fraternities.

While there were certainly other factors at work, the conclusion seems very simple: one of the primary reasons the Trustees chose Wright was to dismantle the Greek system. He is, in many ways, the perfect axeman — a likable, sensible man who is fairly disposable once his task is done.

If Wright does have his way, he will wreck social life at Dartmouth, at the very least, for fifteen or twenty years. While this may sound alarmist to some, read Benjamin Oren's article (see page 6) on the myriad problems enveloping the Colby College campus after they banned their Greek system. Over fifteen years later, fraternities are still a contentious issue, and the Colby Greek system was never as thoroughly entrenched as Dartmouth's.

While the legal implications of the fraternity ban have yet to be seriously tested, there are several important precedents.

So far, President Wright has publicly ducked any questions about independent or underground fraternities, offering a sort of “I hope it never comes to that” response. However, if he is really serious about forcing fraternities to go co-ed, this is the most probable outcome.

Alexander Wilson's article (see page seven) looks at the brief period in 1991-92 when several houses successfully went independent from the College.

While the independent houses thrived, the College policy was very clear and vindictive. They threatened to discipline individual students (not the organizations) for living in the independent houses or for rushing the houses during freshman year.

Though this draconian policy never made it to the courtroom, similar cases at Hamilton College offer an encouraging precedent. The prolonged lawsuits financially sapped most of the houses, but eventually a court ruled that prohibiting students from living in off-campus houses was against anti-trust laws.

I have to agree with James Wright — I hope Dear Old Dartmouth never has to suffer through interminable legal battles and serious confrontations between students and the administration. If houses want to go co-educational on their own, then so be it. But if Wright wants to aggressively trample students' rights and force the process, we should circle the wagons and start looking at our defensive options now before it's too late.

— Benjamin Patch
Editor-in-Chief