The Five Points: Yesterday's News

by M. Ryan Clark

Twelve years later, these words seem darkly prophetic.

The administration's attempt to force coeducation on fraternities and sororities is the most recent move in a twenty-year battle between the College and the Greek system. Over the course of this battle, the administration has taken many steps to reduce and possibly eliminate the role of fraternities at Dartmouth.

The faculty launched the first attack in the late 1970s when it backed a proposal by Professor James Eperson, to completely abolish the Greek system. Eperson charged that fraternities perpetuate racial stereotypes, encourage vandalism, promote an anti-intellectual atmosphere, and are inherently sexist.

He also claimed that fraternities undermined the academic mission of the College and, therefore, the system should be eliminated — the same arguments still tossed around by faculty members today.

In 1981, to solve the house's financial problems, the alumni corporation of Beta Theta Pi proposed that the College “take control of the physical facilities...and operate the houses as it operates the dormitories.”

These recommendations, known collectively as the Mahoney proposal, would have a fraternity system that would allow the richer houses to help those houses experiencing financial difficulties. The College would have to approve the spending of the fraternities, effectively treating “fraternities as mere student organizations whose purse strings it could control.”

According to Mahoney, this would also clean up the “Animal House” image of Dartmouth — since the College would own the houses, fraternities would be forced to follow the same rules as dormitories. The College could hold non-fraternity events in any of the houses and send in Safety and Security officers any time they pleased.

Trustee opinion was muted until the Minary Retreat during the summer of 1983. After the retreat, the trustees announced that it is in “the long-term interests of Dartmouth institutionally and of the fraternities themselves for the College to acquire ownership of the house facilities.”

Since this would be difficult to pull off outright, they proposed a system in which the College could regulate fraternity behavior and derecognize any house that failed to meet the guidelines. These “minimum standards,” as they came to be called, gave the College a convenient way to buy up houses.

However, the most policy statement about the Greek system came in 1987 from the ad-hoc Committee on Residential Life, chaired by none other than James Wright. The Committee's recommendations, collectively known as the Wright Report, are oddly similar to the Trustees' Five-Points plan announced this winter.

1. The residential system should be reorganized in order to design social activities around clusters. Among the suggestions for the clusters were on-site dinners and an Idea Resource Center would give each cluster its own (similar to the system at Harvard). In other words, the Idea Resource Center would run social events like the “Wookie Inferno” (billed as a “Star Wars-themed dance party”) held in the Choate cluster last year, or poetry readings in Brace Commons.

2. Dorms should be established for those students with common academic interests. This was supposed to help create the cluster's “personality”, which committee members felt would be necessary in the new residential structure.

3. The College should continue to work towards a goal of purchasing the houses. After purchase, the fraternity houses would be turned into affinity housing. In dubiously coincidental timing, three fraternities were derecognized during Green Key Weekend 1987, only two weeks after the Committee's report, for serving alcohol to minors. Also, around the time of the report's release, houses were put on probation for such things as wearing “offensive T-shirts” and having “intangible attitudinal problems”.

4. The role of alcohol in the social environment of the campus should be reduced. This is a recommendation not unlike the recent edict from the trustees. The Wright Report recommended banning kegs, closing taps, and requiring a licensed bartender at all parties.

Though the committee understood that eliminating open fraternity parties would not solve the problem completely, it did not come up with any plans to cut back private drinking.

Rather, it condemned the fraternity system by alleging that “too often these organizations are indifferent toward insensitive, sexist, boorish, and drunken behavior.”

5. The organizational structure of fraternities should be changed in order to reduce their role in the social life of the campus. The committee made two serious recommendations. First, rush should be delayed until sophomore spring, and, second, that the College “should explore the consequences of not permitting fraternity and sorority houses to be open in the summer term.” The consequences of this would have been drastic. By postponing rush until spring of sophomore year, fraternity houses would have lost one third of their dues.

Additionally, with rush delayed and summer fraternity life eliminated, new members would not be able to participate in house business until at least junior year. The organizational structure of fraternities and sororities would have been greatly damaged if these propositions had been carried out.

The Wright Report clearly foreshadows the Greek system's current situation. Subsequent committees have concurred with the Wright Report and have taken further steps towards the elimination of fraternities.

In 1994, the Committee on Diversity and Community alleged that the Greek system encouraged “anti-intellectualism, sexism, racism, and homophobia.”

Fraternities also “reinforce values that, among other things, often conflict with pluralism, not because of any conscious intent but because they reinforce the most superficial affinities.” The arguments made in 1994 were strikingly similar to the arguments made by the faculty in the late 1970s.

The next actions of the administration remain unclear. Given its oft-stated goal of purchasing the physical plants of fraternity houses, the administration will likely continue to enact policies to subvert the fraternity system.

The coeducation of fraternities and sororities follows in the footsteps of the Mahoney proposal, minimum standards, and the Wright Report. All of these policies have the ultimate goal of reducing individual expression at the College and of ending the Greek system “as we know it.”