Getting rid of Greek?

August 8, 2007 3:10 PM

Are there groups working to abolish the Greek system?

A google search shows plenty of groups advocating for the Greek system, but few against.

posted by melissam to society & culture (15 comments total)

Greek organizations have been abolished at several schools -- Santa Clara, for one. Dartmouth was talking about it. It's usually approached at the level of individual schools, not as any widespread movement against the entire spectrum of organizations. Largely, this is because each recognized Greek organization is chartered at each individual schools. Kinda like individual franchises.

Keep in mind, you could never truly abolish the Greek system via campus legislation alone, as they could simply choose to remain independent (and in many cases, they are already technically independent of the school). Moreover, there are several non-social, academic Greek organizations that operate under similar principles as the social ones, and there isn't a anti-Greek groundswell against those specifically.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:20 PM on August 8, 2007

My friend was a member then the president of the Hellenic League at Rutgers and they were efforting abolishing the Greek system.
posted by spec80 at 3:24 PM on August 8, 2007

What does efforting mean?
posted by evariste at 3:26 PM on August 8, 2007 [1 favorite]

I feel like a douchebag now after having googled it, but it means "trying."

I work in news. I guess I just subconsciously picked it up. Now I'm efforting to stop using it... dammit.
posted by spec80 at 3:34 PM on August 8, 2007

My undergraduate alma mater, Hendrix College, also has no greek system. It was a local, ad hoc decision, not part of a larger effort.
posted by jedicus at 3:42 PM on August 8, 2007

A hypothesis for your google results - those who are advocates of the greek system are probably alumni of the greek system. They have something that unites them, and they feel that it should continue and support that effort.
However, for those who might have been against a greek system while in school, there isn't really a major reason to still be against the greek system after graduation.
You may have better luck finding those groups who are seeking to change the greek system - anti-hazing for one - than those who are seeking to abolish them universally.

My own private college has for decades sought to eliminate the greek system on campus. However, some of the most serious alumni endowments have come from greek alumni. Even when specific groups have lost their charters due to infractions, the alumni have ensured that the charters have been reinstated asap. Our greeks are local - no national affiliations - but I'll be stunned the day that greeks are gone. Even if they're "gone" - they'll just go underground.
posted by librarianamy at 4:07 PM on August 8, 2007

Hellenic League at Rutgers

What does this group do? I tried to Google it but no luck.
posted by smackfu at 4:09 PM on August 8, 2007

I would say that at some campuses, popular opinion and logistics totally alter the Greek system's operations. My alma mater, UC Santa Cruz, being totally separated from the town of Santa Cruz by a mile or so of meadow and forest, didn't have a "frat row" or anything like that, so I think that discouraged membership because students living in the dorms - about 50% of the total, one of the highest in the UC system - didn't have the ability to just go walk off (or back to) campus at 2 in the morning and find a party. We also had a really tightly-knit system of small, distinct colleges within the university, so the isolation a potential pledge might have felt in a 30-story tower of dorms at a larger campus didn't exist in the same way there.

Furthermore, the ideological flavor of the campus (however well or poorly articulated it may have been when I was there, it was still present) definitely didn't favor any sort of organization perceived to be privileged, wealthy, status-seeking or homophobic, which meant that many students, perhaps unfairly, saw Greek organizations as something they'd rather not have around. A number of high-profile incidents in the area (1, 2) within a few years kept campus opinion about the groups rather unfavorable.

That said, we did have nearly 20 Greek orgs with some presence on campus, some official representatives of huge national groups, others just local. Many were ethnicity-identified when I was there.

So while I wouldn't say that there was an outright movement to ban them, at least at my campus, I certainly didn't like having to deal with my underage residents being driven off-campus to parties by people wearing Greek letters and then showing up five hours later drunk and violent on the hall, tossing their cookies in front of the elevator, and then threatening to not clean it up. I also lost a roommate in an on-campus apartment after his 10-week-long pledge involved him drinking a quart of hot sauce, jumping off the wharf, noisy 5 am workouts, bringing loud, random people to the apartment at all hours of the day, and walking around with bricks in his backpack; he developed ulcers, was injured in the jump, and failed every class he took that term, so in addition to not being physically able to join, he ended up going home to try community college, and I never saw him again.

After all that, I'd be lying if I said those things didn't make me push for limiting the influence and presence of Greek orgs when I was appointed to be one of my college's representatives to the university's student government. Other organizations seemed to be perfectly able to entertain and enrich their members without secrecy, a lack of accountability, and causing lasting damage to people and property, and I didn't see why Greek orgs - who, again, may have been getting an unfair bad rap - couldn't manage the same, or at least convince me that they were trying to do better.
posted by mdonley at 4:37 PM on August 8, 2007

At my small liberal arts college, which was historically male, there were a few frats - SPE, PKA, KA, KSig, PDT, SAE . . maybe one more. I don't remember. Anyway, there used to be Sigma Chi's but something happened to their chapter, and SAE was on the way out for being, frankly, idiots. Every few years someone would try to drum up some support for sororities, but we had women's eating clubs (a la Princeton, I suppose) and Greek for Girls was always voted down.

I think that there are places where Greek houses will always be, but since those houses also give people a place to gather and do stupid crap, there will always be people who want to get rid of them. I don't have any use for the system, personally, but other people seem to enjoy it. As long as they aren't killing one another, I suppose it shall be a system of human organization that shall endure.
posted by Medieval Maven at 4:44 PM on August 8, 2007

smackfu: Rutgers' Hellenic Cultural Association

I don't know where I got league from. I honestly thought it was called that, but it's been a few years since college.
posted by spec80 at 5:05 PM on August 8, 2007

Heh, so the real Greeks are trying to abolish the fake Greeks.
posted by smackfu at 5:18 PM on August 8, 2007

The New York Times on Union College's successful effort to reduce the role of greek life on campus. Alumni were strongly against it, current students seem to like it.
posted by decathecting at 6:22 PM on August 8, 2007

My alma mater, Simon Fraser University, was rumoured to have actively discouraged Greek organizations. However, it was founded in the 60s and was famous in Canada for its hippies. Given the flak students gave the football team at the time, I doubt a Greek organization could have flourished. Moreover, perhaps like Santa Cruz, SFU had a geography that discouraged a frat row. SFU is on top of a mountain, with the nearest non-university building a 10-minute bus ride away.
posted by acoutu at 7:33 PM on August 8, 2007

Caltech ousted the greeks a few years ago. They now have the very unique House system. I would love to see my university do the same.
posted by kiltedtaco at 9:39 PM on August 8, 2007

It's like college football -- boosters convince university administrators that all the alumni money will dry up if anyone messes with their nostalgia.

I wonder if anyone has studied the actual financial impact of getting rid of fraternities where it has happened? There has got to be a tier of alumni who write big "congratulations" checks when this occurs.
posted by gum at 1:23 PM on August 9, 2007