It’s All Greek To Me

If you thought practicing the piano was just a nice way to pass the time, you would be wrong—it was more like a full-contact workout in an overheated gym. How would I possibly know this, as I can’t even bang out chopsticks, you ask? Early Saturday evenings, my junior year fraternity roommate Mike would come back drenched in sweat from a few hours of piano rehearsal. Aside from the annual mud football games, few guys came back to the house from any kind of workout looking as drained as he did. This weekly ritual culminated in a spring recital, and naturally I would be attending. What was truly impressive was that 20 or more of our brothers made the trek down to south campus and took in the performance, without even the promise of booze afterwards. I’d put good money that only a couple had ever heard of Debussy, or even had attended any kind of classical music performance, save a sibling’s end-of-school-year show. But that was the great thing about my fraternity—these were your friends and supporters, often times when you least expected it.

With colleges reopening this month there’s a new punching bag across campuses. Greek life has always had its doubters; some out of a false sense of intellectual superiority and others simply had no interest. The latter never bothered me—in fact I respected them for not caring about it. The former, however, always seemed to invoke the Groucho Marx line about not wanting to be in a club that would admit them. What they never got was that that Groucho was making fun of himself, not the institutions. Now the not-so-funny joke at colleges is the move to disband the Greek system by members of the Greek houses themselves.

This new pandemic of social crusading centers on the tenet that the Greek system is beholden to, and promoter of, inequality, elitism, and racism. The most vocal critics are students at such institutions such as Vanderbilt, Duke, Emory, and my alma mater, Northwestern. Of course, these students also claim that these very same institutions that they attend are also propagators of inequality, elitism, and racism. Oddly, they aren’t leaving campus in protest or calling for the closing of the schools, or at least not until they get their degrees. And I can personally attest that there was neither inequality nor elitism in my fraternity—all the booze was equally cheap and bad.

It’s the charge of racism that particularly rankles me. There was no sign over our door saying “Whites Only.” At any given time we would have had three or four black members, which as a percentage of the house almost perfectly matched the University’s minority percentages. We were probably slightly more progressive than some other houses, especially with a number of South Asian members. During rush week we would have daily meetings to evaluate pledge candidates. Unlike the movie Animal House, we didn’t set up an overhead projector to show face book photos and throw beer cans at the wall when we didn’t like somebody. Actually we tried that once and Hollywood makes it look much easier than it really is. But during these “hash” sessions, nobody, and I mean nobody, ever said, “We have a black guy, why do we need more?” or “Gee do you think it’s going to look bad if I say I just don’t like the guy and he happens to be Hispanic?” Minds met, bids were handed out, and pledges made. As Groucho also said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

A final, and overarching, complaint from the disaffected is that there is no “meaning” to the Greek system. I have vague recollections of the meaning of the secret lessons from my initiation ceremony. You can look up the meaning of my fraternity’s crest in any standard reference book of heraldry. As with anything in life, meaning comes from what you put in, and it varied for each man. Some guys were active in the house all through college, living, breathing, and drinking it in for four years. As junior and senior years came, more distanced themselves, perhaps just paying dues and doing door duty for parties, but not so involved in the day-to-day. Some just faded away.

But there was real meaning in the day-to-day life. Our weekly chapter meetings were nominally to go over the house’s business, but more gossip sessions from the previous, pre-social media, weekend’s parties. Occasionally, however, the meetings turned ugly. The President storming out of the meeting and threatening to resign ugly. Calls for an active to leave the fraternity ugly, only for that active to defend himself in speech so eloquent that it ended in a cacophony of applause. Verbal knife fights that would have ended in blood with real weapons ugly. As unpleasant as these incidents were, I’ve applied what I learned in my personal and professional life time and time again. That’s what college should do for you, and my fraternity definitely did.

Which brings us to the question that Greek members who call for the elimination of the Greek system can’t seem to answer: Why did you want to join in the first place? It seems that these youths felt that their purpose in life was to change the Greek system into some functionary of social change and promoter of “social justice.” This isn’t just naïve but utterly stupid. These days there are a hundred campus organizations, with every flavor of disaffection, that are looking to change the world. The Greek system isn’t it. The virtue signaling of deactivating after failing to complete this mission simply completes this circle of self-absorption.

I won’t defend every Greek house in America. There are plenty of idiots to want to funnel booze into an 18 year-old’s throat or throw them out into the cold woods as pledge training and not expect bad things to happen. There’s no place for that, or if there is it’s probably jail. A friend of mine once recounted a hazing ritual, best not repeated here, whose purpose was to confirm that these fine young white men would not be aroused by black women. Obviously there’s no place for that either. And if there was a shortcoming in my house, it would have been the difficulty for those who were exploring their sexual identities. We all knew members who were gay, but it wasn’t as if they could bring a boyfriend to formal.

Yet there is still plenty of meaning for most of those who have gone through the Greek experience. About a dozen of us have gone on virtual reunions during this Covid time. Predictably, the years have added a few pounds or taken away some hair, but overall the crew is in great shape. The conversation revolves around the issues of 50-something men—how kids will adjust to college this year, golf, and hoping Northwestern’s football team will be at least average. But the jokes are just as cutting as they were three decades ago, and as my wife pointed out she hadn’t heard me laugh that hard in a long time. The camera also shows that our careers have been successful enough that we can afford better cocktails than the swill we had in the past. This brotherhood, in its own way, is Stellis Aequus Durando, “Equal to the Stars in Endurance.” I only wish Mike were alive today to give us all one more performance, even if it were just over a blurry Zoom video.

© 2020 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.