Greek System

I attended proudly the University of Illinois.  It's a fine institution, with fine programs in engineering, business, architecture and law.  The campus is fine, although not the best in the country by far, and it was affordable when I attended.  I follow their sports teams passionately and take pride when alumni win important prizes in literature, medicine or other disciplines.

There was, however, a dirty underside to life as a student at the campus.  I don't know how this translates to other campuses or whether it's peculiar to Illinois.  I suspect that the dirt exists elsewhere but takes different forms.  At Illinois, however, the Greek System was unbelievably obnoxious.

Before all the apologists assail me, understand this:  I never once tried out, or rushed, for a fraternity.  I was never mistreated by a frat boy, nor was I made to feel inferior by anyone that belonged to a frat.  I didn't try to date girls in a sorority -- not that it would have made a difference -- and largely kept my distance from the houses.  In fact, I never once stepped foot in a fraternity or sorority.

Why, then, my disdain for the system?  To put it simply, it's elitist and hypocritical.  For all of those who tout the substantial benefits of the system -- and on this we can agree:  There are far too many of them -- the negatives outweigh those benefits.

Let's start at the beginning: The whole point of having fraternities (unless I specify, when I mention frats I'm indicting both them and sororities) is to promote brotherhood.  That is, after all, what fraternity means.  Didn't the French hail Liberté, égalité, fraternité during their revolution to oust the royals?  The Greeks have sullied that noble idea by claiming one thing and doing quite another.

For example, how can you blackball someone who wants to join your frat if you are promoting brotherhood?  Why even have a credo stating that the promotion of brotherhood is one of your chief goals?  I've discussed this with Greeks and they say that they should have the right to choose with whom they live, and so they should.  Just don't call it a frat then.  Call it a dinner club, a social club or whatever euphemism you choose, but leave fraternity out of it.  By virtue of the fact that you pick and choose among people you scoff at the notion of brotherhood.

The people whom frats choose to admit to their ranks typically fit into a mold.  There were frats that only took tall blond guys, sororities that only chose thin blonde cheerleader types and others that would only admit those girls whose daddies' tax returns deemed them worthy of admission.  I'm not making this up:  One sorority at Illinois when I was there required applicants to submit their fathers' income tax returns as part of their application.  What does income have to do with sisterhood?

The dirty little secret that the Greeks loudly protest is that the system is hugely racist.  When I attended, the whites had their houses, the blacks had their houses and the Jews had their houses.  Sure, there might have been an errant member here and there who slipped through the winnowing process, but by and large the Greek System was largely segregated. 

Add to that there were racist and anti-Semitic taunting that went on -- one time, the Jewish frat found a severed sheep's head in its mailbox -- and the whole notion of proclaiming the pursuit of brotherhood rings hollow.

I coached a girls' intramural football team that faced off against a sorority in the championship game.  The opponent came out with all their blonde ponytails hanging out of the back of their baseball caps and their frat boy coaches were on the sidelines imparting their superior knowledge. There had to be at least one frat boy per sorority player.  We killed them.

That game, because that league was open to all university squads, was played on mud fields outside Huff Gym.  The frat league final was played under the lights in Memorial Stadium on turf.  Brotherhood indeed.

One incident, possibly apocryphal, points the iniquities between Greeks and non-Greek students:  One house's rushees during Hell Week thought it would be funny to bring back some human brains from the on-campus cadaver room that was used for medical studies and put them on plates in the frat as if they were spaghetti.  The actives came home, yucked it up, and then told them to return them to the cadaver room.  In between the house and the cadaver room was the house's rival, so instead of doing the proper thing, the snuck into the rival's laundry room and dumped the brains in the rival's washing machines.  When they were discovered, the FBI was called in because no one knew whether a murder was involved.  When the prank was cleared up, the house got a $500 fine and was put on probation for a year.  Had a non-Greek done such a thing he would have been kicked out of school.

I toyed with the idea of rushing a black house just to make a statement.  I could have been mistaken, but the black houses seemed to promote brotherhood a heck of a lot more than the white houses.  Perhaps they would have thought I was making fun of them, but in fact I would have been making fun of the white houses, whose notion of brotherhood comes nowhere close to the dictionary definition.  In the end, I chose not to rush, if for no other reason that I couldn't afford it.

One incident in my senior year, though, made up for it all.  Friends from my days in the dorm stopped by a party at a house nearby where I was living off campus and broke into the kitchen, where they found frozen turkeys ready for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.  They smuggled out a few of them and gave them away, but wanting to keep one for themselves, brought it to my house and asked me to cook it up for them.  Having learned from our Mother how to do it, I readily agreed, and two weeks later we had ourselves a mighty fine feast, thanks to the fraternity that had enough money it could afford to have a beer wagon for its party (hey -- this was the early 80's).

I guess one could say that that time, the frat's turkey was cooked.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles