And maybe Prof. Burke is right in that this community should respect the bonds y’all have made on faith. I could be very, very wrong. If that’s the case, everyone should let you all be. But he also says that with reference to “the level of which [groups] deserved institutional funding, recognition or acceptance.” I am very far from the institutional level, and so are other students. At the moment, I’m torn between respecting the community that fraternities build among themselves and questioning what kind of spaces–especially identity-based spaces–belong in a community like Swarthmore.

My one intervention is this: Swarthmore is exclusive. Anyone who has such an intense allergy to exclusivity that they cannot bear any association with it should not spend too much time worrying about the fraternities and should spend more time questioning whether the basic idea of selective higher education is legitimate. We even partner with an institution (Bryn Mawr) that is exclusive both in its admissions in general and on a gender-specific but non-ideological basis.

If I were to somewhat cynically design a narrative for the existing fraternities that explained that they were exploring forms of traditional homosociality connected to conviviality, athleticism and invented kinship, what would happen to the argument that some groups are entitled to their exclusivity because of its content and others are not? The only way you could possibly distinguish between the two at the level of which deserved institutional funding, recognition or acceptance is to create some kind of hermeneutical truth-squad that would parse every group’s narrative and every group’s actual praxis against some standard of legitimate exclusivity.

The safer thing by far is to say, “These are the people that I have to make some kind of relationship to in the next four years. Let’s see how it goes.” If you come to the conclusion that bright, ambitious people your age who otherwise met the criteria for admission to Swarthmore College are so utterly intolerable to you–or intolerant towards you–that you can reach no accommodation with them even with the passively supportive infrastructure of the college’s curriculum and residential life system, you have found out something very important about the political and social challenge ahead of you. Some students may feel that they already know at 18 as much as they care to know about the exclusions, discriminations and hatred ahead, and would like a surcease from those. I think that’s legitimate too, but if that’s all that Swarthmore was asking or affording–four years of perfected exclusion of any kind of ‘difference’ that rubs raw against our deepest hopes–I’m not sure it’s much of an education. Education, after all, can’t ever get away from being about transformation.

in reply to lobster, i think frats must have been different in your day because homophobia is absolutely NOT tolerated by either frat.

your claim that swat “funds” us is also pretty dubious. we pay for the house. it ain’t cheap. however, if a brother can’t pay his dues, the frat will accept him anyway. i know, i’ve been that brother (i’ve since gotten a campus job and can pay my dues). i’m curious as to what other student group would be willing to pay out of pocket every week for beer that is free for the rest of campus to drink. i have yet to be to another groups party that is not sac funded where i haven’t had to pay for alcohol.

you can call the frats exclusionary, but they are probably the least exclusionary student groups on campus when you think about it. our house is open as a social space on thursday, friday and saturday nights to the ENTIRE SCHOOL and the rest of the week is spent cleaning it for the next weekend. we are also busy swatties, we don’t really spend time there basking in the glory of having a house. we’re too busy mopping up stale beer and cigarette butts before heading right back up to mccabe, or cornell in my case.

im a little offended by your claim that the frats are a way for us to hold onto some social status that swarthmore won’t afford us. it’s just not like that. in reality, we value our brotherhood. we also value swarthmore. it’s not that way for all of us, but if you want to generalize us, that’s the most accurate generalization i’ve got.

All that being said, despite never being close to any frat guys, I ended up going to grad school with one and regretted not knowing him better at swat …

Mostly, I object to having an exclusionary organization with college subsidies. I’m not suggesting that we ban a culture, but there are no other exclusionary social groups at Swarthmore with buildings, funding, and campus recognition. The exclusion is an inescapable part of the way fraternities and sororities operate, and seems to me pretty counter to the broader ethos of Swarthmore. For what it’s worth, an acquaintance organized a large but socially exclusionary event my senior year with an aesthetic I enjoyed more. I’d advance the same objections to making that a campus-funded event. Basically, I think that any campus-funded membership organization that wants to explicitly exclude students should have a good reason and good criteria. What does that look like for Greek organizations? Why can some people join, and others can’t?

I’m sure there are lovely people in the frats. I still found the organizations a pretty toxic contribution to campus social life. The Wesleyan brothers may not have done anything to you, but the Swarthmore ones periodically (a few times a year) showed up at queer-affiliated parties and made homophobic remarks. Maybe that no longer happens — queer politics have moved a lot in the last 10 years — but it was pretty unpleasant. I’m sure that some of the same issues would exist if you got rid of the Greek system entirely, but it’s hard for me to see how providing a formal, named, funded organization would make it better.

Groups that are closed based on a social identity tend strongly to reinforce that identity in its members. Having attended an all-male high school in a very gendered community, I’ve seen how all-male communities can reinforce normative performance of masculinity. As a member of Swat’s men’s rugby team–a group that’s far more self-aware about its masculinity than my high school–I continue to see that trend. (I’m not sure how to confront gendering in athletics. My best temporary answer is to say that solidarity between the men’s and women’s teams will help, but that’s certainly an imperfect response.) Groups like SQU and Enlace also reinforce identities–but in their case, that reinforcement is part of their anti-oppressive work, because they celebrate identities that are marginalized elsewhere. Fraternities and sororities reinforce masculine and feminine identities, respectively–and, I would venture to assert, extremely normative expression of those identities. Therefore, a gendered Greek system reproduces the gender binary and celebrates cis privilege in a way that the future sorority’s insistence that all female-identifying students can join cannot fully answer. It ignores the possibility of androgyny, gender-neutrality, and gender ambiguity, and at least by appearances, it does not welcome non-normative performances of binary genders. And if we are trying to empathize with all students in the community, or all students who may be part of the community in the future, we can imagine a student who is agender, or uses they/them as their preferred gender pronoun, or is female-identified but performs masculinely, who wants the social space that Greek life offers but does not have a space for it. We might even have to admit the possibility that such students have come through Swarthmore in the past but haven’t tried to be part of Greek life because of its gender requirements. A gender-neutral Greek system could solve these problems. I don’t know of any particular reason why Greek life must be gendered, other than “that’s the way it is elsewhere, or has always been” (which is hardly ever a good reason) or “that’s what we’re comfortable with” (which is fine, but it doesn’t justify institutionalizing cis privilege). If there are other reasons, and I’m missing them, I’d like to hear them.

On that note, I hope I can say honestly that I have tried to understand and may understand why people want these organizations. Through the rugby team, I have solidarity with other students similar to what Greek organizations provide, and friendships in which shared gender sometimes plays a role. And like Chad Orzel notes above, the rugby team provides a space for the debauchery and foolishness common to people our age. That said, I’m also a straight white cis man trying to be accountable for my privilege and to envision ways in which the spaces in our community may marginalize some people. I think that institutionalizing binary gender falls within the scope of “marginalizing some people”. Also, this is really long, but I wanted to get the whole idea out.