Social immaturity
October 4, 2007 8 Comments
A year ago, as I was just beginning my post-college life, I looked at college as a haven to which I could never return, recently-condemned by graduation to the less interesting “real world.” A year later, I am reminded of what I don’t miss about college, particularly how socially-stunted some of the behavior at Northwestern really was, and I have to revel a bit in how distant this sort of pettiness seems to me today.
Specifically, I made a visit over to the website of my school’s newspaper, the Daily Northwestern today and read about a not uncommon debate which was set off by Daily columnist Anna Maltby concerning the worthiness of the Greek system. Maltby presented the nasty inter-Greek gossip of her male friend and his frat brothers as an indictment of the system at large. Maltby says of them:
These guys had no apologies, no regrets. And no qualms about judging someone entirely based on their Greek affiliation. I heard this sentence: “She’s kind of a bitch, but she’s in Kappa, so she’s not as much of a bitch as she would be if she were in Theta.” Wow! I wish I had such a handy, pre-approved rubric of other people’s character.
And I don’t think they intentionally show more respect for men, but when I could get a word in edgewise among all the scandalous talk, some of the guys seemed surprised that anyone sans penis could articulate complex ideas. (I actually was surprised, too, but only because of all the Carlo Rossi I had consumed.)
I found it questionable, as I said in my direct response to her column, that her first instinct was to indict the system as a whole and not to ditch her clearly classless friends. Ahead of even complaining about this in a column, Maltby can, at a micro-level, take responsible for the friends she makes and keeps. I agree with her that many people in the Greek system are incredibly shallow and into stereotyping. I generally attribute it to their insecurity towards meeting people different from them, as cliche as that sounds. Ultimately, this is a sign of social immaturity, a notion that interpersonal relations should occur only between those who have been arbitrarily-deisgnated as social equals. Maltby is right that sororities and fraternities–especially the several extremely status-conscious ones at Northwestern–do exhibit these tendencies, and those that do ought to be called out for it. However, those that do not should be spared of such critique and perhaps even lauded for transcending the usual Greek descent into immaturity.
At its best, the Greek experience brings people who are different economically, racially/ethnically, academically, etc, together. This is especially valuable on a campus like Northwestern, where students often get stuck in their academic and extra-curricular niches. It has always been a shame that a number of people see the system as a way to seek out those who they view as equally attractive, well-off (though not by their own exertion), and into partying as them, but it is certainly not characteristic of the system as a whole. Rather than condemning Greek life for that, we should condemn the specific people and chapters that perpetuate this sort of social immaturity, even if we count those people as our friends.
On a tangent to this post-
I picked the wrong day to start subscribing to the Daily feed. There are a couple of things I miss about NU: the attack on Greeks, not so much.
Makes me wish one could actually market a social club, as is, to undergraduates. I think it would save the campus from the boring debate. Plus, it would get rid of the inane philanthropic activities and scholarship initiatives that our clubs created to make ourselves look more appeasing to the students, the parents and the university as a whole.
That way I could have said proudly, I joined a social club for no other reason than to take an occasional break from my academics. I shared in this experience with others who felt the same way. My studies were very important to me and if I managed from time to time to screw that up because of my socializing, shame on me. (And not the organizations that I joined. After all, I’m an adult and I did have the option of quitting at any time.)
Those who used the Greek system to practice social elitism drive me up the wall. Could I put them in the same boat as those who use NU to practice academic elitism? (jingling keys and yelling the ‘state school’ chant at football games is coming to mind at the moment)
Interesting posts!
Coincidentally during my recent stay in D.C., I saw an episode of “Leave It to Beaver” on the hotel cable that dealt with fraternities. Eddie Haskell falsely disparaged Mr. Cleaver’s old frat at State as “pigma sty” ~ but not to Mr Cleaver’s face, of course!
Another recent pleasure of the visit was our delightful evening with Chris. Thank you for spending the time with us, Chris!
Much obliged for the invitation hm and Elaine! I had a wonderful time.
The school I went to didn’t have officially sanctioned fraternities, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t the same type of social self-segregation people accuse fraternities of fostering. I think it’s a somewhat natural reaction to being thrust into a completely new environment for some people–although you may branch out a bit, you’re most likely going to end up amongst those you feel most comfortable. On the other hand, we didn’t really need fraternities, we just had networking circles–so that if you interned in a certain area of work, there was pressure on associating with others in that same area just in case that connection might be of some use in the future–in other words, utilitarian friendships, which, I would think, fraternities would help overcome just by the fact that they force interaction outside of a certain social setting.
I agree with most of what you write, but the Greek system still sucks.
Some things never change!
I received my BA from Northwestern 31 years ago. I thought about my experiences there recently when I uploaded photos from my NU years to my flickr page. Here’s what I said on flickr yesterday about NU’s Greek System as it existed in the mid-70s:
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I joined Beta during my freshman year and, to my eternal regret, I remained a member of the fraternity and lived in the Beta house until I graduated.
Unbeknownst to me, and despite my having told him I didn’t intend to join a frat, my father signed me up for a trial stay at the Beta house at the start of my freshman year. Lacking the good sense to pack my bags and get myself into a dorm, I stayed, was asked to pledge, and the rest was history. A friend and I explored quitting Beta in our junior or senior year, but the dorms were full, and I wasn’t prepared to deal with the logistics of finding and furnishing a house or apartment and living off campus.
So, by now you might have guessed I am not an advocate of the so-called Greek System. That’s correct.
At Northwestern, the Greek System dominated the school’s social life to the school’s detriment and probably to the students’ detriment also. It divided rather than united the undergraduate student body.
First, the Greek System divided the campus into Greeks and Independents. That could be one reason there wasn’t a unifying school spirt at Northwestern, and why there wasn’t a sense of institutional history and tradition. That had all been Balkanized by the Greek/Independent divide, and then again by the barriers separating students within the Greek system.
Second, and this was probably truer for the women than the men, there was a hierarchy within the Greek system that pretty much ensured high-status sorority women never had to rub elbows socially with Independents, lower-status sorority women or, god forbid, low-status frat guys.
Finally, and this may have been true for Independents for all I know, there was a hard-core party culture within the Greek system that I think prevented students from making the most of the educational and interpersonal opportunities available to them at Northwestern.
My fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, had a dominant clique who, in my opinion, had no apparent interests, friends or non-academic activities beyond the four walls of the Beta house, unless you count going out to taverns together. In my opinion, the principal highlight of their days, weeks, months and years at Northwestern was the endless succession of late, late nights they spent together talking, drinking, smoking dope and listening to music together in the Beta house. Anybody who thinks this is why you go to college has their head up their ass.
My time at Northwestern was framed by two drunk-driving deaths.
In my freshman year, a senior in my fraternity who had been accepted into medical school was killed in a one-car, one-person drunk driving accident.
In my senior year, a beautiful sorority woman in my class died in a one-car, one-person drunk driving accident in Evanston after school ended.
At some point, the Beta Theta Pi fraternity at Northwestern got so out of control the University had to shut it down. I’m not sure of the date, but I think it was the late 80s or early 90s. I believe the frat was on probation, formally or informally, for infractions. The last straw came when one of the Betas injured himself on campus, perhaps even at the house, in some dumb-ass way, and the Brothers surreptitiously took him to a local hospital where they hoped the incident that caused his injury would escape the attention of University officials. It didn’t. The Betas got the boot.
I think the Betas are back on campus now. Whether the Beta house is a healthy environment or a toxic one, as it was in my time, I don’t know. I think many college-age straight men who are drawn to fraternities are immature to the point of chronic irresponsibility, and it isn’t good for them, or for the school, to live together in a fraternity without ongoing, significant and effective mature adult oversight within the fraternity house.
Wow, A. Davey, this is really interesting and sadly resembles way too much my sense of what things were like at Northwestern between 2002-2006. Admittedly, one can get beyond the Greek scene at NU, but it is discouraging to see how people squander their educations, drink a lot, act entitled, and create elaborate social status hierarchies that are based on no more than how much money their parents have and how they look. I am not being hyperbolic, either: I have heard frat guys and sorority girls in certain houses talk very openly about the superficial things by which they judge people. It goes from an unspoken thing to something people start to revel in because they feel they finally have a chance to be politically incorrect, I think.
It is really scary, as you say, how frats become these secretive entities that try to hide the bad things that happen. And it is a shame that many sorority women allow guys to say horrible, sexist things and treat them like crap. THat was really disappointing to me, at NU.
In my opinion, the principal highlight of their days, weeks, months and years at Northwestern was the endless succession of late, late nights they spent together talking, drinking, smoking dope and listening to music together in the Beta house. Anybody who thinks this is why you go to college has their head up their ass.
Couldn’t agree more!
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