A discarded can of our College’s favorite drink. Photo by Quinn Anya. http://www.flickr.com/photos/53326337@N00/3262302956

If ever there were a case for pun making, the events of last week made it pretty convincingly. It was a Frat-zaster. The affront, the outrage, the carefully meted dialogue, mediation and reconciliation (whew, Winter Carnival, unhindered and affirmed)—there was a hint of twisted wonder in it, laying-bare of our values. If only the infamous Giaccone had been a sterner villain! A small spectacle would have become frenzied mobilization, an us-versus-them crusade of the first order.

Maybe that was the odd crux of it all, though. The fire burned out before it really got started, our forces too strong and our enemy a paper tiger. Pick any terrible array of metaphors you like, save, maybe, ones involving Phi Delt. They all fit.

Vagaries aside, last week was understandably and necessarily absurd, as though the story now needs retelling. First, Hanover Police chose an inexplicably irrational new policy towards drinking, introducing it at an inexplicably irrational time.
Second, students responded with indignant force to what seemed a strike at the heart of Dartmouth’s social world. And third, said students won, beating back discussion so quickly that it was reduced, by a Feb. 11th article in the D, to mealy-mouthed abstractions about future “transformation” and “harm reduction.”

Convincing, right? It may have been a hard battle, but hard, we can guess, in deed only. Barring some game-changing detail, the war for the frats was won well before the issue had even settled into campus consciousness. There was no “other side” to it, just a hapless police chief drowning in the horrified criticism of students, administrators, and alumni alike. Had this not happened, would Winter Carnival have been any more dangerous? The worst Pollyanna would struggle to say yes.

Whatever drove the Hanover police’s decision to craft such a strange new policy, we can guess, will yet be a fascinating story. Provided the tale isn’t ultimately monotonous, bureaucratic boilerplate (by now, we’ve heard the rumors about a threatened HPo looking to reassert itself in the face of budget cuts), there’s riveting detail yet to be uncovered here. Someone, somewhee—for some reason—must have thought that a decision to cripple the frats, one week pre-Winter Carnival, would be politically sustainable and therefore worthwhile. Whatever change in thought this marks, provided it wasn’t undertaken by a hopeless fool (which is unlikely, given Giaccone’s long tenure and President Kim’s institutional shrewdness), it will likely speak to some paradigm shift in institutional thinking that has yet to come to light.

But that’s a story for another, hopefully brighter, day. Instead, what stood out about last week’s outrage were two things, each reinforcing the other. The first: that HPo’s new policy, upon retreat, seemed to leave no meaningful imprint on campus alcohol policy, minus obligatory, conciliatory pleasantries. The second: that this change was deferred not only by the immediate strength of fraternities and sororities, but also by the unquestioned, leveling sway of their institutional logic. There is, in a crisis-unified Dartmouth imagination, no alternative to our social system as it now exists. More than anything else about this place or this school, it constitutes our identity, an identity that subjects itself neither to internal criticism nor serious debate when threatened.

This is the delicate point, it seems, that every implicit or explicit challenge to our frat system reaches, and where every attempt at genuine change falters. Assuming that the system needs to be changed (a big assumption, sure, but one deeply felt by many people), criticizing it alienates all too many students whose relationship to our campus mean very little outside of house affiliation. Sure, this monolith of Dartmouth life frustrates the unaffiliated, perhaps rightfully so, but that fact has so far proven counterproductive as a call to change on its own terms. Systemic overhaul will depend on consensus, a consensus that can’t be built when a majority as passionate as ours feels threatened. The implementation of any alternative to the fraternity system, whether that means its overhaul or its phasing into irrelevance, will depend on persuasion. Where that persuasion will come from, though, has yet to be seen.

So that’s the impasse we all reach when change, whether incremental (a la the Student Life Initiative) or severe (last week’s debacle), is hinted at. The Greek system’s acid logic persists, referring again and again to its inclusiveness, and its all-pervasiveness, as incorrigible and unquestionable defenses. Even whispers of reform threaten too many people—too many, too intimately involved. And this is what will doom our Greek system in the long term. As Matt Ritger pointed out so sagely earlier this year, our frats have long had a death sentence stamped squarely on their foreheads.

Sooner or later, they’re going to kill someone, or almost kill someone, or push the envelope just a bit too far just a few too many times. And when it happens, critics will ask, again, the questions that have been long been dismissed or cynically accommodated: Where are the alternatives? Where is the system’s progressive future? Why is the joyfully communal heart of this school, really, so inseparable from its drinking? The answers to these questions have long been just convincing enough, just evasive enough to maintain the status quo.

But where time continues to move forward, and while things on Webster Ave. remain the same, they won’t always be. Sure, Hanover Police made a stupid decision last week, but its defeat added one to what may yet be remembered, by what’s left of the Greeks, as a history of pyrrhic victories. Until then, hold on to your composites.