by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author’s program note. I have total recall of this matter. It was1966
and I was about to be a sophomore at alma mater… and my parents were
worried… worried that I, their darling, their first-born son, was
becoming a wonk… all work, no play, a very dull boy indeed. Sure, I was
#1 in my class, a certain summa in the making, but not well rounded,
never the lithe master of every country club skill. And so, mom did not
so much request as plead with me to go through “rush week” when older
boys (to my worried parents’ complete satisfaction) scrutinized younger
boys… delivering themselves of every social outrage, all in the name of
social acceptance, social advancement, and the glory of the frat.
And so to please mama, I signed up as an available pledge… and went out each and every evening to my fate… which went like this…
Gilded anachronism.
To justify their anachronistic existence, and divert attention from
what they liked to do and were in existence to deliver, all the
fraternities sponsored a yearly academic prize… and all worked as hard
as they ever worked on anything to win it… for winning covered a
multitude of outrages. And so they sought out wonks, not because they
liked wonks but because these wonks and their stellar grades, once
pledged, gave them the latitude to party hardy.
“Boy,” they said at each House in the stream of parties attended, “we
don’t want you… but we do want your perfect grade point average… that
cool 4 point o.” And so, holding their noses, the jeunesse doree’ of
Fraternity Row offered me membership… at the cost of my self-esteem.
Finding the necessary resolution, I told them thanks but no thanks,
breaking my uncomprehending mother’s heart, who saw not courage but a
lifetime of effortless contacts from past, present, future brothers
thrown thoughtlessly away…
… As a result, I was never hazed and so cannot from personal
experience relate its intricacies, primal thrills and long-established
protocols. Luckily I have at my disposal the unvarnished truths on the
matter delivered by the man who kissed and told, that rogue brother, the
traitor of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, Andrew Lohse, the man who
did the worst thing he could do… letting his erstwhile brothers down… to
his everlasting shame and damnation.
For the incidental music to this piece about boys being boys and the
ways long honed by their Greek letter predecessors of getting around
bamboozled parents and clueless authority figures of every kind, I have
selected one of the popular songs from the “Animal House” series (first
released in 1978). It’s “Louie, Louie”, the ultimate attitude song. It
was written by Richard Berry and released in 1957. Find it in any search
engine. Play it at once. And, remember, it didn’t get its reputation
for outrage, insolence and ability to irritate every adult everywhere
for nothing…
Dartmouth College, an abbreviated history.
When you first see Dartmouth, founded in Hanover, New Hampshire in
1769, you catch your breath. It’s a picture-postcard-perfect scene, a
location tailor-made for well-heeled parents remembering their own
undergrad capers. But behind the Currier-and-Ives scenaries is one
generation of Dartmouth men doing absolutely disgusting things with and
to the bodies of other young Dartmouth men… in rites as old as
Neanderthal and as new as Facebook.
The current imp to unveil the excesses occurring behind the
Corinthian columns on Fraternity Row — for they have been unveiled
before — is young Lohse, aspiring journalist, who had no farther to look
for inspiration than to his brothers. What they were willing to do to
sleep in such exalted quarters amongst the gilded youths makes piquant
reading indeed…
… how pledges slurped beer (no doubt the cream of pale ales) off the backsides, between the legs of their soon-to-be brethren;
how these same chosen few walked through kiddie pools sloshing urine and excrement;
how they feasted, as well they might, on succulent pies of gourmet-quality vomit.
There is more, of course; there is always more, of these gifted Ivy
Leaguers snorting with each other, spitting on each other, tossing the
furniture about, least wisely at a female Dartmouth security officer.
There is still more… but you get the picture, the picture Lohse first
published in the campus newspaper, The Dartmouth (America’s oldest
college newspaper, since 1799) on January 25, 2012; a picture he has now
sold for publication in “Rolling Stone” for the edification of the
world.
The faculty reacted with the usual unedifying mixture of umbrage,
outrage, humiliation, and — above all — embarrassment. How could they
brag of their high positions at this Ivy League institution when this
institution was most often portrayed — and in such detail, too — as a
country club for the socially maladjusted and their jejune pastimes and
adolescent joys? Outrageous!
Enter Dartmouth president Jim Kim.
Having little else to do in their pristine North woods, the abashed
faculty made their way to President Jim Kim’s available door… pouring
forth their hot words, often in iambic pentameter. Amongst the words
most heard: outmoded, dangerous, illegal, scandalous, moral thuggery,
physically, emotionally, psychologically damaging… and much more of this
florid, grandiloquent, purple language of high import and flatulence;
for this faculty, like so many faculties, never met a sonorous and
highfalutin word it didn’t like, and uses them with gay abandon whenever
the opportunity arises, as it most surely has arisen here.
Weak as water, or shrewd and cagey, biding his time?
President Kim, a renowned educator, gave these aroused faculty
members no satisfaction whatsoever, although he called for an
investigation and made it clear the College’s detailed anti-hazing
policy, as well as that of the Granite State itself, would be applied
and applied with rigor. That was the presidential equivalent of “blah,
blah, blah” and conduced to greater anger amongst the academicians than
they had already evinced. Too little, they grumbled, too late; they
demanded the complete demolition of each and every den of iniquity and
bad taste called fraternities.
Here President Kim not only disappointed, but alarmed them… for he
made clear that he would not, and most likely, could not eradicate the
insolent fraternities and their (to others) offensive ways. Some saw
this as a nod in the direction of Dartmouth’s rich alumni, aging
brothers with odd tastes and strong memories. If drinking beer their own
way had been good enough for them, what had a few chiding do-gooders to
say of the practice? They would give to Dartmouth if and only if…
And since Dartmouth needs money, and oodles of if, the fraternities
and their bullying, homo-erotic, unhousebroken ways, might have to be
tolerated… for this is, after all, America… where a man (or woman) has
the God-given right to outrage their neighbors and their prim views just
about anyway they like.
And, with that, I give you the stirring chords of “Louie, Louie” once
again, because whilst these frats and their particular menaces and
peculiar devices might well remain for cycles yet to come, “me, I’ve
gotta go”…
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