Correlation, not Causation

By Jordan Osserman, Staff Columnist

Published on Monday, May 17, 2010

• Print
• Report an Error
• Share

In an article published in The Dartmouth last Fall (“Kim to focus on Greek system’s public image,” Sept. 23, 2009), College President Jim Yong Kim stated that the Greek system suffers from a “public relations problem.” Last week, Kim stood by the remark, arguing that Dartmouth’s “Animal House” reputation is a derogatory and inaccurate stereotype of our upstanding Greek community in an interview with members of The Dartmouth opinion staff.

While a number of students leery of a president with an agenda to engineer social life (a-la Former College President James Wright’s failed Student Life Initiative) are relieved by Kim’s hands-off attitude towards social life at Dartmouth, I found the president’s immediate embrace of the Greek system a clear indicator that he’s out of touch with student needs and concerns.

As a member of both Panarchy and the Tabard, two of the “alternative” co-ed social organizations on campus, I have a pretty strong aversion to traditional Greek affiliation. Though not all of my fellow Panarchists and Tabardites feel the same, personally, I find nothing attractive about joining a social group that discriminates on the basis of sex. I find students’ impulses to sequester themselves with members of the same sex a bizarre and anachronistic approach to interpersonal relations that severely stunts the development of real-world social skills.

Some might call me a raging liberal, but I get the impression I’m not alone. From the now-legendary column in the Mirror by Matthew Ritger ’10 against Greek life at Dartmouth (”The Gospel According to Matthew,” Oct. 9, 2009) to the explosion of outrage triggered by the reopening of Beta Alpha Omega and Zeta Psi, it’s indisputable that there’s a vocal group of students frustrated by the dominant social scene on campus and angered by the suggestion that all the fraternities need is a little PR coaching.

Kim shared a few statistics he said he feels back up his impression of Greek life. Of the admitted students who choose not to enroll at Dartmouth, he said, 20-30 percent base their decision on an aversion to the Greek system. Only 1 percent of incoming students cite Greek life as their reason for choosing the Big Green, yet, astonishingly, 67 percent of Dartmouth women and 61 percent of Dartmouth men choose to pledge.

According to Kim, the implication is obvious: in their first year, Dartmouth students learn what it means to be affiliated, and many decide to pledge because of an authentic desire to join the ranks.

I find it hard to believe that Kim genuinely ascribes to such a simplistic interpretation of the numbers and so egregiously confuses correlation with causation. My decision not to pledge a single-sex house may put me in the minority at Dartmouth — and my more extreme opposition to the existence of traditional Greek life may be slightly idiosyncratic — but that doesn’t make my overall discomfort with social life at Dartmouth unique. Ask any Dartmouth student, affiliated or not, what sophomore Fall feels like, and they’ll tell you that there’s immense and pervasive pressure to join a house. On a campus where the decision not to affiliate can render you a social outcast, is it really fair to consider pledging an unadulterated “choice?”

With his doctorate in anthropology, Kim knows that there’s often more to culture than meets the eye. Indeed, it doesn’t take a Ph.D to realize that for a number of students, the decision to pledge is based a lot less on a sincere desire to join the Greek system than on peer pressure and the fear of social alienation. If Kim actually wants to understand why our fraternity system faces such harsh condemnation, he ought to drop the defensive media posturing and look at the problem through the critical lens he claims to hold in such high esteem.

Nearly everyone I know who has pledged a single-sex house has a story about being hazed (even if it was with their own “consent”). It’s easy to spot men in fraternity basements displaying outright misogyny and homophobia that typically don’t materialize away from their brothers. Our Greek-dominated social scene glorifies binge drinking. These observations say a lot more about social life at Dartmouth than Kim’s statistics.

Public relations makeovers can do a fantastic job covering up systemic problems, but if Kim wants to make more than superficial improvements to Dartmouth’s social life during his tenure, he’s going to have to reconsider the real reasons behind our “Animal House” reputation.