To the Editor:
I can not believe it's happening. The Dartmouth has come out, as an organization, and denounced the whole Tri-Kap name change as insensitive. This denunciation is completely without merit, and The Dartmouth, supposedly as the only unbiased newspaper on campus, has no place calling for such a change.
Based solely on the fact that the KKK letters connote something to most people, the editorial board calls the name insensitive. Let me give everyone a hypothetical that might point out the absurdity of the outrage to the name change. Suppose someone starts a hate group in the country that espouses killing all people that are not purely Aryan in origin and relegating all women to cavewoman status. And further suppose that this group names itself the Dartmouth Klan. Would the editorial board seriously propose to the campus that we, as undergraduates, alumni, administrators and professors, change the name of the school and all things associated with it? Of course not, that would be overreacting.
The D's editorial board even claims not to harbor any notions that Tri-Kap is intentionally equating itself with its abbreviated namesake. "No one is accusing Tri-Kap of being racist, or even associating itself with the Klan, but the house's actions are clearly insensitive" since we all know that independent organizations must submit to the ambiguous sense of "community" for which the Dartmouth proclaims itself the protector.
The point is, no one but a Tri-Kap knows what the letters Kappa Kappa Kappa symbolize; that's one of the benefits of being a member. I am a [brother of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity]. A few years ago we found a stereo in an electronics magazine that was SAE brand, and we thought that was pretty funny. But there was no attempt to create a connection between this electronics corporation and the meaning behind the letters Sigma Alpha Epsilon. That's how it should be. Don't condemn an organization for the unfortunate coincidence that some other organization chose the same three letters to start the words of its name.
It is not the role of the students on this campus, especially those charged with distributing the only unbiased source of campus news, to play sensitivity police and draw conclusions about an organization based solely on abbreviations. The Tri-Kap name has a good deal of tradition on this campus. If the students on this campus are too ignorant to draw the distinction between local tradition and nation-wide hatred, that's the fault of the students, and Tri-Kap should not have to suffer the repercussions of the ignorant masses. Tri-Kap, keep the name. Some of us actually can tell the difference.
