If you've been a Dartmouth student long enough, you've probably heard several of your peers -- male and female alike -- say something about how they would never send their daughters to Dartmouth. "It's a frat boy"dominated place, women are subjugated in the social scene," and so on.
That screed used to be lost on my dispassionate newspaper-editor ears -- I wrote it off as melodrama; radical feminist nonsense that made it sound like women get a much shorter end of the stick than they really do. Men might own all the party property, but women own their social capital.
You don't like the way you're treated at frat X? Don't go there -- deposit your capital somewhere else. Personally, I'd never felt disadvantaged as a woman at Dartmouth, inside the classroom or out. That was my line.
No longer. It took me three and a half years, but I've finally realized that I had it wrong. Dartmouth owes women a lot more than what it's been giving to them. Dartmouth owes women a lot more than lifting the moratorium on new Greek houses. Dartmouth owes women more than roundtables about the alma mater and date-rape, and a whole lot more than relegating two of their seven sororities to tiny houses in Guam while welcoming back to the hub of campus frats No. 14 and 15, which lost their right to be here by flagrantly breaking the rules.
What Dartmouth owes women is reparations. That's right " Dartmouth has to pay. Money.
Hear me out: Women were not recognized at this institution until a mere 36 years ago. Before 1972, women were simply not part of the franchise of Dartmouth College. And once they started here, they were second-class students: Blatant prejudice aside, they came to a place where fraternities owned (and still own) some of the most valuable real estate in Hanover, and more importantly, had alumni networks years and years deep with tremendous financial and traditional clout.
Look around, ladies: Where are your powerful alumni spokesmen? Where are your millionaire alumni advisors? Your advocates on the Board of Trustees? Where is the deed for your sorority house or the land it's on? Where are you, especially those of you in national houses, allowed to have as much control over "your" space as fraternities do?
You'll be looking a long time. Fraternity members don't have to. This disparity isn't the fault of anyone at Dartmouth today -- it's a product of a long and complicated history, and I don't suggest that we take anything, including plum properties, away from legitimate men's organizations because of it.
So what to do with limited space? Woe is Marty Redman, who has done an admirable job trying to scrounge up something, even if it's only a couple of insufficiently tiny plots, in the opposite direction of campus growth, which will house a handful of the hundreds of members of Alpha Xi Delta and Alpha Phi sororities. Why is he going it alone?
I hate to say it, but it all comes down to money. That's why only national-backed houses are allowed to join the campus, even though we know that only local houses will ever have the same freedoms as fraternities (including national frat chapters that have escaped dry rules by virtue of pre-existing them).
It's also why the "permanently" derecognized fraternity Beta Theta Pi -- that's the one that tortured a kid and allegedly made covert sex tapes of women in their house -- is being allowed to exploit the lifting of the moratorium.
That's why it's time for the College to pay. Pay in property for new sororities, pay in insurance that would free these new groups from the national constraints that make them unequal to the fraternities, pay in priority.
Maybe, through evolution, we'll see eight sororities spring up over the next 100 years. But what's the College planning to do to expedite this painfully slow process? Not just to allow, but to clear the way and help women found Greek houses on equal footing with men's? That's what I want to know, and current, former and prospective students should demand to know too -- men and women alike. Until I hear that plan, I have to tell you, without a hint of melodrama or radical feminism: My daughters are not coming to Dartmouth.
