This article is featured in the 2023 Commencement & Reunions special issue.
To President-elect Beilock,
Congratulations on your impending inauguration. We are two recent graduates — Kyle, a former editor-in-chief of this newspaper; and Attiya, who previously served in leadership in Epsilon Kappa Theta sorority and the Inter-Sorority Council — who believe you have a unique opportunity to tackle one of Dartmouth’s most intractable problems. Fifty-one years after women first matriculated, the social scene is still heavily segregated by gender. Indeed, the College will never be truly coed until every student, regardless of gender, feels safe and welcome in every space on campus. You can make that happen. In this letter, we offer a framework, developed from our own experiences in classes, at parties and around campus, for how to do so — and an explanation as to why fraternities must open their doors to change first.
Why a coed social scene is necessary
A social scene separated by gender is inherently unequal. For starters, there are 13 recognized (and one unrecognized) fraternities, eight sororities, three coed houses and four National Pan-Hellenic Council member organizations that mostly function separately from the rest. Thus, most male students have substantially more options when it comes to finding a Greek community to join and feel comfortable in. The hypercompetitive and widely criticized women’s rush process is a natural consequence.
Even within the houses that exist, inequalities persist. Financially, houses across the board differ dramatically; fraternities, thanks to their longer histories and higher-paid alumni, have larger potential funding bases than sororities. One of us is in a financially secure coed house with no dues, while the other was in a sorority dependent on the ISC for financial aid. Additionally, most fraternities are local, while half the sororities are bound by national organization rules. This means some sororities are officially barred from hosting public events, having alcohol or even having men in their houses. A social scene dominated by fraternity-hosted events is the result — with disastrous consequences for women.
There is no good reason to allow these obvious inequalities to continue. Dartmouth should move aggressively to shift the entire social scene toward coeducation, with a goal of, say, 80% coed houses by 2035. This preserves the possibility of a couple single-sex houses remaining, but ensures that coed spaces are predominant.
This will simultaneously be a house-by-house and a whole-of-Dartmouth operation. To meet these goals, Dartmouth should work with each house individually to identify and remove obstacles to coeducation. Help and push houses to go local. Cover operating expenses for financially strapped houses. Allow unrecognized fraternities like Sigma Alpha Epsilon and derecognized fraternities like Alpha Delta to return as coed houses. Construct new coed Greek houses. Work with the town of Hanover to eliminate planning and zoning obstacles to any of these changes. Work with affiliated and unaffiliated student leaders to ensure current students are part of the journey. And finally, put up the funds necessary to make all this possible — which probably means launching a new capital campaign.
Sororities, however, have an excellent counterpoint. They were founded to give women, like other historically marginalized groups, a space of their own away from those run by men. Remaining inequalities indicate that women are still marginalized today. The Greek system’s original sin is that when every other part of Dartmouth went coed, fraternities were not forced to follow. In order to reverse that injustice, fraternities must lead the way in integrating — and most sororities would then follow in due course, enough that coed spaces eventually dominate the social landscape. In other words, the responsibility to build new and inclusive social spaces should fall, first and foremost, on the frats.
Why the frats must go first
The most pressing reason to push fraternities to integrate first is their institutional complicity in the culture of misogyny and sexual violence on campus, a culture that continues to create a gap in the educational opportunities of men and women. This reality is borne out in statistics from a 2017 survey: 34% of female and 26% of transgender and non-binary undergraduates report that they have been victims of sexual assault while at Dartmouth (compared to 7% of men), over a third of assaulted women report that their assailant was someone they “met at a party” — the largest single category — and we all know where the parties are at Dartmouth. This reality is also borne out in everyday sexual harassment targeting women, as one reporter noted last month in a harrowing account that described explicit verbal abuse from fraternity brothers. And it is borne out in our own experiences: One of us was groped in Kappa Pi Kappa (then Kappa Kappa Kappa) fraternity freshman year, but after her assailant was found responsible, his brothers nonetheless scrambled to defend him. It was up to the frat to decide whether he could remain a member; when he was allowed to stay, it was her who was effectively barred from returning to the house due to his continued presence and social stigma. Sadly, events like this are commonplace — every fraternity has its own collection of young women who have been substantially harmed within their houses.
If more women than men must spend days, weeks, months away from school to avoid their abusers because reporting to Title IX may bring more trouble than closure; if more women must avoid certain fraternities because they are dominated by men who abuse or men who protect abusers; if more women must spend all night anxious, covering their drinks and searching for their friends’ shadows under dim basement lights because there is simply nowhere else to party; if more women are forced to watch their rapists and abusers walk at Commencement and go on to have prestigious corporate jobs; they simply do not have equitable educational experiences. Women are fundamentally disadvantaged by the continued existence of all-male spaces, and until they are eliminated via integration, the sororities must remain in some form. The need for them will exist until fraternities finally, in some cases after centuries, begin making the changes necessary to incorporate women fully.
Additionally, our experiences suggest that fraternities believe that they are unaccountable to anyone and will not change without a push. They are unaccountable to the sororities, as evidenced by their lack of enthusiastic engagement with anti-sexual violence efforts during the summer of 2021. They are unaccountable to the press: One of us, Kyle, was the subject of an online harassment campaign when he, as a news reporter, attempted to investigate rumors that a winter 2021 COVID-19 outbreak started at an illicit fraternity event, and the Interfraternity Council now routinely refuses to release to the public even basic information about rush. Finally, they are unaccountable to the administration: The very existence of SAE as an entity on this campus — a rogue house, derecognized following hazing allegations, that routinely takes a rush class in blatant violation of College guidelines — speaks volumes. To end unaccountability, fraternities must change.
While fraternity culture is most harmful to women and queer individuals, men are also genuinely harmed by the culture of binge-drinking and chauvinism that fraternities encourage. The lack of any real local alternatives to the frats — a dive bar, a bowling alley, a clothing store someone under 45 might patronize, anything — means that celebration at Dartmouth is synonymous with drinking and drugs, making perpetual intoxication a timeless tradition. Many men who belong to fraternities face pressure to “embrace alcoholism,” perform bizarre hazing rituals and generally behave in a manner they might not otherwise around women and other marginalized people in the interest of fitting in. These habits linger long after college, manifesting in chronic alcoholism and toxic workplace cultures. For women and the vulnerable, it means that “old boy’s club” fields historically dominated by men remain actively hostile minefields. For men, it means a more lonely, angry existence.
It is for all these reasons that the sex-segregated social scene at Dartmouth must end, and end with fraternities being cast first into the ash heap of history. The arguments usually offered against this path are dubious. Alumni donations may suffer temporarily, but past controversies suggest that there is a substantial bloc of Dartmouth alumni who presently withhold their money because they rightly perceive the College as complacent in a broken system. What about increased liability if the College exercises more control over Greek spaces? Give us a break. Dartmouth can afford to hire an extra couple of lawyers to head off legal snafus. And as for the idea that men need their own spaces — sure, maybe, somewhere, but why must they also be the primary social spaces on campus? What positive contribution precisely do fraternities offer that coed houses could not? Why must we perpetuate the lie that men and women are constitutionally unable to forge social spaces together?
There are absolutely practical questions to be considered. How will the first women that join newly coed houses be protected better than the women who integrated Dartmouth just over 50 years ago? How will entrenched apathy and bureaucratic sclerosis across the Dartmouth community be overcome? How will the most stubborn, obstinate houses be converted to the right side of history? These must be considered thoughtfully before a plan is rolled out, but the ultimate goal remains just as important.
President-elect Beilock, we leave you with this: Bold leadership is necessary to integrate the Greek system, but it is not sufficient. It will take everything Dartmouth has — and maybe, in the end, your best efforts will crash against the patriarchal walls of Webster Avenue — but it is far too urgent to not try. You have the opportunity to not just be the first woman president of the College, but the first president of a truly coeducational College.
Dartmouth was among the last Ivies to let women past its gates. It could be among the first to truly set them free.
Kyle Mullins is a member of the Class of 2022 and a member of Phi Tau coed fraternity, graduating today. He is also the former editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth. He is now a member of the Opinion staff and his views do not necessarily represent those of The Dartmouth.
Attiya Khan is a member of the Class of 2022. While at Dartmouth, she served in leadership at Epsilon Kappa Theta sorority and on the Inter-Sorority Council and was also a member of The Tabard coed fraternity.
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Correction Appended (June 12, 12:23 a.m.): A previous version of this article named two specific companies while describing a hypothetical situation in which women at Dartmouth watch their abusers graduate and get prestigious corporate jobs. Because the co-authors of the piece intended for the names of these two companies to act as a stand-in for prestigious companies in general, the names of the companies have been removed for clarity.
