The McGill Daily Vol. 111 Issue 02

Page 6

6

features

September 13, 2021 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

Is it Great to Go Greek?

A critique of the Greek system in the US and Canada

Anna Zavelsky Culture Editor

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old, visible, the street of fraternity and sorority houses known as Greek Row is often lined with historic manors, architectural feats; across 800 US campuses, fraternities own roughly US$3 billion worth of real estate. Power is derived through visibility and exclusivity on campus and online, both literal and digital visual markers of wealth. By monopolizing and capturing an enticing social space that embodies a stereotypical college experience of parties and lifelong friendship, the predominantly white (PW) Greek system maintains relevance amongst college students. Greek life parties are one of the main ways in which students at US colleges engage in party culture, with large fraternity house basements creating ample opportunity for drinking below the age of 21. It’s therefore not unreasonable to suggest that Greek life has played a notable role in spreading COVID-19 throughout the pandemic, particularly on college campuses and particularly with the mass return of students to campus universities in the US. COVID-19 cases on college campuses during the 2020/2021 academic year were largely sourced from the unmasked and not socially distanced gatherings by Greek life members, including events organized and publicized by the Greek Letter Organizations (GLOs). Although – according to a former-McGill Greek life member – the commitment and pressure to be social in this capacity is less applicable to Canadian GLOs, multiple University of British Columbia (UBC) frat parties have violated public health regulations. Such a socially-oriented conception of the “college experience,” according to sociological researchers Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton, is exemplative of what they call “the party pathway.” Their book, Paying for the Party, examines how colleges maintain inequality, based on their research of an unnamed university in the Midwestern United States (MU, Midwestern University). They find that the “college experience” is not universal, but socially classed, coining the term “pathway” to describe “when the university structures the interests of a constituency into its organizational edifice.” Armstrong and Hamilton describe the unnerving centrality of frat parties, mixers, and the

Eve Cable | Illustrations Editor expansive calendar of Greek events to be exemplary of the “party pathway.” Many students in this pathway have familial wealth and are able to pay full university tuition without aid. Majors characterized by “a heavy focus on appearance, personality and charm” are provisioned by the university to enable the party scene. They allow a student to be relatively successful post-grad, despite spending proportionality more time socializing than studying. Armstrong and Hamilton look at why a student would

prefer the notoriously cockroachspawned, no-AC, hair-stuck-incommunal-shower-drain party dorm compared to a dormitory with more resources, explaining that these dorms are desirable because they have a reputation for being social hubs, “havens for people with similar backgrounds, interests, and orientations toward college.” Part of the party dorm’s desirability stems from a student’s desire to experience “true college life,” a notion that often correlates with affluence and what they call “the socialite experience” of college.

“Just as roads are built for types of vehicles, pathways are built for types of students. The party pathway is provisioned to support the affluent and socially oriented… built around an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other.”

The first fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa, was founded in 1776 at William and Mary College, and excluded anyone who was not white, cisgender, and wealthy. PW GLOs grew in popularity in response to increasing university diversity, and thus for the purpose of exclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity, class, religion, sexuality. It was not until 2013 that the last sorority formally desegregated. These exclusive GLOs mean that only certain demographics are granted access to the connections provided by a membership, connections in “high places” that are often already provisioned by white generational wealth. This perpetuates a cycle which guards access to power, from homogenous university-level pledge picking to Supreme Court nominations based on frat-sorority siblinghood nepotism. Lawrence Ross, historian and member of the first historically Black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha, writes that “Greek organizations resisted class and race diversity. Frats were a way for white upperclass men to separate themselves from an increasingly diverse student population” in his book Blackballed:

the Black and White Politics of Race on America’s Campuses. Ross writes of the Divine Nine, nine historically Black Greek Letter Organizations made to socially and academically support Black students, and help them succeed after college through an alumni network. However, statistical evidence shows that participation in Greek Life by white and Black students is not reflective of student body demographics in most US and Canadian universities. Such disproportionate participation suggests that PW Greek Life is unwelcoming to BIPOC students, and that the rush process is explicitly or implicitly discriminatory against BIPOC students who rush. Recruitment is subjective, partial, and is supposedly conducted based on personality. But one sorority girl at MU admitted, “sororities have the reputation of selecting on the basis of attractiveness.” A largely homogenous selection of those who are afforded pretty privilege, inextricably linked to white privilege. Brianna (she/they), a member of a sorority at McGill, conversely described that what drew them to their sorority was


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