Explore the blog posts below for students' perspectives on what these organizations are like. We admired them and we wanted their approval. For a Dartmouth kid to do what he did, he had to have been broken and hit bottom before he could break the code of silence., On February 22nd, his 22nd birthday, Lohse received a call from Dartmouths office of judicial affairs, informing him that, based on information hed provided the college, they were pursuing charges against him for hazing. A true bro, Lohse adds, can also drink inhuman amounts of beer, vomit profusely and keep on going, and perform a number of other hard-partying feats Dartmouth provided the real-life inspiration for Animal House that most people, including virtually all of Lohses high school friends, would find astounding. Everyone peed on it and threw in their chaw, he says. The Office of Greek Life is responsible for leadership development, organizational management, and general administration for all Greek-letter organizations, Greek honor societies, undergraduate societies, and senior societies at Dartmouth College. Shake Out is a two-night event that occurs during fraternity rush. Ten cups of beer sat on a table. Its fraternity system includes 17 fraternities) 8 sororities and 3 co-ed groups. As he cut across the restricted area, a campus security guard ordered the boys to leave. As a result, Lohse the only student to come forward voluntarily may be the only student who is ultimately punished. I understand that no one is above the rules, but none of this would have even been possible if I hadnt spoken out in the first place., When I ask Dartmouths new dean of the college, Charlotte Johnson, about charging a whistle-blower with the crimes he exposed, she rejects the characterization. When my grandfather was at Dartmouth, the then-president said fraternities are a sanctuary for juvenile delinquency. Fraternities (unlike sororities, most of which are dry) also happen to be the only campus entities that serve alcohol to minors, which about 70 percent of Dartmouth undergrads happen to be. Last summer, Emory Greek Life's reckoning with its shameful legacy revealed a system too marred with systemic racism to continue operating. Greek life at Dartmouth is legendary. More recently, students assailed members of an Occupy vigil at Dartmouth, heckling them with cries of Faggots! He told me with the way everyone drinks, he had no way to tell who had an alcohol problem. Back at his mothers house, Lohse enrolled in an outpatient rehab program. The GSC sponsors social and content-driven events, provides financial support for student organizations, and supports college-wide initiatives that affect graduate students such as the Student Wellness Check-in . In reality, Kim is one of the only officials in a position to regulate the fraternities. One student tells me that during his pledge term, the brothers in his house set up a tarp in the fraternity basement, covered it in vomit, and made the pledges do a slip and slide. He loved it. Thats an inappropriate analogy, she says. Alpha Phi Alpha was founded as the first historically black fraternity at Dartmouth College in 1972. Notable alumni include all-star NFL running back Reggie Williams and the MLB's head of Baseball Operations Jimmie Lee Solomon. Brown, a school with 8,500 students, averaged eight assaults; Harvard, with 21,000 students, had 21. I actually see the culture as being predicated on hazing. On his first visit as a prospective pledge, the first man he meets sets the tone for what follows: Speakers on the balcony were blasting Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean by Ruth Brown. Not long after he took office, Kim met with Dartmouth alums and reassured them he had no intention of overhauling the fraternities. Hey! But one by one, I think a lot of his friends just gave up., By homecoming weekend, Lohse had descended to the darkest place hed ever known. Lohse was escorted to the college infirmary and given a Breathalyzer, which registered his blood-alcohol level at 0.24 three times the legal limit. A lot of people here are still really friendly, and because of Dartmouths secluded location, campus life is really vibrant at Dartmouth. Last spring, college president Jim Yong Kim, an anthropologist, medical doctor and the co-founder of the international NGO Partners in Health, established an intercollegiate collaborative known as the National College Health Improvement Project to study high-risk drinking in the same way that Kim approached communicable diseases in Rwanda and Peru. One night in October 2009, early in his sophomore year, Lohse was studying in his dorm room when he heard someone pounding on his door. The question, ultimately, is whether their questionable motivations or checkered past make their words any less credible. 5. The dinner was served by a Hispanic couple who lived in the house and received room and board for preparing dinner and helping to keep the place reasonably clean. . A part of me still wanted to go back to Dartmouth and return to my fraternity and party. That winter he took off for Asia, where he spent a few months traveling with his brother and working for a small NGO in Nepal. The question is, given how the school has treated Lohse, will anyone ever come forward and speak truthfully about the culture of abuse and degradation perpetrated by the fraternity system? The fraternities here have a tremendous sense of entitlement a different entitlement than you find at Harvard or other Ivy League schools, says Michael Bronski, a Dartmouth professor of womens and gender studies. I get calls almost every weekend, she says. Welcome to the Sixties. Then a brother handed each of them a bottle of Boones Farm Blue Hawaiian a Windex-colored cohort of Mad Dog and told them that whoever drank it the fastest got to remain. Fraternity life is at the core of the colleges human and cultural dysfunctions. Lohse concluded by recommending that Dartmouth overhaul its Greek system, and perhaps get rid of fraternities entirely. If you complain, youre exiled like Andrew Lohse. Founded in 1869 at the University of Virginia, Kappa Sigma International Headquarters is based in Charlottesville, Virginia. I hope many of you prospective freshmen will look into all aspects of a school before finally making a decision. But instead, hes proven to be just the opposite. Trust the brotherhood. Its depressing coming of age here, says Deanna Portero, a senior from New York. At our black-tie dances at Phi Psi and at the Saturday dances at the West Side Club, we danced to the same music as the adults, the standards, as they are called, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hammerstein. Dani Levin is the president of the Sigma Delta sorority, and a peer sexual-assault counselor. In many ways the 1950s were a rerun of the 1920s, including the Scott Fitzgerald revival. You get high with Andrew Lohse, and all of a sudden hes on a 20-minute tangent about literature and liberal politics, and hes fascinating and exciting to be around, and makes you believe that you can do great things, because he wants to do great things. As half of all Dartmouth sororities are not allowed to host open events with alcohol due to national regulations, fraternities have become the main avenue for social life in a barren town with not even a bowling alley to its name. The Greek letter community is diverse, with both local and nationally affiliated organizations representing the National Panhellenic Conference, the North-American Interfraternity Conference, National Pan-Hellenic Council, and the Multicultural Greek Council. . 10. Their members are secure that they have bright futures, and they just dont care. On the advice of Professor Bronski, who had written for The Village Voice, Lohse even tried to set up meetings with reporters from The Boston Globe and The New York Times. Many perceive Dartmouth as a quiet, intellectual school, but it's received quite a lot of press for its Greek life - and it's usually not painted in a positive light. Theres a level of violence at the heart of it that would be completely unacceptable anywhere else, but here, its just the way things are.. Ha ha! Kims predecessor, James Wright, was appointed Dartmouths 16th president in 1998 and embarked on a plan to end the Greek system as we know it by requiring fraternities to substantially go coed. Judas, Brutus, Arnold, Wright, read a banner that hung from the window of one fraternity house. Alpha Xi Delta Sorority. What happens in the house stays in the house. At last, he and the other whale shits were escorted to the basement, where they were formally baptized as SAE pledges in a kiddie pool filled with a noxious sludge. Also, juniors and seniors arent guaranteed on-campus housing at Dartmouth. A major student complaint was parietals, hours when women were permitted to be in rooms with men. One of the things Ive learned at Dartmouth one thing that sets a psychological precedent for many Dartmouth men is that good people can do awful things to one another for absolutely no reason, he said. Yet with the exception of a short stint as a rush chair, where he sold the lie to new pledges, hardly anyone voted for him. He also began to develop his rush strategy to prepare for joining a fraternity. Id also like to note that some people are perfectly happy with the party and Greek scene at Dartmouth. Tri-Kap has a distinct McMansiony aura that screams "recently renovated by someone without taste. Sororities and fraternities have played an important role for undergraduate students at Washington University in St. Louis for more than 100 years. We let the pledges imaginations get the best of them. Lohse, for his part, hasnt backed down. In this way, Dartmouth positively influenced the life chances of individual African Americans as well as the larger black freedom movement. Sororities and coed houses quickly sprung up alongside the fraternities and adopted many of their drinking practicesPong, Meetings, and parties for starters and since Dartmouth CFS houses are . One of them disappeared into Tibet, seeking nirvana, I guess. It is also, for many, a social necessity. Long before Andrew Lohse became a pariah at Dartmouth College, he was just another scarily accomplished teenager with lofty ambitions. But over the past few weeks, Greek life has once again taken center stage in Dartmouth's years-long epidemic of sexual violence. Dartmouth's faculty has been trying to rid the college of fraternities since 1979, after a hushed-up gang rape involving three groups of fraternity brothers and a mental-hospital patient.. On the other hand, Dartmouth is heavily focused on its undergraduates. About Us Greek organizations agree to uphold six principles through their activities, programs, and philosophies. Sexual assault is rampant at Dartmouth; some female students say they circulate the names of men considered dangerous and fraternity houses viewed as unsafe. Between 2008 and 2010, according to the colleges official statistics, Dartmouth averaged about 15 reports of sexual assault each year among its 6,000 students. Im a convener.. Hes attacking Dartmouth itself.. Ive been at our house when a senior partner from a financial-services firm and a chief recruiter from someplace like Bain are standing around drinking with us as we haze our pledges, says senior Nathan Gusdorf. Whether in residence halls, living-learning communities, affinity houses, or Greek organizations, nearly 90% of Dartmouth's students live on campus. You and you, he said, pointing to Lohse and one of his roommates. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. Lohse recalls the evening in hazy images: lit candles, blacked-out windows, a relentless pounding on the walls of the elegant pool room of the SAE house, where the pledges spent more than an hour standing in a circle around the pool table in total silence, as brothers burst in and out of the room, forcing them to down bottles of Mad Dog. You dont learn about Doming until you become a brother, says Lohse. Kim who was recently nominated by the Obama administration to head the World Bank was initially seen as a potential challenge to the status quo. Social or general fraternities and sororities, in the North American fraternity system, . Fun. After being out in the real world and traveling in Asia, which he describes as an awakening, he now had trouble taking Dartmouth seriously, with its petty fraternity politics and drinking culture. Dartmouth has a reputation amongst the Ivies - and even across the country - for having very active Greek life on campus. Ritualized vomiting was simply part of brotherly life. They had their own music, rock-and-roll, their distinctive clothes and hair, their own sacrament in marijuana, and for extremists, LSD. Kappa Sigma is the largest college social fraternity in the world with more than 200,000 living members, including over 17,000 undergraduates and 305 chapters and colonies located throughout the United States and Canada. I was worried about not being able to get housing on campus my last two years, but it did work out for me just fine. Assistant Dean of Residential Life and Director of Greek Life Josh Gamse Josh.Gamse@Dartmouth.edu 603 646 2399 Program Coordinator Vacant Program Coordinator for Administration and Chapter Development Laura LaMontagne Laura.V.LaMontagne@dartmouth.edu 603 646 2399 Associate Director of Residential Operations Bernard Haskell bernard.w.haskell . Beta is the best example of the classical plantation frat house on campus. The Sixties Rock-and-Roll also meant sex in black idiom. Students can join a Greek letter organization beginning sophomore year. He is from Massachusetts. There are indeed a lot of rich, entitled, white legacy kids. Its all about the challenge, says one of Lohses SAE brothers. Another frat ordered its new members to crawl between the legs of a line of naked brothers, with, you know, their ball sacks flapping on their heads. A fourth was rumored to require its pledges to have sex with a frozen turkey. Lohse looked around as 10 sophomores scribbled down on paper why they deserved to be chosen. Alarmed by the skyrocketing rate of binge drinking, which studies show is nearly twice as high among fraternity residents, a growing number of colleges have opted to kick frats off campus or do away with them altogether. Do you think all the stuff the house did, like the vomlet, was good? he asked. As a Christian, I have a desire to . We were told they needed a few more guys to piss and boot in it., Such rituals were not restricted to SAE. Now a financial manager, Sjogren played football and baseball at Dartmouth and was a brother at the now-defunct Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. These schools are about their role as networked conduits to the top as much as they are about education., Or, as one of Lohses SAE brothers puts it: Having a 3.7 and being the president of a hard-guy frat is far more valuable than having a 4.0 and being independent when it comes to going to a place like Goldman Sachs. You go to Dartmouth, Lohse told himself as he pounded the Boones. Greek Life. 4. Always protect your pledge brothers. Brothers arent the only ones injured by this unspoken pact around fraternity life. Alpha Delta, the infamous Animal House frat, was pretty much out of the question, as were the other elite or A side houses on campus, since they recruited jocks and prep-school types who would have seen right through me, says Lohse. Besides, say many at Dartmouth, the chances that the school will actually change its approach to fraternities seems slim. I took the idea of creating an identity really seriously. Greek life at Dartmouth has hugely changed during this period and was pretty unrecognizable to me in the film. I gather that the fraternity then was a place where the members sang around the piano, drank even though it was Prohibition, and of course had a good time. Students in that class included the son of a famous journalist and also the son of a mid-western governor. Dissent, a signature part of the undergraduate experience at many liberal-arts colleges, is, at Dartmouth, common only to the faculty. All of this binge boozing leads inevitably to binge vomiting. Nestled on a picturesque campus in tiny Hanover, New Hampshire, the college has produced a long list of celebrated alumni among them two Treasury secretaries (Timothy Geithner, 83, and Henry Paulson Jr., 68), a Labor secretary (Robert Reich, 68) and a hefty sampling of the one percent (including the CEOs of GE, eBay and Freddie Mac, and the former chairman of the Carlyle Group). There are indeed a lot of rich, entitled, white legacy kids. (Another SAE brother confirmed, Everyone in the house was encouraged to vomit on each other, but the act of actually vomiting on another individual happened only rarely.). Despite pledges to diversify and cultivate a more equitable system, current and former sorority members castigated the half-hearted, lackluster . Dartmouth is a very Greek-oriented school. Psi Upsilon became the first fraternity founded at Dartmouth in 1841, and Kappa Kappa Kappa followed soon after in 1842. But theres no draft. Roughly half of Dartmouths 4,200 students may be affiliated with a Greek organization, but the other half takes part in the system by default. Recently at a house on Webster Avenue I gave a talk on the importance of the irrational in both poetry and political theory (Wordsworth and Burke). We will return to that book in a moment. The First Dartmouth Fraternities: A Brotherhood of Libraries In the 1820s, a majority of students belonged to either the Society of Social Friends or the United Fraternity. There used to be a DKE (Deke) house on West Wheelock Street, where that building on stilts now stands. But he was still drinking and smoking weed, still actively pursuing all the things that had gotten him in trouble to begin with. To some, Lohse still seemed furious by what had happened to him. Rumors about hazing abounded. Where have all the flowers gone? Joan Baez used to sing. That was my introduction to the frats: passing out from drinking, waking up in the hospital and not having any idea what happened. What she did notice were bruises that looked like bites on her chest that hadnt been there before. Hes writing a memoir: a generational tale that he hopes will be part Bright Lights, Big City, part The Sun Also Rises and part This Side of Paradise, and describes as a one-way ticket to the secret violence at the heart of the baptismal rites of the new elite. At which point he stops himself. We win, is how one of Lohses former buddies puts it. Their precise pungency is hard to describe: urine, vomit, stale beer and sour food, all combined in layers of caked sludge, which emits a noxious odor that can linger on your skin for days. There were also milk meetings, where pledges were asked to chug a gallon of milk in 20 minutes, which always resulted in plentiful booting. In a way, he was relieved. Fraternity basements, legendary for their grottiness, are elevated to a whole new level at Dartmouth. Kappa Sigma, Tulane University. The Kids uprising and the black revolution helped elect Nixon. Its just that as someone whos never been big on partying and drinking, the whole party culture at Dartmouth came as a shock to me considering the academic reputation of Dartmouth. It's come to be almost expected that there's . Remember: Chris Miller entered Dartmouth in 1959. Welcome to the AD house! he stuck out a hand to shake with me but discovered there was a can of Bud in it. Members, officers, and advisors, please check the Office of Greek Life Handbookfor any questions you may have. Dartmouth Student Exposes Graphic Details Of Fraternity Hazing. Lohse made SAE his first choice. No college student should devote every waking moment to academics, so building social hours into your life at school is a great idea to keep your life balanced. Special this year: a giant cake and a class asking the question, "Is Dartmouth a religion?". Blindfolds. I have some friends who werent able to get housing on campus, so they ended up renting and sharing an off-campus apartment.