Samain Bare Aspen Moon
A word about fraternities. I was in one. Not of my choosing. Wabash College, where I spent my freshman year, required all freshmen to live on campus. There were dorms, but preference for dorm rooms went to upper classmen. (Wabash is all male.) The result: you had to pledge a fraternity. For reasons I neither recall nor care about, I ended up in Phi Kappa Psi. I mention this in particular because of an odd coincidence. A Phi Psi chapter in Texas just killed a pledge named Ellis.
It’s unclear right now whether alcohol was the culprit, but if it wasn’t, I’m sure it was a contributor. Binge drinking not only occurs in fraternities, it’s actively encouraged. While I don’t blame the Indiana gamma chapter for my subsequent alcoholism and 10 years of cigarette smoking, I certainly got my start in the chapter house in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
Being a pledge gives pledge masters an outsized influence over young men and women in their first year away from home. I suppose this could be good, helping initiate a student into campus life, gaining a new collection of brothers and sisters who understand college, it’s relentless complexity. It wasn’t good for me. My situation is a little unusual in that I had no desire to be a fraternity man, but ended being one anyhow. I was not enamored of nor looking for a fraternity. So I began jaundiced. And left the same way.
I’m not sure how college in the 1960’s compares to college now. It was a lot, lot different, I think, but Wabash, a more traditional place, was sort of a time capsule of old school ways. It sounds like fraternities have not changed much even now, over 50 years later.
Count me as a fraternity man against fraternities. Reinforced by the Texas incident.
