As I sit to write this article on an almost spring February morning, I am recovering from an assault of the mind and the eyes and the ears. Perhaps my language is too strong. Let me explain: Grove City College allows Greek Life to not only flourish but run rampant. Some students, independent of these groups, dread the first few weeks of the spring semester—Pledge Week for each sorority, fraternity, and housing group. The Rush in the fall, where students can decide which sorority or fraternity fits them best, is not quite so bad as Pledge. What, then, distinguishes Pledge?
The sights and sounds are enough to get the cogs turning. First, Pledge Week is an excuse for young women to wear as much inappropriate clothing as they can (tight, short, and low is the equation). Or, for both young men and women – young men especially – to further abuse the human body by dressing in ridiculous articles of clothing (i.e., a unicorn onesie with the sleeves shorn off). The inappropriate and the ridiculous are not qualified as clothing. They do not promote Christian community. They promote the message of the secular world: such clothing is all about expressing yourself and expressing, in this case, the particular brand of your group, so do and wear whatever you want, as long as it hurts no one else. But dressing immodestly and ridiculously hurts all who see it.
Second, Pledge Week is an excuse for rowdiness, rude words, and sharp-tongued phrases. Again, like immodesty, rude words hurt all who hear them. There is no “Take regard to the purity, respect, and personal space of others” clause in the fine print of Greek Life. Breakfast presents just one minor example: MAP Dining Hall echoes with a clamor of memorized, rote, dull choruses of good mornings and goodbyes. No one gazing out the window with a hot mug of black coffee in hand has room (mental, spiritual, or physical) to think, to pray, or to watch the chilled sunrise. An unspoken rule in MAP Dining Hall is that the first dining room is the place for quiet, where everyone eats breakfast and reads, whether reading their Bibles or G. K. Chesterton’s essays. How can you read when a group of girls is telling everyone good morning in one low, monotonized voice and advertising each person’s full name to boot? “Good morning, Miss Jane Elizabeth Smith. Good morning, Miss Anne Thomas. Goodbye, Mr. Luke Jones.” Even worse, though, is the cold shoulder of one sorority to another, the exclusivity of the In-Group, the whispered insults—what Christian community is that?
My third complaint reaches back to the origins of Greek Life: Yale and other universities in the eighteenth century had exclusive, student-created groups to provide a setting in which to intellectually battle ideas and host conversations professors did not allow in the classrooms. Those groups evolved into Greek Life, groups based on academic success and rooted in exclusivity and inclusiveness. The entire idea behind Greek Life sits under the guise of opportunity for community.
The opportunities for community are endless – I give them that. A few Greek groups on Grove City’s campus try to take good advantage of the richness available when brothers and sisters join to live as one in peace and unity and seek to build one another up and serve not just their group but the people around them. In other words, when members of Greek life live out their Christian identity before any other identity they subscribe to, they represent the good that Greek life can entail. But for the majority, this is not the case. They have seen the opportunity for Christian richness in white letters on a green sign by the freeway and they have revved past it. The results of missing that exit are chaotic. Indeed, the results of missing that exit are dangerous to the spiritual, intellectual, and even physical health of Greek life participants and the rest of the campus.
Has a hand-picked community-based, unlike sports teams or reading groups, on no shared endeavor or activity but merely on preference for the group itself – ever succeeded long-term?
They have seen the opportunity for Christian richness in white letters on a green sign by the freeway and they have revved past it. The results of missing that exit are chaotic.
Greek Life tells students inadvertently that they get to be a part of a group that is catered entirely to their likes and dislikes, that they get to hang out with people who are just like them. What happens when a bunch of people who are all the same get together is, inevitably, a tower of Babel – a cesspool for sins to populate and abound. For each sorority is a clique. Each fraternity is a clique. A Greek group is an in-group. To be included, Greek Life must be had. Don’t miss out!
Did you, reader, pick who you go to church with? Did you pick your family? Why would you seek the approval of men and long to be included in a group catered to you?
I put my question to the mercenaries: are the cultural results of Greek Life at Grove City College worth that much? Is there anything worthy of praise about Greek Life? Even if the groups have potential for Christian fellowship, and that potential is the only reason they exist, and the bad parts of Greek Life are ignored, such justification, in and of itself, is the promotion of a lie through a potential truth. What kind of community is being encouraged on this Christian campus? If it is one where a young woman must pursue her education with a root vegetable dangling from her neck and a young man must wear a cow onesie to chapel, it needs to be removed.
