About men; about cold beer, willing women, hazing, conformity - about fraternities

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1988 by Jason DeParle

I needed the housing. Duke fraternities were based in dorms, not off-campus houses, and they controlled the choicest buildings. To remain independent was to face likely banishment to a room on the old women's campus, two miles from the action.

I liked the parties. Most of them took place in a darkened chapter room, with broken couches pushed aside to clear a beer-sogged dance floor. They were louder, later, and wilder than anything I'd known. I don't remember if anyone wore a toga, but the songs, dances, and excitement had that Animal House feel. This is it, l thought, the real thing. Given their numbers, fraternities also seemed like the only thing. Just about half the campus was Greek, but to my freshman eye the other half, scattered and less howling, seemed invisible.

I liked the pageantry. In its traditional forms, this spirit took shape in items like homecoming floats, which, sappy as it sounds, can be a grand sight on a leaf-blown October day. Less grand, but probably more appealing, was a Delt ritual called the Charge of the Hill. The fraternity opened onto a patio that faced a steep, 25-yard slope to the street. Each spring, the brothers would wet the hill into rivers of mud, place a keg on the patio, and sturdy themselves to defend it against a charge of advancing pledges. There were few prohibitions on what could be slung during the ensuing free-for-all. A diversion column would throw smoke bombs or buckets of beer from the roof. Unhappy solutions of egg yolks, vaseline, and month-old yogurt would be freely applied. The result, a few minutes later, was a tangle of 50 drunken and unsightly people. This may not be the highest manifestation of the human spirit, but among the lesser ones it was awfulIy fun. Yale, a campus with few frats, had its own variation until a few years ago, called "bladderball," that drew hundreds of participants.

The Delts offered subtler attractions too. I left a high school class of 150 and entered a college class of about 1,500; some universities have classes five or six times that size. For me, as for freshmen elsewhere, the fraternity offered a sense of belonging. It gave me a lunch table to sit at. It gave me a seat in the basketball bleachers surrounded by people I knew. The ten-cent word for that is community, and most of us yearn for it. Without the Delts, Duke seemed much larger, more imposing, anonymous. During my first two basketball seasons, as part of the fraternity, I never missed a home game. Duke basketball offered a thrilling mix of theater, sport, and spectacle. During my last two years, after leaving the frat, I attended only one game and left feeling lost and lonely in the crowd.

And the Delts weren't just any group; they arguably had more social cache than any other group on campus. They were rich, smart, and smooth. Guys who lived together would turn to each other and call, "Hey rooms," in a breezy manner that impressed me with its college-man confidence and intimations of closeness. Behind the beer parties and Topsiders lurked the shimmering image of the fraternity beau ideal: a knit group of people called brothers.