University of Virginia Library

The IFC's Dilemma

There is some feeling (expressed in a letter
to the right) that the IFC's strong non-discrimination
stand is grossly hypocritical. It is felt
that the IFC's statements that it is nondiscriminatory,
that it will not recognize any
fraternity which is formally discriminatory,
and that it strongly supports the current drive
for a full-time black recruiter for the University
and different criteria for accepting Negro
students are nothing more than good "publicity"
moves. The hypocrisy springs, it is felt,
from the irreconcilability of such statements
to the fact that there is only one Negro in a
fraternity at the University.

An important distinction needs to be
made. The Inter-Fraternity Council is a body
organized to govern the thirty-three fraternities
collectively. Like any governing body, it
attempts to assume a prescriptive role rather
than a descriptive one. In other words, rather
than remain in passive or inactive on the problems
with its individual member fraternities, it
prefers to be as active as it can toward
eliminating those problems. Its dilemma in the
matter of discrimination in its individual
members, however, is that it is powerless to
take any action to insure that they are truly
non-discriminatory.

It can make sure that they do not have
discriminatory clauses in their constitutions,
but it cannot sit in on or control their ball
sessions. All it can do in such a subjective area
is lay down certain standards by which it
hopes its members will operate.

A fraternity is, by nature, a discriminatory
organization. It happens here that some of the
discrimination seems to lie along lines other
than ones of individual concerns; that is,
although there are thousands of people who
have been discriminated against by the fraternities
of the University of Virginia, some of
those people seem to have been discriminated
against for reasons other than their appeal to
the fraternities as individuals.

There is no doubt that this is so, and the
IFC readily admits it. Admit it or not, though,
it does not tolerate such discrimination, but
its hands are tied when it wants to do
anything effective to prevent it. So it does
what little it can by making those statements
which seem so hypocritical on the surface.

The last of those statements, however,
indeed may prove to be somewhat more
effective than its predecessors. The consensus
at that symposium held last Sunday night at
St. Paul's Church was that the reluctance of
fraternities to accept Negroes, and, indeed,
the unattractiveness of fraternities to Negroes,
is due largely to the fact that there are so few
Negroes at the University; because there are so
few, they are necessarily obtrusive, either
within or without a fraternity. The unhappy
case is that one seldom finds a group of sixty
people anywhere who are willing to set an
example or "stick their necks out" when they
cannot be certain that others will follow.
Because of that, the Inter-Fraternity Council
feels that the first step toward real integration
of fraternities is real integration of the student
body. Only when that is achieved can anyone
be sure that a Negro which is accepted by a
fraternity is not a token; only when that is
achieved can those individual members of
fraternities who are currently keeping Negroes
out of them develop the personal contacts
which will show them the desirability of
Negroes as fraternity brothers.

So the IFC's strong stand in favor of a
full-time black recruiter for the University and
different criteria for accepting black students
not only is not hypocritical, it is functional
and practical for bringing about the end of
more black students in the University, which
should lead directly to the desired end of
black students in fraternities. The Inter-Fraternity
Council, representative of the
fraternities collectively, is doing everything it
can to set the proper standards; it is powerless
to force the fraternities individually to comply
with them.