University of Virginia Library

On Rush

The University's fraternity system - a
slowly dying anachronism - makes its annual
bid for self-perpetuation this weekend when
the five week rush program begins. For
first-year men, rush is an event that has
probably caused anticipation, trepidation and
perhaps for some who think beyond free beer
and parties, the beginning of an effort to
evaluate the role of the individual in the
University community.

For a first-year man, the size and
impersonal coolness of the University can be
an unsettling experience. Gone are the friends
of high school or prep school, replaced by a
horde of students in which he is but another
face. Gone is the reassurance that came from
having a family to go home to, replaced by
the sterile cell blocks of McCormick Road.
The first-year man feels a crisis of identity. He
needs to replace the peer group and family
relationships that have previously given him
an identity if he is to avoid being swallowed
up by the University.

And this is why fraternities have held a
place in the University community. Some of
the substance of fraternity life and much of
the facade that fraternities present during rush
appeal to the often unrealized needs of the
first-year man. He sees a group that cats what
appears to be decent food in friendly and
homelike surroundings. The members of the
fraternity are generally very friendly, both
with rushees whom they like and with each
other. The fraternity provides a place to get
together and have those "great parties" on
weekends or to find a man with a car who is
willing to go down the road and someone else
who can set up the dates. The fraternities
pride themselves on their men who reflect
traditional University values - active in the
IFC, a closet full of three-piece suits. In short,
they present an image that is very appealing to
many first-year men.

We ask you, however, to look beyond the
facade of Southern good fellowship into the
substance of fraternity life - what it is like
after rush, after the image has been stored
away until another fall brings a new group of
first-year men.

Not one of the 30-odd fraternities at
Virginia is integrated. While there may be
some which are willing to pledge a token
black or two the great majority would not
have it any other way. Fraternity membership
is decided by the blackball system. Any
member (or group of two or three members)
is free to exclude any non-member simply by
deciding to exclude him. You will probably be
unable to conceive of the hypocrisy and
narrow-minded bigotry that the blackball
system allows unless you actually attend one.
Aspiring members are excluded because
someone dislikes the part in his hair, the
width of his tie, his hometown, or his
intellectual bent. Blacks are excluded simply
because they are black and there is almost
always at least one bigot in the house. And
because of the blackball system, you should
have no delusions that you can effectively
work within the fraternity to change it. It is
more likely that a boat-rocker will forfeit the
benefits of "brotherhood" and be informally
ostracised.

And if you look beyond the facade
presented at rush, you will find that most
fraternity practices, especially with respect to
pledges, are based on juvenile notions
borrowed from the Army and a bygone day
when rituals meant something.

Pledges exist at a fraternity primarily to
take care of distasteful jobs that have to be
done, to run errands, and to serve as outlets
for the individual prejudices and frustrations
of the members. Every house expects the
pledges to work, both during the year and for
a week before school starts, at preparing the
oft-decrepit quarters for another year of
parties and indoor athletics. Every house, or
at least those that think of themselves as the
"better" houses, refuses to tolerate any
deviation by its pledges from the norms
established by prevailing house opinion. In
other words you will be expected to be the
type of person that the members don't
generally have the initiative to make of
themselves. That means coat and tie, the right
friends, the right activities, etc. You will, in
almost all cases, have to go through at least
one juvenile ritual know generally as hell
night, where you will have to physically
degrade yourself to the level of an animal to
prove yourself worthy of entrance into the
august group that establishes such moronic
standards. Then, after initiation, you will be
expected to turn around and force the same
absurd and perverted system on another group
of first-year men.

And if you join a fraternity you probably
will wind up doing exactly that. Like any
other group of its type, a fraternity has its
own socialization process. Most members
accept the standards. Those that don't keep
quiet about it and wind up supporting the
system through their lack of opposition to it.

So there is a difficult choice at hand for
the first-year man, one that comes extremely
early in his college career. On the one hand
there may be the appealing qualities - parties,
friendships, a place to go. On the other there
may be a social conscience, a determination to
resist bigotry, and a desire for a more mature
and rational ethos than fraternities provide.

There is nothing wrong with the concept
of small group living; in fact it is something
that the University will have to attempt to
provide as it grows bigger and the need for a
group to identify with grows commensurately.
But school after school has found that
fraternities bring with them unwanted excesses
and racial discrimination. School after
school has phased them out or seen them
decline steadily as students found them
inadequate.

At the University, the general five to ten
year lag in social trends has allowed the
fraternities to remain essentially unchanged
from the days when they were founded to
preserve and foster the elitist concept of the
racist Southern gentleman. But here too they
will fail, perhaps when the houses deteriorate
beyond repair, but more probably when the
typical entering student has no need for them.

We believe that time is now. We think that
if the majority of first-year men knew exactly
what the fraternity system entails, they would
not rush or they would refuse to join if asked.
The time has come to seek a better way of
student life.

Don't rush.

Don't pledge.