First off, kudos to the University of Oklahoma’s President for his swift action in sending that little gang of redneck racists, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, packing.

I don’t know much about college fraternities or sororities. The University of South Florida, where I went to school, didn’t have any national Greek organizations. The University President, John Allen, did not believe they were compatible with a good education and they were not allowed on campus. He didn’t believe in varsity sports either, for pretty much the same reason. There were strong intramural athletic programs, and students were allowed to form and join local fraternal societies, but they were not affiliated with national Greek organizations–while I went to school there. What Greeks there were constantly lobbied for varsity athletics, so I have always associated the two together.

President Allen is long gone, and USF is now a massive state university with an enrollment of 30 thousand, with plenty of national Greek activity and nationally ranked sports teams. But the school I attended was the stereotypical small Southern liberal arts college. It was chartered in 1956, opened its doors four years later, and graduated its first class the year I started, 1964. There were about 8 thousand students there when I enrolled. My student number was 15853, so about half the students that had ever enrolled were still there the day I matriculated.

Most of the students had no problem with President Allen’s philosophy.
There was a high proportion of graduate students, and USF was a commuter school, many were “townies” who normally would have gone to Florida State or U of F. There was an atmosphere of businesslike scholarship, we were there to study, and when we partied we partied like grown-ups. These were mostly working class kids who couldn’t afford private University of Tampa tuition (its where the rich, dumb kids who couldn’t get accepted anywhere else went). A lot of the students were adults, especially older women going after the MA in teaching (so many, in fact, we jokingly called the school “Menopause Manor”. Before long, the Vietnam vets starting pouring in, on the GI bill. In 1967 I took a couple of years off for my military service and came back in 1969. There were dormitories on campus, but only out-of-town underage students lived on campus. The University also had a lot of science and math undergraduates, and the school had Masters programs, and even a PhD program in Chemistry. This student body simply did not fit into the classic Greek stereotype. I finally graduated in 1971. I came back for my MA, from 1974-1977. The school was much bigger, but culturally had changed little–except for the freaks. There were two tribes, then. Freaks, and straights. The Greeks were all straight dudes. I was a freak. I still am.

The sports madness never caught on while I was there, and neither did sororities and fraternities ever become very popular. The average age was a little too old for that sort of thing, as was the level of student maturity. But there were some frats on campus. We sort of looked down on them, mostly rich white kids who couldn’t get laid, were afraid to get high, trying to prolong their high school experience. They wore neckties and kept their hair short, and most were business or pre-law majors. I hung out with the math and science crowd, and with the artsy-fartsies, and later, the politicals. Not one of them was Greek.

To be fair, they weren’t all rich white kids. There was a black fraternity, and a Jewish one. No doubt today there’s a Hispanic one. But they were clearly stratified economically, and by social class and status. There were “cool” brothers and sisters, and there were progressively uncooler ones. By the end of the first year, they had separated the incoming freshmen by family, class, ethnicity, money and looks. One sorority was populated by delicious babes, another by real dogs, and there was one for everything in between. You could take one look at the rushes and tell which frat they were trying to get in. The tall Aryan types with Arrow shirts tended to clump together, milk rises til it sours, you know. During rush time, the petitioners carried little varnished wooden paddles with them resembling cricket bats, each emblazoned with decals of the fraternity they were pledging. No doubt they were involved in one of their bizarre hazing rituals or barbaric initiation rites.

One of the things that first struck me about USF was how democratic it was. Unlike high school, with its Byzantine cliques and petty snobbishness, I had no trouble making friends with the upperclassmen, and even graduate students, even as a lowly freshman. Maybe it was because so many of the students were older, and many had already been on their own for a few years, or were veterans, I don’t know. Those who couldn’t fit in went into the Greek system, or at least this is what we imagined. If we created a little separate world for them, it was because they normally kept to themselves. They only hung out with other Greeks, and only dated girls from sororities of comparable rank.
I can’t think of any who even joined organizations I belonged to; Chess club, Sports Car Club, Society of Physics Students. And there were very few in any of my classes. They were destined for other careers than I was, and busily prepared themselves for work in esoteric disciplines like Real Estate Investment Counseling or Executive Administration Management Education.

Well, other than my prejudices, I knew little about Greek life at my school, and I certainly know even less about fraternity/sorority life today. I know people join these organizations to develop personal connections for later life and business, and they tend to favor people of their own social and economic class that they’re likely to deal with, but I didn’t feel the need to do so, and neither did any of the people I knew. I had a very rich social life in college, but all my friends were different from one another, and most were strange or eccentric. Even though I soon moved away from Tampa, I still keep in touch with quite a few of them. But I can’t remember even one who was a Greek. I certainly can’t say that the SAE people we saw on the news, singing racist ditties in tuxedoes, are representative of Greek life today. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they were.