[University of Washington Seattle WA]Wikimedia Commons Mac Hubbard is a student at the University of Washington in Seattle. I read passionate complaints about the Greek system and often wonder if the logic of what to do about fraternities gets a little clouded by their inherent unlikeability. College has changed a lot since the days fraternities entered campus life, and surprisingly so in the last few decades as college level education has become more commonly sought and attained. Back in the old days, fraternities were founded on pretty strict codes of values that were supposed to define the group pledging their allegiance to them. Supposedly, you would give your word that you would uphold those values, as well as a collection of secrets, until death. The first founders of fraternities got their ideological basis from the ancient Greeks (hence the letters). It was already a fetishism for bygone eras to begin with. My point in saying all this is that in my experience with fraternities, I have found they are skeletal structures with nothing meaningful to fill them. The central point you gather round in these places nowadays isn’t based on idealism. It’s golden era thinking and team colors — you say red is better, I say blue. Why we ended up with those teams is almost completely arbitrary. No one sticks to any of those lofty ideals written in yellowed pages, which, to be fair, many people outside the Greek system could probably agree are worth aspiring to. [sigma nu seattle]Wikimedia CommonsSeeking membership is about wanting to belong to a large, powerful entity. Many people just get absorbed into this something that is larger than themselves. I mean, the problems we see trickle into public view — as in the recent case of Tim Piazza’s death at Penn State —are just a symptom of that identity crisis, aren’t they? There’s no doctrine in any fraternity I’m aware of that demands the death of a young man by hazing. I think the problem comes from the fact that fraternities themselves struggle to understand their purpose. That’s why I would argue fraternities have no place on modern American college campuses. It’s not that they’re objectively bad institutions filled with objectively bad people drawn to that sort of institution. It’s that they’re outdated, no longer compatible with campuses today. They offer a way for you to lose your individuality, often at the cost of doing something you didn’t think yourself capable of. Your own values get lost in a muddled, haphazardly upheld code of living. It’s a sign of the times that many foundational institutions of our society are being called into question. Patriarchal and colonial inventions still carry clout in the mechanics of how things work, but we are learning how to slowly undo them while our conversations have increasingly focused on rethinking them completely. Doing away with a system and its culture that date back to the 1800s with deep roots in American college life has its obvious challenges, not least of all is the unlikely possibility the people ardently holding that decaying system up with bandages and duct tape will go quietly. A campaign for the complete disappearance of fraternities may be a few steps too far ahead. That’s a lot of untangling to do overnight. With each new tragic death though, it becomes clearer that we should start untying more and more of the knots. Because, I think the question warrants repetition: what role do fraternities serve? _Reach writer Mac Hubbard at opinion@dailyuw.com. _ NOW WATCH: JIM ROGERS: The worst crash in our lifetime is coming
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