The dead walk the earth, wear backward hats

A zombie walks among us, feeding on Busch Light and unsuspecting freshmen. It has been dead for some time now, perhaps years, yet it lumbers on, poisoning Duke's campus and laying waste to its once-thriving social life. We can fight back--we may be able to kill the beast--if we possess the will to wrestle control into our own hands.

Greek life has reached a critical point in which its continued existence is due only to precedent. Fraternities no longer operate in a capacity that can sustain the dominant portion of the University's social environment. This was not always the case. Now, before I'm ignored as another frat-basher, let me stress that the greek system was once a healthy part of Duke's campus. Institutional homogenization aside, the beer flowed freely and the frats made Duke a lively place to party hard while still getting a decent education.

Now the sagebrushed quads of West Campus loudly proclaim with eerie silence, "This place is deeeaaad anyways." Freshmen wonder at stories of four--four!--parties on any given night; juniors are nostalgic about the good old days of 1999. Exasperation, desperation can be heard in a fratter's voice--or even more commonly, disinterested boredom. In the meantime, a mass exodus flees to the wasteland of Durham in search of diversion, but bouncers don't read greek. And so Duke's frustrated social psyche chafes at itself, hemmed in by the zombie that can't get down and won't go away.

How did this happen? It's not the fraternities' fault, really. Close to 10 years ago, Duke's administration began a silent crusade. One by one, the pillars of the "work hard, play hard" temple fell until kegs were gone, section parties were lame and--with no bang but a wheezing whimper--the beloved Hideaway was no more. Acting under the "safe environment" banner, the University has exhibited a blatant disregard for the welfare of its own student body: Where there used to be a self-contained and controllable social environment, the irrepressible drinking has now been pushed into binging corners and dingy, restrictive bars where dangerous threats from area crime to drunk driving now pose many times the safety concern of anything to be encountered on a beery West Campus Friday night. All the while, the hulking structures of frat sections loom large, stifling all possibility of any alternatives on West.

Perhaps it was inevitable. The national social climate of universities changed decades ago, and the greek zombie has been driven out in many places long before the more conservative Duke. Although minor shifts have recently occurred to racially diversify the greek system, the overwhelmingly white fraternity demographic still bleaches West Campus, acting unchecked as an intolerably segregating force. Duke is in many ways a backward and mystified institution, and the administration's recent public relations makeover shows that they've known this for some time now.

Now, I'm fully prepared to hear many triumphing the positive aspects of frats; I may even be called a "homo." But I know the benefits of the system as well as anyone. Although we don't feel the need to welcome new members through beatings and ritualized man-play, my selective house is for all intents and purposes a fraternity, and I owe some of my very fondest Duke memories to it. And yet, I can still recognize that the glue that binds us together is deteriorating. It is time to move on.

The fall of Sigma Alpha Epsilon marks the second frat to disprove the myth to which people still stubbornly hold fast: No amount of old-blooded coffers can resurrect a zombie. Several more are likely to follow SAE and Phi Kappa Psi in the semester to come--all of a sudden, complaints about frats are not so futile. In the meantime, rush rushes on, freshmen unaware of the gutted shell into which they are walking. If Duke is ever again going to be an exciting place to study, sooner or later the frats have to be forcibly shoved to the margins.

It needs to be sooner. For better or worse, the administration has castrated Duke's social scene. But it hasn't had the wherewithal to follow through and let the transitional phase begin to end. It has to buckle down, grow a pair and start following through on its responsibilities with concrete action. Moving all sophomores to West was a step in the right direction; but a flesh wound won't kill a zombie, and until that happens, our community cannot begin to rebuild. The Hideaway has to be reopened, the WEL made alcohol-friendly and the bizarrely nightmarish prison cell that is the Bryan Center must be refurbished into a viable social space.