Excellent article from a Dartmouth student on why people want to pledge despite all the humiliations associated with it.
When I was just a wee, innocent prospie, visiting Dartmouth to decide if it was the school for me, I saw my first glimpse of the pledging process. I watched a naked frat boy running laps around a fetid basement and then crashing into a huge pile of Keystone Light cans, crushed plastic cups and torn Keystone boxes. On that particular night, he and his pledge brethren were bartending the party naked. Was it hilarious? Absolutely. Was it embarrassing for them? Surely. So why did they go through it?
The pledging process at almost any fraternity contains some trying elements, and yet over 60 percent of eligible Dartmouth students choose to brave pledge term — some admittedly more trying than others — in order to be a part of a Greek house.
Sociology professor Kathryn Lively helped explain the reasons for pledging’s prevalence and popularity.
“You only want something if it’s hard,” she said.
With the many painful myths and stories surrounding pledging, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that pledging can be hard. And it’s the only way to be a brother.
“I think it’s hard for anyone to do something and mean it and not become part of it. If you actually want to join something and you want to take it seriously, you have to at least try,” one junior fraternity member said. The difficulties of the pledging process ensure that all those entering the fraternity truly want to be a part of the house.
On another level, hazing during pledging guarantees an integration of a pledge’s personality and a house’s personality. “It’s part of an identity process where you drag someone’s identity down a little bit and then welcome them back into the group,” Lively said. When you do that, it creates a stronger group identity.”
As well as the addition of the pledge as a true member of the group, the group is also ingrained in the pledge. “The purpose of hazing is to make one lose their identity — not completely — so the identity of a brother or a sister becomes part of a core identity,” Lively said.
Now that the identities of last fall’s pledges have been integrated into their houses, they’ll be the ones enforcing pledge rituals this time around. When asked how he felt about being an upperclassman now, the male junior said, “Can’t wait! I think that’s the general feeling amongst my class: They can’t wait. They have no ill will against the ’10s, we just want to experience the other side. It’s something new.”
This integration of identities can become a problem on campus, however. As brothers become more and more associated with their respective houses, the stereotyping can overcome one’s actual personality.
“I feel like I’ve been stereotyped as some ‘sweet dude’ in ‘the best house on campus’ but in reality I am way more than that,” the junior fraternity member said. “Basically my point is that I had serious ideas but some people don’t take me seriously because they refuse to look past this mask of stereotypes that my fraternity places on me.”
In addition to the identity and personality changes that occur as a result of hazing, other basic changes occur in the life of a pledge. All the fraternity brothers I spoke with affirmed that pledging greatly improved their pong skills, which one senior man called “essential to the life of a Dartmouth man.”
Becoming a brother in a fraternity can also affect someone’s social standing and social connections. “My social capital went through the roof. After pledge term, way more people knew me,” the junior said. “I came to appreciate a diversity of ideas more greatly and connected with people who I might not normally have connected with.”
Admitting to hazing to administrators could obviously carry serious ramifications. But the details of hazing activities are often kept secret from students outside the house as well.
“Secrecy creates a feeling of specialness,” Lively said. “If everyone has this nebulous idea that [one particular frat] has this crazy hazing … it’s the secrecy that almost makes it valuable. You’re not allowed to talk about what you do. Part of it is to make it seem like it’s more powerful than it really is.”
As the world-renowned Dr. William Ellery Channing put most eloquently: “Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.”
When a pledge class is asked to strip themselves of the layers of protection that they wear around all day (pun intended) and bartend a party naked, it’s not a simple task of humiliation. Instead of their clothes being the defining mark on their bodies, their comfort in the fraternity becomes that defining mark. They put it all out there (pun intended again), and are accepted into the group.
