The man who wrote the movie returns to find brothers in slime.

In January of 1961, as a pledge in a Dartmouth fraternity, I underwent a little number known as the "Night of the Seven Fires." My pledge partner and I, handed a smudged, mimeographed map, had to locate and climb a steep, snowy, wooded hillside in sub-zero temperatures. We then had to stop at each of seven bonfires and perform demented acts demanded of us by the brothers. Among many other things, most of them unsuitable for airing in an all-family magazine, we had to drop our pants and sit in the snow, drink impossible quantities of beer and wine, and vomit repeatedly, sometimes on each other.

It was one of the greatest nights of my life.

This is difficult for people to understand. Fraternity hijinks are a very particular and specialized sort of behavior, and are regarded with neither sympathy nor affection by much of the world, especially mothers, police officers, campus administrators, and other societal voices of moderation and control. It's hard to explain to those who have missed the fraternity experience how richly satisfying booting, or mooning, or eating your underwear can be. People just don't get it.

popularity inspired editor Doug Kenney to suggest that he, Harold Ramis, and I write a movie based on them. The movie, of course, was "Animal House."

This probably did not endear me to Parkhurst Hall, whose occupants have been laboring mightily to rid the College of its "Animal House image." Well, sorry folks nothing personal. It just seemed like fraternities were endlessly getting a bum rap, and it was time someone spoke up for good old irresponsible, sophomoric, hedonistic, over-the-top fun.

The movie evidently tapped into something it quickly became the highest-grossing comedy of its time. People who liked it didn't just see it once, they went ten or 20 times. Its release coincided with, and perhaps contributed to, the rebound of fraternities around the country from their Vietnam-era doldrums. Toga parties and food fights made comebacks. Beer sales rose sharply. Sheer, mindless fun-for-fun's-sake was in fashion once again.

The fraternities revived in Hanover, too, only to discover their popularity among other sectors of the College was at a low ebb. To be sure, Dartmouth has usually eyed its fraternities with something less than full-bore enthusiasm—the first time the College considered getting rid of them was in 1846—but this was different. This time, it looked like the administration, faculty, Trustees, and police were serious.

The opening gun was fired in 1978. An English professor, James A. Ep-person, circulated a petition among the faculty to have fraternities abolished for "interfering with College life and the health and well-being of students." The real stunner came when the faculty voted 67-16 in favor of the proposal. Obviously, there was some serious resentment harbored against the fraternities at Dartmouth. And though the proposal ultimately did not fly, it marked the beginning of a crackdown that resulted in many houses being put on probation, and given shape-up-or-ship-out ultimata. Next came a reformist "plan of improvement," and then, in '83, the instituting of "Minimum Standards." Since this program called for expensive renovations to the deteriorating houses, it was widely perceived as ah attempt to do away with the fraternities by breaking them financially.

Then, in '87, the Board of Trustees released a "Residential Life Statement" calling for a reduction in the fraternity system's dominance of social life on campus, and, shortly after that, the Hanover Police, without notifying the administration, conducted their notorious undercover sting operation, recruiting an 18-year-old girl and sending her, with an outof-town policeman posing as her boyfriend, on a round of fraternities during Green Key weekend. Naturally, she was served beer at some of them, and eight fraternities and two sororities were charged with serving alcohol to a minor. The houses were actually put on notice that they could face criminal indictments, though the College ultimately got them off the hook. This had a chilling effect on the admission of nonmember guests to parties. Finally, in 1988, the administration announced that starting with the class of' 93, rush would be delayed until sophomore year. Since this would decrease fraternity membership and their already pinched treasuries there was bitter resistance to the measure, all the more so because it was a dictate from on high that ignored heavy student opposition.

Were these necessary reforms, or the overzealous programs of Dean Wormer-like administrators during a fundamentalist, neo-prohibitionist decade? What it sometimes looked like, to those of us on the outside, was that the College had declared war on its fraternities. Being in a house these days didn't look like much fun at all. So when the Alumni Magazine invited me up to research a piece on the state of fraternities at Dartmouth today, I thought twice. I mean, I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

I enter the AD house after all these years with trepidation. Here it is, the mythic fountainhead of the Animal House legend what will it be like today? Reduced to a skeleton crew of intimidated weenies, sipping Oolong and discussing Proust?

But no. The first thing I notice is the smell. It's the same smell, it hasn't changed in 25 years! Mainly beer, with certain miscellaneous nuances. And the place looks pretty much the same, too. A. bit more wrecked-up, maybe, but it's the same tube room, the same tap system, and, running the perimeter of the basement, the same beloved AD gutter (today known as the "gorf.") In the erstwhile basement bathroom converted to a broom closet a few years ago after a brother tore out the toilet to mix punch in it I can still make out the carved names of brothers from my era: Y. Bags, Lapes, Snot, Mag F. Pie, Hydrant, Dumptruck....

Having recently concluded a very successful rush, the house has nearly a hundred members, and it looks like most of them are here tonight. They seem a little cool; I wonder if I'm welcome. Or maybe it's a generational style they don't make a big deal about things. There's so many of them, though, over twice the number we had! The living room is like a subway car! And, God, how'd they get to be so young?

I have brought with me, on videocassette, an assemblage of eight-millimeter movies taken by one of our better social chairmen, Bob Scott '61, back in the early sixties. As I show the old flicks glimpses of snow statues, of the brothers cavorting at Hums, of parties and our great perennial R&B band, Lonnie Youngblood and the Redcoats (the original Otis Day and the Knights) pledges are periodically sent to "run a rack." They return with lengths of plank covered with brimming beer cups so that the brothers may indulge their taste for malt beverage. The crowd especially appreciates the sequence in which several old ADs eat the shirt of Bert Rowley '62 off his back. When the show concludes, they give it a round of snaps and sing a friendly (albeit obscene) song to me. Then one of them hands me a hill 16-ounce cup of beer, and I see all these faces looking at me with expectation.

Good God, I think, can I still chug one of these things? Well, it takes a little longer than it used to, but, yes, I can! All right still got my chops! The ADs cheer, the ice is broken. We repair to the basement, where fine music is played, multifarious brews are demolished, and whoops of laughter fill the room. Sometimes, it occurs to me, despite the passage of time, the essence of things remains the same.

The Coed Fraternity Sorority System, as it is currently called, is made up of nine sororities, five coed houses, and 17 "mainstream" fraternities. That's 31 organizations in all, in 27 houses. (Pi Lambda Phi went defunct in '67, and its former house no longer holds a fraternity. The DKE house was razed in '72.) Two fraternities and two sororities are predominantly black. They tend to have smaller memberships, and are "achievement oriented," in contrast to the mainstream houses, which are seen as primarily social outlets.

Well, right. The main function of most Dartmouth fraternities, as it was in your day and mine, is social. Let's face it Hanover is still a long way from anything. Without the houses, there's nothing to do. Sure, you can take in a string quartet at the Hop, or a movie, but after a while this gets old. You're 19, you want to party. The College has tried to provide "social alternatives" dances at Collis Center, parties at the cluster housing but they're just not the same. For one thing, College-sponsored events cannot serve alcohol to anyone under 21, and most students at Dartmouth are under 21. For another, you can't trash Collis Center or a dormitory; they're public places and don't belong to you. What it boils down tothere's nothing like getting down with your own friends on your own turf. Social alternatives are diet sodas healthier for you, probably, but nowheres near as satisfying.

Let us state the obvious. College is the first time most young people get away from home. It's a short, fouryear window of opportunity, between the oppressiveness of living under the control of your parents and the oppressiveness of adult responsibilities, to raise some serious hell, to get a lifetime's worth of rude, rebellious and disreputable behavior out of your system. And I would submit that, by and large, this is a normal and healthy process.

In America, the expression of youthful exuberance is typically done in tribes. Laughter and raucous celebration come easier when you have company; that's why. sit-coms have laugh tracks. When the youths in question are from the inner city, the tribes are called gangs. In the sixties, they were communes, and the hell-raising was often political. In colleges, we know them as fraternities and sororities. Whatever they're called, the tribes are a sort of halfway house between childhood and maturity.

And probably a rejection of both. I have long theorized that Dartmouth students' singular passion for booting (that's recreational vomiting, for the clueless among you) is a metaphorical regurgitation of their polite, proper upbringings. Similarly, the unwashed clothing (I knew a Skidmore sophomore who called underwear worn longer than a week "oldies but goodies"), amiably destroyed fraternity interiors, malodorous basements and public urinations constitute a livingout of a "natural" (as in "unrefined") lifestyle that will soon be utterly forbidden to them for the rest of their lives. A contemporary addition is the use of dip, or smokeless tobacco. I'm told a pinch of this stuff, tucked behind your lower lip, can give you a nice buzz, "make your head feel numb" as one AD brother put it. What may be more important is that it forces you to spit. Repeatedly. So fraternity guys now have a new disgusting thing to do, and the mung on fraternity floors has gained a component saliva. How gross! How wonderful!

At the heart of the fraternity experience is this powerful drive to do stuff legendary feats of endurance and consumption, acts of absurd, non-linear behavior. Fraternity guys, in their collegiate way, are playing Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' game living in a state of mystical, spiritual brotherhood, pressing the envelope of human experience, trying to take things further. This is the drive that prompted three AD brothers to take off late one night for Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, for no other reason than that it had a funny name. And another fellow to drive his car hundreds of times around the town square of Lebanon, until he ran out of gas. And another guy to plant himself nude in the hose closet of the basement, where he waited patiently for three hours until enough of us were drinking down there for him to pop the door open and amaze us. It's what made one of my brothers swear he could live on beer alone for a week (he didn't make it), and another bet he could survive inside the refrigerator of the tap system for an hour (he succeeded, drank one congratulatory beer, and retired from the scene early, swathed in blankets). It's what prompts stair diving, mooning someone's grandmother, trick-or-treating wearing nothing but a jack-o-lantern, supplying its nose with a portion of your anatomy. There's no reason for this, stuff you just do it. It's existential, dadaist performance art.

Then there's hazing. In my day, there were pledge papers ("My Sensations at Birth" was the mildest one), crew races, and a painful interview with a "Grand Inquisitor." Today, of course, there is no hazing at Dartmouth, so the following stories must be from somewhere else. One house drops its pledges a few miles out of town, naked with an axe. The point is to get back to campus. Ever try hitchhilang naked with an axe? Pledges of another fraternity are threatened with a punishment for pledging infractions known as the Rack of Gnarl up to a dozen cups containing a mixture of catsup, soy sauce, dog food, mouthwash, and whatever other unappetizing liquid or semi-liquid substances happen to be on hand. You're supposed to drink every cup, and, sorry, it's bad form to boot too soon.

Hazing gets a lot of criticism. In many cases, it deserves a lot of criticism. Done right, though which is to say, in a spirit of friendship it's basically fan, and serves some important functions. During your pledge period, you find you can do things you didn't think you could do, face scary stuff and come through fine. You learn you can trust your brother, that, ultimately, he's not going to let anything too terrible happen to you. Surviving the shared ordeal bonds you to your pledge brothers, and, for that matter, to everyone who's ever been a member of your house. Why this should seem important, I don't know, but it does seem so. Maybe it's just that it's damned pleasant to be bonded with other people the world's a lonely place.

There are questionable sides to fraternities, ternities. There's sexism, and elitism, and conformity, and anti-intellectual hedonism, just as the critics say. This is not surprising. Young men, in fraternities or out, have always had a problem viewing young women as persons rather than pastries. Which is in no way a justification of that posture the objectification of women is a bad thing. It just shouldn't come as a shock that 21-year-old guys behave that way.

Their penchant for elitism the "We're number one" syndrome and the conformity seem more a function of age than of house membership. And as for anti-intellectual hedonism... ism . . .yeah! I mean, the animal in us needs care and feeding, too, just as badly as the scholar, the visionary, and the spiritual seeker. Yes, fraternities have defects. But so do sewing circles, scout troops, and Congresses. Fraternities are no more perfectable than any of humanity's other inventions.

Which does not mean there's no room for improvement. In fact, a more balanced approach to the fan and madness seems to be evolving these days. Just about everyone I talked to, including some independents, said so. There's a heightened awareness about alcohol, for one thing; during parties, sober brothers guard the exits, and take your keys away if you're too ripped to drive. Nor, at least in some houses, is there the pressure to drink there once was. AD pledges, for instance, are told by their pledgemaster straight out—if you don't want to, you don't have to.

The houses are in better physical shape, too, due largely to the implementation of Minimum Standards. And numerous Dartmouth women told me the guys are even making progress with sexism, that things are much better than they were a few years ago. So, as it turns out, much of the reform demanded by the College during the eighties has actually improved things, without diminishing the partying in the least.

Perhaps you, too, had gotten the impression from the relentless media reports of controversy and divisiveness at Dartmouth that somehow the fan was getting lost up there. Put aside your fears. I spent time at more than a dozen houses fraternities, sororities, and coed and I'm happy to report that the men and women of today's Dartmouth are having as much fun as we ever did, if not more. You'd be proud of 'em.

Saturday of Green Key, my last day; tomorrow it's back to the freeways and smog and mortgages and diaper-changings of real life. Turns out the AD house has its major annual party this afternoon on the front lawn. They've got this terrific funk band on the front porch, and the dudes are wailing. The yard is as packed with people as it was Green Key Weekend 28 years ago, the Sunday afternoon Chuck Berry was sup-Thanks posed to play. But I'm not dancing I'm feeling grumpy about having to go home tomorrow, and, hell, a little burned out generally from trying to keep up with these 20-year-olds the whole week.

Thanks to last night's killer rain, much of the yard is a mud puddle. After a while, predictably enough, the brothers decide to do a little mud diving. In fact, half the guys in the house quickly join in, as do many of the dates and friends and onlookers, and it looks like "Return of the Mud Monsters" out there. And, then, uh-oh I spot seven or eight beslimed brothers headed straight for me with crazed, demented smiles.

Well, I don't feel like going in any mud, that's for sure. Later for that, Jack. "Come on, you guys, let's just forget it, okay?" They blithely ignore me; I barely have time to toss my wallet and shades to my amused wife (who's been egging them on), and then I am being carried across the yard by all these guys Donk and Oddjob and Mulch and Scurvey and Snot II and Toast and Remus and Spock and they find a particularly juicy mud hole . . . and put me in it!

And, whaddaya know, it's great! Suddenly, I'm not tired and I'm not grumpy it's as if I've been shot up with adrenaline. And, man, I'm dancing my brains out, exchanging high fives and whooping like a maniac, and it all comes back, that total party feeling, where time suspends and you're in an eternal, fun-filled now. This is it the thing people join fraternities for one of those peak Bacchanalian moments that know no equal. I feel closer to these dancing mud maniacs guys I'd never met until a week ago, and who are young enough to be my kids than I do to most of the people I see in everyday life. They're my brothers! This bonding thing really works, even all these long, weary years later, and I couldn't be happier.

Ah, fraternities.

Sweet!

Although its forms have gotten milder, hazing remains. Some pledges must carry stupid objects.

The ADs in '63 were a deceptively respectable-looking lot. But is that Chris Miller in the big pumpkin?

Two versions of fraternity evolution,above and below. The houses alsohave evolved, according to Miller.

The houses are fixed, pledges aren't forced to drink as much, and at AD, the band plays on.

"Its hard to explainto those who havemissed the fraternityexperience how richlysatisfying booting,or mooning,,or eating yourunderwear can be."

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? What happens to all these degenerate fraternity animals after graduation Despite their undergraduate . proclivities, they do not generally ; become the guys you see on Skid Row, rushing up to wipe your car windows with greasy newspapers, Here's what a representative sampling of brothers from my era none of them strangers to the basement scene are up to these days: Otter: Partner in a law firm Lapes: Assistant general counsel, bank Huck Doody: Journalist and editor Hydrant: Partner in law firm Y. Bear: CEO of own company Bakes: V.P. of chemical company Sugar Ray: Assistant state attorney general Turnip: Professor oflinguistics Giraffe: Doctor F.A.Mae: Doctor Doberman: Minister Chris Miller

"A more balancedapproach tothe fun andmadness seemsto be evolvingthese days."