The Houses Should All Go Coed

OUR IMPERTINENT friend above equates groups that have a small and not always welcome presence on campus with members of a large and powerful majority.

African-, Asian-, and Hispanic Americans need a place to let their hair down. Most students, on the other hand, already have such a place. It's called Dartmouth. Fraternity brothers can be themselves anytime they want to, within the M. limits of the law and I College regulations.

Andrew Beebe '93, himself a member of Alpha Chi Alpha fraternity, was right to get the discussion going. "During a period in our lives when understanding different views and perspectives could not be more important to the holistic education, the last policy we want to continue is one that is isolating, instead of unifying, men and women on this campus," he said. Relationships between men and women at Dartmouth are, as the psychologists would say, "dysfunctional." There are too many physical affairs and too few friendships. And there are some bad attitudes and some seriously bad incidents, as last month's cover story of this magazine showed. These problems don't originate in the fraternities; few people on campus hold to that extreme theory. In fact, the Greek houses—sororities and fraternities—are the perfect places to fix the problem between the sexes. They remain the center of campus social life, providing a constant for relationships in the face of the Dartmouth Plan.

Student efforts work best when they are student initiatives—when well-meaning administrators stay out of it. Why not give this initiative a chance? Let students encourage the houses to go coed on their own. Let them solve a set of problems that they themselves have come to recognize as anathema to the Dartmouth spirit.