The Case at Brown

Fraternity pledge week at Brown University, as on many another U.S. campus, is traditionally a raucous, roughhouse affair. Last week, with one undergraduate dead and others in bandages, shocked Brown students themselves admitted that their happy customs had gone too far.

As a finale to Brown's pledge week, fraternity men had made the rounds of chapter houses to "congratulate" each other. As had happened before, the congratulations led to free-for-alls. At Beta Theta Pi, the brothers stood off a small invasion for a while, finally had to call for police help. Elsewhere, windows were smashed, streetlights broken, a U.S. mailbox ripped from its post.

At the height of the celebration, 19-year-old Hale T. Gehl, a sophomore from Chicago, and a member of Theta Delta Chi, had a bad fall. While visiting at the Delta Phi house, he lost his balance on the stairs and plunged to the bottom. Two days later he died of a brain hemorrhage.

Shocked, Dean Robert W. Kenny last week suspended all fraternity social activities until further notice. Non-fraternity men, who outnumber the Greeks two to one, held a mass meeting, raised the question of whether Brown should have fraternities at all.

When fraternity men held a counter-rally, Brown President Henry M. Wriston dropped in. Accusing Brown's fraternities of being "discriminatory, non-democratic and anti-intellectual," Wriston gave them a short, blunt warning: "Either represent a majority of the students--or you will not survive on this campus."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.