New Look for the Thriving Greeks

By Ezra Bowen

At the University of Florida in Gainesville, members from all 50 of the school's flourishing fraternities and sororities ran marathons for money and shook tin cups until they raised some $10,000 for the Stop Children's Cancer Fund.

At Ohio State, the Greek-letter societies (membership up 31% in twelve years) proudly claimed eight of ten designees for both the homecoming court and the outstanding senior awards given for scholarship, leadership and community service.

At the University of Washington, where an increase of 400 pledges over 1984-85's total raised fraternity and sorority memberships to a campus high of 4,200, the Greeks were well on their way to topping last year's record 444 pints of donated blood.

Across much of the country a special kind of Greek revival is thriving on the campuses. College students have pushed national undergraduate membership in fraternities from 230,000 in 1980 to more than 400,000. Sororities, which record no countrywide membership total, have added 131 chapters in the past three years. At the same time, the Greek societies are working hard to overcome the image projected by the 1978 film National Lampoon's Animal House, which portrayed ham-handed initiation rites, sex groupies and boozy car crunching as standard behavior at the frats.

To many educators these quantum changes, both in numbers and life-style, , are a reflection of the swing toward Establishment values and conservatism on campuses. Virginia's assistant dean of students, Terry Appolonia, confirms that today's collegians "are seeking more and more ties to the Establishment." Mitchel Livingston, Ohio State's dean of student life, says, "They want to be part of a group which has similar ideas and values to their own." He adds, "Fraternities and sororities are the answer. It's all part of the trend to affiliate with an organization."

This portrait of the student as conformist and joiner provides a dramatic contrast with the bitterly anti-Establishment days of the Viet Nam War and its aftermath. Then, to join a fraternity or sorority--with its typically upper- middle-class stigma and perhaps a bigotry clause or two in the charter--was definitely out. Memberships slumped, while dozens of fraternity and sorority houses closed their doors. "It was 'do your thing,' " recalls Mimi Turrill, 36, a Pi Beta Phi who graduated from the University of Colorado in 1970. "Women's lib was coming to the fore, and sorority women were thought of just as clones of each other." Says Jack Levin, a sociologist at Northeastern University in Boston: "It was an embarrassment to be a member of a fraternity."

Some colleges and their students, particularly those among the old-line schools of the Northeast, continue to feel that way. Two years ago Maine's Colby College and Amherst in Massachusetts banned Greek societies as "quite anomalous with the spirit of the university," in the words of one Amherst administrator. Adds Levin: "Fraternities provide a model for separatism that carries over into adult life."

Even where the societies are booming again, however, the conventional lines of separatism are being erased, and an atmosphere of constraint and cautious adherence to more stringent rules pervades most houses. Virtually all national fraternities and sororities have stripped from their charters any ethnic or religious bars to membership. Some 18 states have passed laws forbidding dangerous or degrading hazing, and colleges and Greek societies have added their own toughened antihazing regulations. To comply with 21-or-over liquor laws already adopted in 38 states, many campuses require notification of college authorities plus the guarantee of a sober, drinking-age bartender for any booze party. But, admits Kaye Howe, vice chancellor for academic services at Colorado, "there are not enough police in the world for us to control the Greeks." |

Apparently not. Last October Sherri Clark, an 18-year-old sorority pledge, died at a party sponsored by two sororities when after drinking heavily, she fell from a bridge. And in Texas, Kappa Alpha Rusty Combes, 26, won a $21 million out- of-court settlement for injuries sustained in an auto accident after a fraternity blowout. Along with the plain human tragedy, notes Cincinnati Attorney Robert Manley, such disasters have "the potential for bankrupting every fraternity in the country." The societies know it, and the bottom line of ruinous insurance payouts and premiums has pushed them to clean up their act.

The membership boom also has roots in the hardening realities of today's economy. Acceptance in a fraternity or sorority often entitles a student to convenient, low-cost housing (at the University of California, Berkeley, for example, an average of $317 a month for room and board, compared with $455 for a dormitory room). In addition, many of the societies now provide extensive job counseling, instruction in resume writing and interview techniques. Then, too, says University of Washington Junior Michelle Lessard, "you can make a lot of connections, and you need them in today's job market."

Along with the Greek revival has come an upsurge of the nice-guy sentimentality once typical of college life. Greeks again serenade a girl who has accepted a fraternity pin from a brother. Corsages, long dresses and black tie are back for dances. Initiation ceremonies, long scorned as juvenile (and now largely cleansed of the rough stuff), are once again emotional experiences, with pledges of fealty by candlelight. On some campuses, Hell Week has been renamed Inspiration Week. Senior Kyle Williamson of the University of Colorado's Sigma Phi Epsilon house, which prides itself a membership of jocks and other square-shouldered types, admits that "a lot of guys cry." Buckley Gillock of Virginia speaks for generations of Greeks when he describes why he cares so deeply about being a Kappa Alpha: "It's meant making the best friends I've had so far in my life, and probably the best friends I'll ever have."

With reporting by Robert C. Wurmstedt/Denver, with other bureaus