Related: Sunday Globe Special: Dartmouth Drinking Game
"Dartmouth College roiled, again, by student insensitivity" by Alyssa A. Botelho | Globe Correspondent, August 18, 2013
HANOVER, N.H. — The heart of Dartmouth College’s campus — the fraternity memorialized in the 1978 film “National Lampoon’s Animal House.”
The party, whose theme invoked two infamous South Central Los Angeles street gangs, took a disturbing — and, for Dartmouth, disturbingly familiar — twist.
“It then turned into a ‘ghetto party,’ with racialized language, speech, and dress,” Jordan Terry, a Dartmouth sophomore and president of the college’s NAACP chapter, wrote in an e-mail to college leaders.
They didn't book Otis Day and the Knights?
Administrators decried the actions of guests at the party. The fraternity acknowledged behavior that was “insensitive and thoughtless.” And a bucolic campus was left again to ponder how it had wound up here, in the spotlight for students gone rogue....
Dartmouth sophomore Troy Donahue, 20, of Colorado, said he did not think the brothers of Alpha Delta “meant harm” with their Crips and Bloods party. “I definitely see why it’s offensive for a majority-white frat to play on that stereotype though,” he said.
“They just weren’t thinking about who it might affect,” said sophomore Kelsey Stimson of Santa Barbara, Calif. “It was poor decision-making . . . a lack of awareness.”
Other students expressed private outrage at yet another racially tinged instance in a long pattern of questionable judgment calls made by students in Dartmouth’s Greek culture.
Many were afraid to comment without anonymity on a secluded, tight-knit campus where everyone knows one another....
Dartmouth’s Webster Avenue, which houses most of the college’s Greek houses, lit up with activity as midnight approached Wednesday, music turned up loud and porch lights beaming as students went to weekly chapter meetings and after-parties.
But Alpha Delta’s House on East Wheelock Street remained quiet. Dodge balls were strewn on its front lawn, and clothes hung over its empty front balcony.
Almost all nights, Donahue said, parties stay in the realm of the whimsical. He listed some of the recent costume themes at his own fraternity, Gamma Delta Xi: For Shark Week, guests dressed as aquatic animals, and for Slumber Party, pajamas were the dress of choice.
“I’ve never heard of anything like Crips and Bloods happening before,” he said.
The “ghetto party” of 1998 sparked a national uproar and a flurry of discussion at the college about campus culture. But memory of that party has not been enough to quell a repeat.
Dartmouth alumnus Joseph Asch, who wrote about the Crips and Bloods party on the independently run DartBlog, said stricter and more sustained supervision of Greek life by college administrators was badly needed.
“There’s been a lot of turnover [of staff] in the Dean of the College and other offices . . . and fraternities have been left somewhat to their own devices,” Asch said. “It’s become a bit of a ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation.”
Dartmouth’s new president, Philip J. Hanlon, is an Alpha Delta alumnus who took office June 10.
“It will be interesting to see how president Hanlon deals with this, given that this is the first crisis that’s appeared on his watch,” Asch said.
On Thursday, the Dartmouth NAACP chapter, the Afro-American Society, Women of Color Collective, and La Alianza Latina sent a joint call for action to students, urging them to report the party as a bias incident to the college’s Judicial Affairs Office.
Students upset about the party but reluctant to speak out said the call for action from those groups represented a brave effort on a campus where college pride and solidarity are paramount.
“If you challenge the college in any way you get a huge backlash from your peers,” said the student, who grew up in a gang-heavy neighborhood.
And at Dartmouth, nestled out of the way in New Hampshire’s secluded rolling hills, that kind of alienation can make for a difficult four years.
“This school is our life,” the student said. “There’s not much else in this town.”
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