Question: Should Greek Week have been canceled for 2010?

Has Greek Week really been canceled?  I’m sure Lehigh’s fraternities and sororities will use the valuable life skills instilled by their “new member education” to pull together and more or less recreate the Week formerly known as Greek.  We’ll barely miss the high school antics, after all.

Many students and alumni have been quick to dismiss the cancellation as another casualty of our administration’s “War on Fun.” That may be the case, but I won’t defend that position here.  A deeper problem relates to how Lehigh students relate to the so-called “other.”   The most divisive and threatening of these relations is the one between Greeks and non-Greeks, and the cancellation of Greek Week abets this division.

The administration reinforces the perception that Greeks are out-of-control coked-out alcoholic racist homophobic misogynists.  At the same time, Greeks feel that their space on campus is under attack by both the administration and various student groups – whose antipathy towards Greeks is often influenced by sensationalist rumors.

One thing should be obvious:  The Greeks are not monolithic.  Plenty of houses hate other houses.  Plenty of Greeks even hate their own houses.  By continuing to paint 40% of Lehigh’s population with such broad strokes, we foment division within the student body.

Greek Week was one of the few events that at least pretended to encourage some interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks.  Its cancellation will push the Greek community back into the very bubble that allowed this behavior to fester in the first place.  The administration is wrong to think that bringing down a disciplinary hammer will strengthen Greek life in the long term.  Only increased participation and scrutiny from the larger campus community will have the power to move social standards in the right direction.

To Discuss this issue, please see all three of our editor’s viewpoints, and comment here.