| Charge!, or Meeting Delta Upsilon (A hypothetical speech to my home chapter) |
[Oct. 17th, 2011|11:52 am] |
It’s not easy being "Greek."
It may be that membership in a fraternity or a sorority once conferred some kind of nobility to a college student, but those days are over. Greek Life is a relic, pre-dating the ages of individualism and information-sharing, from a time before everyone technocratically self-selected their own insular groups, back when “elite” was still a compliment.
From the beginning it was a strange choice for me to join Delta Upsilon Fraternity. Despite a surfeit of fond memories and friendships, I remain even today a little conflicted about my decision. It has always been like that one jacket you have in the corner of your closet: it fits just a little funny and it doesn’t really go with anything, so you only wear it out on certain occasions. But it keeps you warm and it has a lot of sentimental value, so you enjoy keeping it around.
As I sort out my fraternity experience, it always gets me to thinking about whether I put enough into it to get enough out of it, what I gained from it and what I can give back. Now, nearly a dozen years after my graduation, all I have to contribute are my thoughts about what the fraternity ultimately meant and means to me.
Every semester, for every ceremony in which the fraternal leaders initiate a new class of fraternity members, they dig up some old alumni to give a sort of commencement speech to the brotherhood – and the public, since Delta Upsilon is non-secret – called “The Charge.” It’s supposed to take the form of instruction or exhortation to the youngsters. I must admit that I can’t remember anything about the charge at my initiation, or who delivered it, so in the long run I suppose it’s not very consequential.
But it occurs to me that it would be the perfect venue in which to not only speak frankly about the benefits of college and brotherhood, but to unpack whatever general life wisdom I’ve accumulated thus far.
I was never very popular and I’ll never be famous. I didn’t have the prototypical Delta Upsilon experience and my tether to those days and those people is stretched thin, at best. I would never ask to speak and they would never think to invite me. This is not an entreaty or a fishing expedition.
It’s just a daydream. And this is what it would sound like:
* * * * *
Hello, everyone. My name is Jason Hammersla, 1999 graduate and member of Nu Class. I’d like to thank the brotherhood and alumni leadership for the invitation to speak here today and for the warm reception I’ve received.1
I’m a native Rochesterian but I come here from Washington DC, where I’m the communications director for a modestly-sized trade association, working on health care and retirement savings policy. It is said that “if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”2 I’m allergic to dogs, so I couldn’t be more pleased to be back here in my hometown and at my alma mater, where friends are easy to come by.
I should admit that in my time here I used to be known as a “satellite brother.” Perhaps this is still a familiar colloquialism; a satellite brother is one who is a part of the fraternity but never really at the center of what’s going on. They don’t live in the common housing, and they’re invisible at parties. They exist on the periphery: intermittently visible, vaguely exotic.
Satellites, by their nature, are held in the gravitational embrace of something larger than itself. And as gravity fades and their orbit expands, they gain the invaluable benefit of perspective. I speak to you today from 200,000 feet above sea level.
These are fractious times. Nowhere is this truer than in my adoptive home, our nation’s capital, where our duly elected representatives too readily employ the art of war to vilify their opponents, undermine their intentions and demonize their ideas. There is a vacuum of leadership in our world today, and nature abhors a vacuum.
So it is particularly heartening to consecrate and celebrate the ascension of these young men to a higher standard. For as much as a university education is an avenue for individual improvement, the university experience is about development as a member of civilized society. And the fraternal experience, at its marrow, is about development of men into leaders by example as well as by title. This is what the Rochester chapter proudly refers to as “building better men.”
I acknowledge that the word “man” and manhood have become bound up with, and weighted down by, conventional gender roles, pop psychology and quasi-Darwinian competition. For all its accumulated freight, people throw the word around capriciously. Be a man. Take it like a man. Stick it to the man. Man up. Man down. Man overboard. Who’s the man? You’re the man.3
For these purposes, at least, let us think about the word “man” in a broader way – as a simple abbreviation of the word “human.” And in that light, the existential inquiry becomes even more profound: what kind of man am I? What kind of man am I going to be?4
Under this roof we try to answer those questions through the advocacy of certain key principles, as espoused in The Cornerstone, Delta Upsilon’s Guide to College and Beyond:
- The Promotion of Friendship
- The Development of Character
- The Diffusion of Liberal Culture, and
- The Advancement of Justice
There is an old Hebrew word some of you may have heard before, “shibboleth.” Its original, literal translation is some kind of “grain plant,” but it is now commonly used a reference to an Old Testament story in which the people of Giliad used the word as a means of identifying trespassers from Ephraim. The Ephramite dialect didn’t include the “sh” sound, so when the Gileadites asked them to pronounce the word, it came out “thibboleth,” and so they were promptly drowned in a nearby river. And so “shibboleth” has come to mean “a practice or saying that is uniquely distinctive of a certain group.”
The four principles are your new shibboleth, not so much guidelines as they are prerequisites of fellowship. This is why we have no need for a secret handshake. If you didn’t believe in these things already, you would not be here now.
But there is another part of the Delta Upsilon canon that sets forth a more prescriptive set of ideals, as described in the associate member manual and passed down for generations from big to little brothers. They are as follows:
- A Delta U must be an introspective man.
- A Delta U must be a thinking man.
- A Delta U must be creative man.
- A Delta U must be a man of action.
And we take this to heart. Often, we end up inadvertently “choosing” our favorite of these labels, whether to justify our predispositions or rectify our perceived weaknesses. I always found it amusing that guys seem to fixate on that last one, “a man of action.” Everybody always wanted to be a “man of action,” probably because it sounds the sexiest, most like a stud or a superhero. “A man of action.” That’s Bruce Willis, John Wayne, Teddy Roosevelt. It is, I suppose, the most manly of these men. Nobody ever got laid by being an introspective man.
Believe me.
But eventually, you come to learn that this is obviously a false choice. They’re all the same person.
You can’t be an introspective man without being a thinking man, because then what are you doing? Introspection without thought – whether it’s getting high or getting lost – is no better than sleep.
You can’t really be a thinking man without being a creative man, because it’s the creativity that allows you to stretch boundaries, to challenge conventions and ask “what if.” As Delta Upsilon Brother and two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling once said, “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”
You can’t be a creative man without being a man of action, because it takes work and will and determination to bring about creation.
And action without introspection? That’s just being a spaz.5
So: introspective man, thinking man, creative man, man of action – this is not a menu, or a checklist. It’s a roadmap, with each step compelling you to the next. Congratulations to you, my newest brothers, for taking your first step on this path. You are to be commended for their perseverance in reaching this point.
Perhaps your decision to join Delta Upsilon has not come without cost. Sacrifice is a part of any life choice, but it is another guiding principle of this house that we do not ask any person to surrender their self-respect. Assuming this is the same non-hazing chapter of the same non-secret fraternity that I left behind, they have not had to endure the stereotypical – and, hopefully, antiquated – indignities and humiliations we instinctively associate with the fraternity system.
Indeed, as some of the more insidious elements of fraternal life have been purified by sunlight, so also has that sunlight tarnished the image of a Greek man, or woman, as the archetype of collegiate ideals.
And so these new brothers have had to tolerate a different, and not altogether unironic, kind of struggle: they have to put up with other people giving them crap about being in a fraternity. From sad-but-true news briefs and Hollywood underdog bromides, the populace at large –perhaps some in this room – has inherited a partially informed skepticism about what we do here.
They think we take ourselves too seriously. They think we don’t take anything else seriously enough. They remember our mistakes. They dismiss our accomplishments. They attend our parties, enjoy our refreshments and laugh at us behind our backs. They accuse us of buying our friends.
It’s not the friends we’re buying. But I’ll get back to that in a minute.
I joined the fraternity in the fall of my freshman year, 1995. And in my four years as an undergraduate there wasn’t a semester that went by that I didn’t wonder if it was the right decision.
At 18 years old I was a nerd caricature. Self-conscious, awkward and bookish – not even really smart, just bookish. Weirdly polite. Politely weird. I was the kind of guy who did really well with parents, teachers and administrators. But in acutely social situations, I turned into wallpaper. What would a fraternity do with me?
And what would a fraternity do for me? As an undergraduate clinical psychology major and aspiring therapist, I had little need for future business connections. I was already close to home and living in special-interest housing, so I wasn’t seeking another surrogate family. I had a girlfriend and I didn’t drink, so access to girls and parties wasn’t of much benefit.
I attended my first rush event in the Friel Lounge mainly because I didn’t have anything else to do; if cable television had been available on campus then, I probably would have been watching The Simpsons instead. And might possibly be watching The Simpsons now.
Throughout the rush experience, I connected with several of the brothers on a personal level and I was appropriately impressed by the civic and academic leadership: Students’ Association senators, Campus Times editors, National Merit Scholars, Rochester Early Medical Scholars, male cheerleaders. That’s straight out of the fraternity rush handbook: sell your brotherhood as a collection of charming overachievers.
But what I found most enticing – what sold me – was the unspoken, maybe accidental idea that when you bring a diverse group of people together, you can accomplish big things. Even the most introspective man of action can’t do big things by himself. He needs a team.
Delta Upsilon Brother Kurt Vonnegut created, in my favorite novel, Cat’s Cradle, a fictional religion-slash-philosophy called Bokononism. Followers believe that humanity “is organized into teams, teams that do God’s will without ever discovering what they are doing.” Such a team is called a karass. Vonnegut writes that one can try to discover the limits of their karass and the nature of the work that God has had it do ... but such investigations are bound to be incomplete.
It may be that Delta Upsilon is my karass. It could be that this very moment is the result of all that work. I wish I had known; I could have avoided so much exercise.
Along the way I certainly had my unforgettable brotherhood experiences, like pranks and road trips and wacky adventures. I have memories so rich and deep that I can still smell them. Most speakers and most charges will urge you to relish those moments, savor your youth, seize the day, blah blah blah. Okay, yes, definitely, do that.
I’m going to tell you what’s really important, what your dues are actually paying for: chapter meetings.
Here’s the big, dirty secret about Greek Life: the friendships, the parties, the fun stuff – you can get that anywhere. You don’t really need a fraternity for that. What Delta Upsilon offers is an opportunity for you to be a part of – and take responsibility for – something more important than yourself. It’s an active, participatory process, and it takes shape in the form of the chapter meeting.
Once a week, these guys spend the last flickering embers of their weekend in an antiseptic classroom somewhere, conducting the mundane, mechanical operation of the fraternity.6
They take roll. You probably thought, when you came to college, where most classes seem purely optional, that your days of roll call were over. In time, your compulsory attendance at these meetings will seem like something between a privilege and a punishment.
They comport themselves according to Robert’s Rules of Order and Parliamentary Procedure, a framework so arcane and labyrinthine that you can never really be sure if the president is just making things up. Each week, someone will unveil a new procedural maneuver to cut off debate; in response, someone in the brotherhood at large will, with all civility and respect, introduce a resolution instructing the president to eat his gavel.
They argue about trivial things, like whether this year’s rush T-shirt should be black or blue, or whether they should be buying traditional or barbeque-flavored potato chips for the Mardi Gras party. At some point during these ridiculous discussions, you will find yourself so bitterly frustrated by the guy sitting next to you right now that you begin to wonder if his acceptance to this school was a clerical error. Within two hours, you will have realized how stupid the argument was, and within 24 hours, you will have forgotten about the issue entirely.
They argue about important things, like budgets and dues and academic standards and risk management. There will be a handful of decisions every semester that affect this fraternity’s lifeblood and legacy. You will have to choose between the impassioned argument of this guy you respect, who says this thing, and this other guy you respect, who says this other thing. And you will accept the consequences of not only your choice, but the choices of your peers.
It can be an ugly, soul-crushing exercise. In Washington, we call it “making the sausage,” under the premise that nobody wants to see sausage or laws being made. But this experience is absolutely essential to the development of thoughtful citizenship and leadership. Because when you are tired and frustrated and bored and despairing, that is when your character is exposed. That is the man you are.
And when our founding principles – friendship, character, culture, justice – and our prescriptions – introspection, thought, creativity, action – are applied in those moments, that is the foundation of leadership. That is how you do big things. And that is how we build better men.
You know, I get frustrated when I hear people, usually politicians, say that “Washington is broken.” Certainly, our government has many problems, some institutional and some circumstantial. It doesn’t always do what we want it to do, and it doesn’t always do it efficiently. But it does what it’s supposed to do, which is take the will of the people and convert it into the rule of law. It’s not “broken,” it works. It’s just messy. And, as with any piece of complicated machinery, the operators need to know what they’re doing.
Someday, you will be those operators. Government, like this fraternity, like life, is just a series of meetings, and we are counting on you to show up. I ask you to be present for those meetings, watch and listen at those meetings, speak conscientiously at those meetings. Take what you learn in those meetings – take what you learn about yourself in those meetings, and apply it the outside world as teachers, as titans of industry, as parents, as leaders.
In the words of brother and president James A. Garfield, “I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.”
Thank you very much. Congratulations, Dikaia Upotheke, and justice for all. |
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