Words by Stephanie d’Arc Taylor.
Since the first fraternity was founded in 1825, American college life has come to be defined by networks of rituals, secret codes and internal hierarchies whose influences stretch far beyond the four walls of the chapter house. As a growing number of colleges distance themselves from the so-called Greek system, Stephanie d’Arc Taylor considers the role of ritual in shaping this strained American institution.
The video opens on three young women standing at the front door of a large, stately house. They are dressed in uniform, their hair shimmering through the haze of a South Texas August. They give rehearsed speeches to convey welcome. Brilliant smiles gleam below inscrutable eyes. Then they open the doors, and the levees break. Dozens of identical sets of manicured hands and heads appear, grinning identical grins that border on the maniacal. A sea of young white women with glistening hair and teeth. The heads and hands move rhythmically, in unison, as if marshaled by an unseen drum major. They are yelling “woo.”
The effect is unsettling and ponderous, like a postcard from Baudrillard’s desert of the real. You feel the impulse to close the browser, to stand up, take a minute to process what you’ve seen. But when the video ends, the player automatically loads another video, with similar identical floating heads, clapping in time and baring perfect white teeth. There are thousands of them.
This is a door stack, a time-honored ritual practiced by American sororities to attract potential new members to join the organization. “It’s something you’ll typically see in the South, like Alabama, Ole Miss, Georgia,” explains Lexi Solomon, an active member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at Virginia Tech. “We don’t do door stacking, but we begin learning the songs for recruitment a couple months in advance. The week before recruitment we spend between five and nine hours per day practicing. But there’s a lot I can’t tell you because it’s ritual.”
The casual onlooker would be forgiven for describing the door stack as vaguely ridiculous. But Greek life—the collective term for American fraternities and sororities—is serious. Since the first fraternity was founded in the US—the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in 1776—it has become a keystone institution of the American economy, government and high society. Eighteen US presidents were fraternity brothers, as well as innumerable titans of every industry imaginable.
In America, a country without ancient aristocratic networks or economic guilds, fraternities create the types of shared backgrounds that mutually benefit members as they proceed through their careers. In the US as in Europe, vast riches and immense reserves of power have been created on the backs of these networks. And ritual is the major—in some cases, the only—thing that binds the albeit already very similar members of these organizations. (Until the 1960s, white fraternities and sororities were officially segregated. Today, there are several exclusively Black fraternities and sororities; the rest remain overwhelmingly white.)
But these rituals aren’t just effusive performances by young women wearing pastel polo shirts screen-printed with Greek letters in metallic foil. The initiation rituals, a closely guarded secret, carry “an air of gravitas,” says Neil Duprey, a Sigma Alpha Epsilon alumnus of the University of California, San Diego. Duprey was raised in a nonreligious household, but says, “I’ve gone to church a few times with friends of various denominations. The SAE initiation rituals had a bit of that flair.”
The religious undertones to Greek initiation rituals are no accident, says photographer Andrew Moisey. Moisey’s 2018 book, The American Fraternity, is the result of seven years he spent shadowing a fraternity at the University of California, Berkeley. At one point, he found a 50-year-old ritual manual in an abandoned fraternity house. “The rituals were quasi-Christian, [positioning] brotherly spirit as the thing that separates fraternity brothers from the rest of society but also binds them to a higher calling,” says Moisey.
In the ritual that initiates new members into the fraternity, according to Moisey’s manual, young men go through a sort of resurrection. “You ‘die,’ are put into a coffin, and then you’re reborn as a member of the brotherhood. That’s also the ritual that Freemasons do, as well as born-again Christians,” says Moisey.
Like Lexi Solomon, Duprey declined to give details of his chapter’s rituals, as per fraternity policy. But his experience with initiation corroborates at least one aspect of Moisey’s account: Sigma Alpha Epsilon “rents out the Masonic center in La Jolla [an affluent suburb of San Diego] as the setting,” he says.
Greek life rituals can be useful for young men and women learning how to operate in the world. For Solomon, the process of joining a sorority showed her that she could handle situations in which she was under extreme scrutiny. “At the beginning, I was so nervous I was shaking like a Chihuahua,” she laughs. But “going through the stress of recruitment and coming out the other side showed me that I could withstand a lot more than I thought I could. Social pressure was not something I was adept with, so it was a personal victory.” The rituals represent a continuity she finds comforting. “For me, the rituals are about connecting with your sisters, the values that are important to you, and the history of the women who co-founded this organization.”
For Duprey, the process of fraternity recruitment prepared him for job interviews, down to the business casual khakis-and-shirt dress code required for later-stage recruitment events. “It was an early introduction to the ways I would be interviewed at companies I was attempting to get jobs at. I just learned to talk about myself,” he says.
Prior to initiation, prospective members of both sororities and fraternities traditionally undergo a period known as pledging. Horror stories about fraternity hazing abound, involving brothers forcing pledges to drink to excess, expose themselves to extreme weather conditions and consume spoiled food or even excrement. Neither Solomon nor Duprey report initiation rituals that were scary or dangerous. But the figures speak for themselves: There was at least one hazing death per year at American universities from 1959 to 2019. Between 2005 and 2013 alone there were 60 deaths. The predominant cause of death is alcohol poisoning.
Fatal hazing rituals, as well as increased scrutiny on biased recruitment practices, have led many schools to crack down on Greek life on campus in recent years. Cornell, where Andrew Moisey teaches, is one of these. But he reports that fraternity alumni networks have pushed back against university sanctioning of fraternities, even in the wake of student deaths. Wealthy donors have threatened to withdraw contributions and even, in the case of Harvard, filed a civil rights suit against the university. In June, Harvard was compelled to remove a ban on Greek organizations on campus, on the grounds that the ban itself was discriminatory.
But growing grassroots opposition to Greek life is becoming harder to ignore. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing in May 2020, a number of students at Southern universities typically regarded as Greek strongholds have joined the Abolish Greek Life movement, citing discriminatory recruitment practices and overtly racist histories. At Vanderbilt, outside Nashville, a third of Delta Tau Delta members have disaffiliated.
“At the beginning, I was so
nervous I was shaking like a Chihuahua.”
A representative of Kappa Kappa Gamma, Lexi Solomon’s sorority, says that “a majority of our women at Vanderbilt University” remain members. Solomon, who is Cuban American, harbors no illusions about the past—or about the future of Greek life on American campuses. “There’s a pretty racist history to Greek organizations,” Solomon says plainly. “I know other schools are trying to abolish Greek life. Lately, we’ve been having difficult conversations about how we can be more accountable and do better for sisters of color and be more welcoming to people of color…. If a chapter is not doing that it’s time to say goodbye.”
But there have been efforts to reform fraternities and sororities for over a century. In 1873, Cornell banned secret societies after the death of Mortimer Leggett, who fell off a cliff to his death while being initiated into the Kappa Alpha Society. Today, one-third of Cornell undergraduates participate in Greek life. In October last year, the body of 18-year-old Cornell student Antonio Tsialas was found after a reportedly liquor-soaked fraternity hazing event.
Each new outrage—whether a hazing death or video of a sorority sister using a racial slur—spurs a round of performative pledges from Greek organizations to do better. For Moisey, this kind of lip service is representative of not only Greek life, but also the American institutions that its members eventually come to lead. “It’s uniquely American,” says Moisey. “Pledging to stand up to the highest ideals and then doing whatever they want. There’s a close analogy between this behavior and the behavior the US has exhibited on the world stage. The place they learned this was in college.”
