Ivy League cleans up fraternities

Boston

A small, select New England college's decision to end traditional fraternities and sororities has fanned a smouldering debate across the United States about how much colleges should regulate the private lives of students.

The trustees of Dartmouth College are asking fraternities and sororities to go co-educational to reduce reckless behaviour, excessive alcohol consumption, sexual assaults and racial divisions.

Dartmouth is part of the Ivy League of elite private US colleges and universities and its alumni include some of the most powerful people in the country. But the school does not technically own or control its fraternities and sororities and earlier attempted restrictions on fraternities failed.

The wild student life portrayed in the 1978 movie Animal House was written by an alumnus based on his experiences there.

It is an image that has become unpopular because of the alcohol-related deaths of an estimated 25 students each year, many of them at fraternities or fraternity-sponsored drinking parties.

No less of an authority than Chris Miller, the 1964 Dartmouth graduate who co-wrote Animal House, defends them. "Wild and undisciplined behaviour and sheer crazy college fun certainly are one of the great memories in my life, and I don't think it's something that should be done away with," Mr Miller said. "To try to 'civilise' a bunch of people who are 17 to 21 and deny them the kind of madness that I think people should have at some point in their lives is a big mistake."

About 1,700 of Dartmouth's 4,000 undergraduates live in off-campus fraternity houses.

But with demands from public officials and parents for closer scrutiny of students' private lives, Dartmouth and other schools now plan to build and control their own dormitories and increase the number of students living on campus. "The achievement of these principles will necessitate changes in the current residential and social system, including the fraternity and sorority system, dining arrangements, and other aspects of student life," Dartmouth's trustees said.

Students took a different view. At a protest rally in front of the president's house, about 1,000 angrily chanted: "Paternalism!" Students have the "right to decide their own college experience without it being socially engineered," said John Phinney, a junior. "I find it amazing that the current generation of college administrators, who, in the 1960s, as students, thought they knew more than 'the establishment,' now, in the 1990s, as 'the establishment', think they know more than the students."

Fraternities and sororities at Middlebury and Bowdoin in New England have become co-ed and they were banned outright at Amherst and Colby.

Even at Harvard, which does not have fraternities but does boast all-male clubs, four of the eight clubs have voluntarily restricted admission to social events out of fear of inviting closer scrutiny.