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Well Here’s Something I Never Thought I’d Do

posted by Carl Newman at 11:27 am.

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My uncle Chris once told me that once you get to grad school, it doesn’t matter what you did as an undergraduate. My uncle, the college professor.

I related this little nugget to a friend of mine who’s starting her second year in the college of business here. She was voicing some familiar, “Did I pick the right major?” issues. I also told her that both of my creative writing professors spent a good deal of time in the business world before they got their MFAs in Creative Writing (the anti-business). People just end up doing something, and if they like doing it, it doesn’t particularly matter how you got there.

I was auditioning for Fishing With Dynamite, local sketch comedy group, and introduced myself in the standard way. Name, major, year, hometown…(I was even wearing a number at the time. Talk about a quintessential U of I experience). And later in the auditions, I was working with a freshmen in the college of business, and she said, “You don’t look like a business major.”

I get that a lot. I take a smug sort of pride from being the only long-haired boy in my business classes, virtually the only one in performing arts, and almost certainly the only one who comes into class listening to The Replacements. Frank Zappa said that everyone wears a uniform, mine has usually been one of anti-conformity (which is really just a peculiar breed of conformity).

The college of business doesn’t seem like my cup of tea to people who don’t understand. They think, “here’s an apparently independent minded young man with artistic tendencies. Surely he doesn’t belong in business.”

It got me thinking about this email prank that happened. For my eight readers who don’t attend the U of I, a hoax email was sent out, posing as an email from the Chancellor.

Dear Students,

GDI Chancellor Richard Herman

And when I read it, I got really pissed off. First, because hoaxes and pranks are supposed to be funny. If the email read:

“As many of you know, the extreme level of hazing that occurs during Rush is at least disconcerting and at most appalling. Last year Greek organizations were known to run the gamut from forced cross-dressing to defecation in the oral orifices of pledges. As a side note, McKinley does not provide free mouth-wash.”

Then I was pissed on behalf of fraternities. And thought, “Well, there’s something I never thought I’d do.”

Life’s a funny thing that way.

The “GDI” in the email’s signature apparently stands for “God Damn Independent,” which according to an op-ed piece I read in the Daily Illini, is something that non-greek students say when they get frustrated at being asked what frat they’re in. (This has never happened to me personally. No one has ever assumed I was in a fraternity, or asked me to rush. Ever.)

Of course, every man is an island and the limits of cognition are such that we, as individuals, can possess no consciousness but our own. But we humans do tend to aggregate and organize, and we join groups.

Groups are fundamentally an artifice. They are created by individuals for some explicit or implicit reason. Most fraternities have a mission statement (or the equivalent of one) that says somethings along the lines of, “The goal of the (insert greek letters) is to foster brotherhood and blah blah blah.”

Many times I’ve heard people, many of them of them my friends, joke about how the greek community “pays for their friends.” No they don’t. They pay for housing and food. By that logic I paid for my friends last year, (side note, I would totally buy Steve Plock if I had the money) and my grandmother pays for her friends when she donates to our church.

People feel the need to belong to a group because the group then can become a part of their identity and lend some structure to the clusterfuck of human existence. And the identity and structure part of Greek life makes sense to me. A group of people, who through extensive interaction and collaboration towards group goals become intertwined. Brotherhood, in a word. Most of the Greeks I know have strong connections to the members of their organization, and not just because they drink together (not that I’m diminishing the merit of shared drunkness, that’s a deep bond).

Yeah, sometimes frat guys are total fucking douchebags. But that has nothing to do with the fact that they’re in a frat. The frats themselves, are alright.

No one is really a God Damn Independent, everyone is interdependent by necessity more than choice. We’re all part of groups, and if the group has any value, then disgracing it damages every individual in it. And that just isn’t right. What we choose to join has implications for who we are, but to say that any large group is without merit, tends to be deeply stupid.

Carl Newman: appreciates when you don't feel like commenting, but still want to tell him what an asshole he is at warriorpoetresponds@gmail.com