As a freshman from an exceedingly small town in north central Kansas, I arrived at K-State with a terribly basic understanding of what being greek entailed. Only two students who attended my high school during my tenure had joined a fraternity before me. Joining Alpha Tau Omega was a leap of faith in those regards.
What I soon learned, however, is the difference between house and chapter. My house is where I eat, study and rest my head. It is not elegant, it is not overly tidy, but it is an imposing structure upon which the men at ATO have built an even more impressive and immutable structure, the bond of brotherhood that is their chapter.
This is the part of the letter where you expect me to explain that I don’t pay for friends, I pay to live with people with like backgrounds and goals. But the truth is we’re not at all the same. What binds us together is that on any given day of the week, there are 79 other men who are interested in what you’re studying, ato college and just hanging out and having fun.
There is an evident schism at K-State between the greek community and the rest of the student population. Our accommodations may be aberrant, our wardrobes disparate with the remainder of the student body, but we have the same career goals and challenges as students not in fraternities or sororities. And we have flaws, too.
Sexual objectification is pervasive in society, from greeks to students for whom Delta is only the mathematical symbol for change. “Slam piece” is perhaps a demeaning term in the greek lexicon, but is it any more objectionable or harmful than the more widely used phrase “piece of ass?” Vilifying the bulk of greek men because a handful created a variation of a common pejorative seems rather illogical and in itself discriminatory, just as it seems odd that homecoming jackets are relevant to discussion in this publication while cargo shorts are not.
Dylan Koch
freshman in computer science