How much do the Greek letters matter?

This summer, President Tilghman announced what we all knew was coming — a ban on freshman participation in Greek organizations. The announcement told us little about how the University plans to regulate the groups without deigning to recognize them. But there was a twist: The University is going to wait a year before the ban’s implementation.

The delay was a wise move. The administration is going to need at least that much time to figure out how to give the new policy teeth — and how many lines it’s willing to cross in the process.

Suppose the following:

A year from now, some of my closest friends and I decide to organize an email listserv to help coordinate our social lives. We’re not a University-sponsored organization, and we don’t get any perks from Dean Dunne. We’re just a bunch of friends who like to hang out as a group.

At the beginning of each year, we throw some parties to meet freshmen. But rather than add all the freshmen we meet to our listserv, we decide to vote on the ones we most like hanging out with. We don’t particularly enjoy excluding some people, but the list could not serve its purpose if we added each acquaintance to it.

We give our group a name – the Greek letters Delta Tau Chi.

Note that we aren’t engaging in hazing, a practice that the University bans regardless of Greek affiliation. Still, we’ve presumably run afoul of the new policy. But at what point does the University decide that the policy even applies to us?

The answer seems obvious at first: the moment we name ourselves Delta Tau Chi. But that would be transparently arbitrary. Even without the Greek name, our group hosts parties, recruits freshmen, and — probably worst of all in the administration’s eyes — excludes some people from our listserv. What we call ourselves does not change our impact on the campus social climate. National affiliations aside, the Greek letters are a name, nothing more.

Which raises a second problem with drawing the line at groups with Greek names: the policy would be practically unenforceable. Fraternities and sororities could simply drop the Greek names, cut off any national ties, and carry on as before. How would the University stop them? Call it the dodgeball tournament loophole.

Partial compliance, with some groups keeping their Greek letters and others dropping them but continuing to recruit freshmen, would be both the most likely and, in the University’s eyes, the most problematic outcome. The groups with the greatest commitment to openness in their rush and pledge processes — probably the ones least likely to haze and the least socially exclusive — would keep their Greek letters for transparency’s sake. But they’d be at a competitive disadvantage to all the groups that would change their names to retain access to freshmen. Exclusivity and hazing might actually become even more prominent features of social life at the University as a result. For all her good intentions and grand plans to upend the campus social order, President Tilghman can’t simply nullify the law of unintended consequences.

So considering the problems inherent to the strict no-Greek-letters approach, what if the social planners of Nassau Hall decide to go a different route?

Are my friends and I subject to the new rules once we vote to include some students and exclude others from our group?

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Will the administration start to limit our interaction with freshmen from the moment my friends and I create our own private social listserv?

What could justify this kind of overreaching interference in students’ private social interactions? A perception (wrong as it may be) that our cliques are too insular? That too many of our friends come from the same high schools or join the same bicker clubs? That they’re too Southern? Too rich? Too Christian or too Jewish? Too white or too black?

And where does all this intrusion end?

Many of us had hoped that President Tilghman would make the Greeks a deal: University recognition for any group willing to adhere to a few sensible regulations, perhaps including a delay of rush to the spring of freshman year. A choice for some, not a mandate on all; a trade, not a power-grab.

That battle now seems to be lost. But the stakes are still high.

This is about more than fraternities and sororities. It’s about our ability to associate freely as the young adults we are. As a legal matter, perhaps the University has the authority to do any or all of this. But that won’t make it right.

Unaffiliated students, take heed. The slope looks pretty slippery to me.

Jacob Reses is a Wilson School major from Linwood, N.J. He can be reached at jreses@princeton.edu.