Last week, the University of Alabama’s students watched as greek and independent students at Auburn University fought a not-so-unique battle over on-campus fashion.
It seems that our neighbor has passed along the torch of greek controversy to us, and the state of Alabama is starting to find itself in the midst of a modern greek tragedy.
At the University of Alabama last week, a student personally suffered the brute reality that so many of us have just written off as tradition, and even more of us just tried to ignore.
The University of Alabama has been aggressively trying to push the idea and ideals of community upon its students for a while with campaigns like “You are UA” and the implementation of living-learning communities across campus.
The ideals of community are even apparent within the Capstone Creed, which reads, “As a member of the University of Alabama community, I will pursue knowledge; act with fairness, honesty, and respect; foster individual and civic responsibility; and strive for excellence.”
Last week at the Capstone, a fellow member of the student body was called a racial slur by a member of the greek community. In response to this incident, let us focus on the part of our creed that says “act with fairness,” while looking more broadly upon the greek system.
As it stands currently, the University’s creed and its tolerance of practices within the greek system are at odds. The University of Alabama’s greek systems openly and obviously discriminate based on racial identity.
The University of Alabama serves as an incubator for Alabama’s next generation of doctors, engineers, and politicians. This sort of behavior does not reflect values that we wish to instill in Alabama’s future leaders. The University calls for us to strive for excellence; therefore we are called to take action when we see the sort of unfairness we see within the greek system. But what can we do?
I cannot claim to have all the answers in fixing the current greek system, but I know we cannot accept the status quo.
The first step that we, as a student body, can take is to demand a creed to which we are actually held to by administrators. We should adopt the same sort of active honor that has prevented Harvard from having a formally recognized ROTC program for so long, because of their non-discrimination policies and the U.S. military’s very open discrimination against gays and lesbians.
Upon adopting such policies, UA organizations that openly discriminate, like the greek system, will not be allowed to call the Capstone home.
Creating a system that fully embraces fairness is hard, but that is not an excuse for just sitting around and allowing unfairness and racial segregation to be the norm. We would not embrace these ideals in our hometowns and we should not accept them here in our home away from home.
I do realize that the greek system is not the only institution on campus that does this, but we can no longer allow such an influential part of campus that prides itself on power to promote these unacceptable ideals.
We cannot allow the inappropriate name yelled at Justin Zimmerman to fall on deaf ears. This is not just an incident between two people. It is just more tangible evidence of what we have been trying to ignore – namely, racism in the greek system.
This is a call to arms. We must stand up as a university against this intolerance. Faculty, staff, and students (greek and independent) have to demand that fraternities and sororities stop promoting racism by joining the 21st century and finally desegregating. Michael Patrick is a junior majoring in political science. His column runs biweekly on Thursdays.
