Social life at the College is usually at its best late on a Saturday night. As Daniel Okstein ’26 stated so well in a Record op-ed, “On a night out, students of all different academic backgrounds, class years, teams, and extracurricular interests … can find an inclusive kind of socialization made difficult by all of the College’s rigors and demands.” Indeed, the unique respite of a night out at the College is a twofold sort of social freedom: Not only do students often look forward to Saturday night as a relief from the week’s largely solitary academic burdens, but it is also perhaps the only time most students at the College can socialize in a truly care-free and purely interpersonal manner. Since all other opportunities to socialize throughout the week are mainly defined against some other activity or toward a purpose — a study break meal with friends, a club meeting, a team lift — the typical Williams night out becomes the “do or die” blitz of real, unburdened social time.
This problem is further exacerbated by the (observable) fact that nights out at the College are only intersocial and inclusive in the loosest sense. It is, of course, no secret that the social dynamics of the College can often be quite cliquey and impermeable, a point which becomes exceedingly clear in rare moments of social “unification.” An op-ed by Felix Barman ’27 in the Record last year put this point of separation nicely: “While mixers between teams are common, by the time a party opens up to other students, the meeting-new-people thing is mostly over.” To put it plainly, most students don’t go to a party to meet someone at the other end of the College — they go to talk to everyone they already know.
This coagulation of social groups takes place in more casual settings, too. Though students at the College often hew to the stereotype of being open-minded and eclectic in their interests, it is unlikely that many of the events at which any given student may find themselves will present entirely new social situations and people previously unknown to them. This may be too general of a rule to apply in any meaningful way, but it does seem at least possible that the students one might overlap with in an environmental studies class actually belong to the same “pool” as regular attendees of Williams Outing Club hikes and Log Lunch. Following this, we should recognize that the College’s social scene is often actually asocial and unintentionally exclusive, but this culture of individuality and cliques is preventable. In fact, maybe the answer to this problem might be to borrow from an older (though admittedly flawed) institution: Greek life.
The central issue that these problems of individuality and exclusivity derive from is that almost nothing at the College is purely social anymore. I don’t want to suggest that social experience here is completely and utterly defunct — that seems wrong. Instead, I mean that very few events, clubs, or experiences at the College are wholly dedicated to an inclusive and strictly social environment. By only allowing social life to arise as the product of some other pursuit — whether academic or extracurricular — we have sold ourselves short. The most fundamental problem of the College’s social apparatus is its failure to bridge the gaps and recognize the value of social experience in itself — a vital component of any “total” liberal arts education. On the whole, it seems clear that the College lacks a social scene capable of self-justification (that is, sociality for the sake of sociality) and the unification of the broader community.
Given the College’s long and tumultuous history with its fraternities, I find it important to mention that the aspects of the fraternity — and all Greek life, for that matter — I think of as worthwhile are exclusively social.
Fraternities and sororities carry a long list of issues: hazing, misogyny, racism, and nepotism, to name a few. That said, it is also undeniable that such organizations played a large part in the social formation of the College. In fact, some of the very problems that Greek life is associated with — exclusivity, social stratification, siloing — persist despite their formal absence here at the College. The problem, then, becomes finding a way of structurally remedying the College’s current social flaws while also rejecting the apparent injustices built into many existing fraternities and sororities.
What a frat provides on a structural level is the kind of purely social cross-pollination the College seems to need. If what we are lacking is an inclusive and genuinely intersocial organizing body, the foundational structure of the fraternity seems to offer a solution to both problems at the same time. There are already traces of something like this currently existing at the College — Williams Outdoor Orientation for Living as First-years, the Junior Advisor system, and affinity housing come to mind — but such programs do not universally address these issues of social siloing.
Perhaps what I am most interested in, then, is not precisely Greek life, but rather its more general collegiate grandparent or a distant cousin, a medium for pure social unification, whatever that may actually look like — think of it as one big mixer, maybe. I hope for a structural body that can focus (unlike all other clubs or organizations at the College) solely on socialization, akin to the social clubs from which many fraternities are actually derived or have become at other colleges and universities. My intention, therefore, is not to produce the specifics of such a social body, but instead to create the impetus for a new structure of socialization which is explicitly and primarily social in nature; the idea is, after all, that we really ought to dedicate some time to meeting someone new. There are probably a thousand different ways something like this could split — Harvard has final clubs, Princeton has eating clubs, Bowdoin has college houses — but the exciting thing to me is less about the immediately specific than it is about the possible. The College has been facing a social and communal divide for quite some time now, and it seems we ought to do something about it — in my mind, the social club is that something.
At its best, the College is a place where diversity can thrive in both an academic and a social setting, though perhaps the latter is more undervalued than we typically think. In all our worrying about classes, clubs, and internships, it seems that we have lost the social thread which ties some of the most vital parts of our education together.
Jasper Hale ’28 is from Boulder, Colo.
