Alpha Beta Corona
Greek Life in the Pandemic
by Ashley Futterman
It’s a strange feeling to come home to an empty house when one of your roommates has coronavirus symptoms and you’re all supposed to be on lockdown. That feeling quickly morphs into a state of dumbfounded fury when you realize where your four missing roommates are: a fraternity party.
But wait, it’s not a fraternity party, those aren’t allowed these days. It’s just a gathering at a fraternity house. Plus, it’s outside. And all your roommates that went wore masks while they were walking through the house. Your roommate that might have corona hasn’t even gotten her test back yet. Don’t you know that ignorance is the same thing as a negative test?
It’s these kinds of details and ethical loopholes that are dividing college roommates and making universities the country’s newest coronavirus hotspots. The culture of Greek life has trained a new batch of anti-maskers. Only this time freedom isn’t in the right to a haircut. Their liberty rests firmly on their inalienable right to party.
COVID-19’s impact on college campuses has progressed in phases. In the spring, university officials saw a return to in-person classes as a possibility. Perhaps the unfamiliarity with coronavirus bred genuine optimism, or their declarations of “we have plans to make plans” could stave away deferrals that would plunge college deficits even further into oblivion.
For my own college, the “hybrid” model was the plan set in place. Most courses would still exist in the Zoom world, but pending public health recommendations, small classes would be able to occur in a masked, yet recognizable fashion.
I was thrilled. The lease for my senior-house started in June, so I jumped at the chance to escape. While we now know that some of the first coronavirus deaths occured in California, back in the spring it seemed like the land where the pandemic only kind of existed. Compared to New York City, which was one tumbleweed short of the apocalypse, a state fraught over closed beaches was the far more attractive society.
When Trump announced he was closing the borders to European travelers in March he caused the cancellation of my study abroad program. I was pissed I was about to spend the foreseeable future with only people whom I share DNA with, but I was also nursing my wounds from my abrupt removal from the city of Berlin. My two and a half months abroad were blissful for all the reasons anyone’s life is when they get to live in a foreign city and reap all the benefits of adult freedom without any of the stressful responsibilities. I mean I was seeing the best music sets I had ever experienced for 7€ and getting As in my Berlin Culture class by filming a video series of me eating my way through the best doner kebab in the city… I don’t know how to explain it other than: all the clichés are true. Studying abroad is really fucking fun.
More than that, in my short time on this Earth I have come to learn that being a young person in the social media age is pretty much characterized by constant comparison of your life’s mediocrity to others’ pretended superiority. But living in Berlin I had felt completely content. I was at peace in the present — the second-guessing voices of what if you picked the other path in the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book of life were silent for the first time.
I mourned the loss of my remaining semester as the world I knew crumbled around me. My family went into complete isolation. It took my mother — a neurotic Jew who prepared for doomsday long before the word coronavirus ever entered our mouths — eight weeks before she felt comfortable letting my sister and I go to a drive-through Dunkin’ Donuts.
I arrived at my college town in a state of spoiled delusion. The stir craziness, combined with my perception that I had been robbed of the 21-year-old experiences I was otherwise entitled to, produced a sense of warranted recklessness.
Inside the college bubble, it would have been hard to tell there was a pandemic dominating the world. Sure, our hands were callused from constant washing and masks were worn to stores, but socializing between big houses never stopped. There seemed to be an implicit Summer-Social-Contract. Everyone you saw at these parties knew the risks they were taking, and really, what was the worst that could happen? We were a bunch of healthy 21-year-olds. What were we supposed to do? Hunker down and stay quarantined like the rest of the world trying to control a deadly virus? Please.
I was handed a nice dose of karma when I became patient-0 in my social circle’s outbreak of coronavirus. My anxious parents responded to the news with concern, while my 14-year-old sister more fairly responded with a snort, “Well what did you think was going to happen?”
My dalliance with the virus was the painful wakeup call I so desperately needed. It started out mild. A stuffy nose here, a sore throat there, nothing I couldn’t handle. Then it got worse. I spent seven days so exhausted that the short walk to the bathroom felt like a marathon. I lay awake at night, terrified that if I fell asleep the chest pains would succumb to pneumonia before I could call for help. I never got so sick that I needed to go to the hospital, but COVID’s required isolation sparked anxiety I didn’t know my mind was capable of.
Living my life knowing that I would probably get coronavirus was like starting a relationship with someone you know is toxic, but it’s fine because you think it will just be casual. You’re doing it for the anthropologic adventure, for the chapter in the memoir you may write some day. But before you know it, they’ve taken over your whole life and it’s been months since you could smell anything, it feels like you have never-ending mono, and your chest hurts every time you try to exercise.
Worse than any physical ramification was the guilt. I guess the American self-preservationist mindset was more ingrained in my character than I’d like to admit. I was sick and I had no one to blame but myself. I promised that I would no longer play a part in the spread of this horrible virus. It came as a confusing surprise when this effect did not seem to transfer to the majority of my housemates. When we sat down for a discussion regarding health-guidelines for the coming semester, it became clear that they viewed living in our house as a submission that you were at Berkeley so you could go out.
This wave of cases changed the school’s reopening plans and blame did not go unnoticed. An administrative email read, “At the rate we are seeing increases in cases, it’s becoming harder to imagine bringing our campus community back in the way we are envisioning…The majority of these new cases stem from a series of recent parties connected to the Greek system, which included students both within the Greek community and others, and led to some secondary spread within households and within other smaller gatherings.”
On a good day, Greek life at my school fosters a relatively more progressive atmosphere than at many other schools. I joined my freshman year out of fear and curiosity — trying to find a social circle in a school of 28,000 undergraduates sprawled out over a city didn’t exactly scream “intimate freshman year.” My school only promises on-campus housing in the first year, so Greek houses provide students with a comparatively affordable, safe, and convenient option. Culturally, I spent most of college thinking things like Diversity and Inclusion chairs and consent talks outside of frat parties were the norm.
That said, these factors are grains of the sand in the systemically classist and racist foundation which on which Greek life is built. As an ex-member of a sorority, I can mostly speak to this side of the system. In a recruitment process that’s almost entirely based on one’s ability to be charismatic in awkward pseudo-cocktail parties, it’s not hard to guess why some people might not be feeling like their most outgoing self. I cannot begin to imagine the experience of a person of color walking into my former-sorority house during rush and being told to “just be yourself” to the troops of Barbies before them.
So it should come as no surprise that Greek-affiliated students were wholly unequipped to handle the coronavirus pandemic. This health crisis is somewhat of a social experiment. Generally speaking, healthy young people are at little risk of serious health consequences. If college kids are not living under the worry of protecting their older family members, self-interest goes out the window. The choice to follow CDC guidelines requires a combination of empathy and intelligence.
COVID-19 disproportionately affects people of color and those with lower incomes. The headlines may as well read “COVID-19 disproportionately affects those Greek-life students rarely interact with.” This world is the embodiment of a bubble of privilege. Greek life kids can’t understand why they have to stop partying because they hardly see who it hurts. Before the pandemic, the lack of financial and racial diversity in these communities churned out mobs of ignorance, but at least no one was dying because of it.
The coronavirus social experiment also tests levels of maturity, patience, and security. Attendees of huge fraternity parties are safe from the awkwardness of actually having a conversation with someone. Blacking out on cans of White Claw against the thumping decibels of “Mr. Brightside” can feel thrilling when you’re surrounded by hundreds of other people. Mimicking that structure in a small gathering just doesn’t fill the same void of escapism. There’s a level of intimacy required for covid-safe socializing, and that concept is lost on the Greeks.
The fear of being replaced is the backbone of the sorority girl’s mindset. Sorority pledge classes are roughly double the size of fraternities’. At the parties I went to in the beginning of college, an average of four sororities would be invited to a fraternity event. While handfuls of guys from other houses would be let in if they were friendly with the hosts, there were always plenty more girls to go around. It’s no accident; the greater the number of girls and fewer number of guys means less competition and better choices.
The mindset of friendships and relationships being contingent upon your attendance at an event is ingrained into the minds of sorority girls, whether they’re conscious of it or not. After I expressed worries to a friend about our housemate quarantined because of exposure, I was summoned back to an intervention at my home. One of my friends politely informed me that I should “stop talking shit and making people afraid of us.” Why? Someone had overheard my conversation and suggested the idea that my housemates shouldn’t come to a party being held that night. Hell hath no fury like a sorority girl uninvited.
All Greek life corona deniers are not created equally. You definitely have people like a senior member of a certain fraternity, who, after public health officials came by to test everyone at the house during an outbreak, said, “Why are we getting tested? If we just never get tested and never know, then we can party forever.”
The majority of people are less delusionally extremist. After the second wave of corona cases hit my school in early September, my house of ten girls turned into a civil war fought by some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction: sorority girls high off tactile use of passive aggression. We were capable of having a civil discussion about health guidelines when the prospect of quarantining again was theoretical, but when it became our imminent reality, many changed their positions. The screaming fight my roommate and I got into after she went to the “social gathering” when we were supposed to be staying away from people would have made Bravo TV executives salivate.
Later, when she apologized for her actions, she said, “I know I’m on the wrong side of this. I just don’t know how I got here or how to get out.” An argument between people who claim to love each other over the health and safety of individuals and our community had devolved into a popularity contest. Not caring about being safe had become synonymous with being “chill.” My school’s Greek life isn’t made up of complete idiots, but it has imparted values on its participants so skewed that they feel powerless to the invisible set of distorted priorities that guides the mob mentality.
The sorority girl’s existence subsists on her male counterpart. The organizations emerged as secret societies for women, as they were not allowed in fraternities. This origin has provided a veil of female empowerment to the women who currently participate in it, when in actuality, their existence is dominated by the presence of the male gaze.
That I live in a house with ten other girls is relatively normal for Greek life upperclassmen. In the pandemic, we are told to sit still and limit our socializing to those we live with. Every fight that occurred in our house aligned with the experience or fear of being isolated with only each other. As freshmen, our bonds were born and strengthened in the performative environment of fraternity courtyards. We were implicitly told that the better friends we were, or at least looked like, the better party attendees we would be. To be quarantined was to be without an audience. We were really good at getting drunk and dancing on tables together. We even built college-long friendships out of them. However, beneath all the nasty exchanges and closed door gossiping was the fear that maybe that was all we ever really had in common. We loved each other because years ago older girls had sat us down on Bid Day and told us that’s what sisters did. But when we were put to a real test of compassion, we couldn’t even behave like friends.
The coronavirus pandemic illuminated the failure of Greek life to actuate this idea of “community” its leaders love to name-drop. The reality is that headlines broadcasting “Covid is circulating in this community” are oxymorons themselves. A collection of people living in close proximity and a group bound by mutual respect and fellowship are two very different things. Community must be practiced — to automatically assume the former implies the latter is simply naive.
