When Frats Ruled the School

Author: Joseph Bergan

Look around Middlebury's campus on a Friday night, and you will find a graveyard of old party locales. Fletcher House is quiet, only livened up from the little noise that spills over from the Mill. The mansion-like social houses of Ridgeline lie asleep like slumbering giants. Even on Rte. 30, Mumford and Meeker houses, filled with white paper, thumbtacks, ink cartridges and calendars, sleep in the chilly Vermont night.

Middlebury was not always this way. There was once a time when the façades of Mumford and Meeker were adorned with Greek letters and their rooms were unfit for living. This was a time when fraternities ruled Middlebury. The Campus recently sat down with Dean of Advising Karl Lindholm '67 to try and understand what life was like in this now distant era.

"In 1967, we had 11 fraternities," he said, "and by responsible estimates I would say 90-95% of my graduating class was in a fraternity." Lindholm describes the frat scene at Middlebury during the 1960s as one of inclusion. "My roommate was not in the same frat, and we used to eat at each others' [fraternities]," he said.

The pervasiveness of frat culture in the 1940s through the 1960s was quite different from the social scene today. Lindholm describes the frats as a simple way of life. "I went home after my sophomore year and told my father I had joined a fraternity. He asked me 'Why?' and I could not answer that question ­- it was just the culture," said Lindholm.

About the sixties, he said,"All the freshmen lived in dorms and ate in Proctor," while all the members of the fraternities ate in their respective cafeterias.

"There were very few constraints on underage drinking," he added. He describes the mood on the weekends where the houses on Rte. 30 would "roll back the furniture and have a party." Students would then hop from house to house looking for the best party.

Some parties will forever live on in the College's memory. The annual demolition derby thrown by Sig Ep, (that was housed in present-day Meeker house) was one of these events. The demolition derby was not held in a vacant field but rather in a more central location - the Sig Ep property itself. "They would buy old cars, and then smash them up in their front yard," Lindholm recalls.

Another wild adventure turned out to be the demise of SLUG, once housed at Fletcher House. In the early 1980s, the house members rented a bus and threw a party at Middlebury College's Breadloaf campus. In the aftermath, "the place was completely covered in cocaine powder," said Lindholm.

The fraternity culture underwent many changes. "If you look at the yearbook in 1967, we're a bunch of straight-edge guys, and then you look at 1969 and everyone's got the long hair," said Lindholm. "It all had to do with Vietnam." An unpopular war, the women's movement and a lowered drinking age all caused students to migrate elsewhere for parties.

By the time the 1980s rolled around, student participation in frat life had fallen to a mere 15 percent. The fraternity climate turned nasty. In one of the more colorful pranks in the school's history, two social houses on Rte. 30, displeased with the administration, created snow sculptures late one Saturday night. The sculptures were large and gave all church-going Vermonters a veritable sex-ed lesson. "I had to hire earthmovers to come in and knock those down," Lindholm said, "They were intricately constructed."

In the early 1980s the Board of Trustees toured the remaining six fraternities on campus. An appraisal of damage found that four of the six houses required more money to repair them then they were worth.

Fraternities did not hang on long after that and the College adopted the current co-ed social house structure which some would argue are now headed for the same fate as that of fraternities.