EDITOR,

I went into the Keystone Regional Leadership Conference: for executive members of Beta Theta Pi: with a fairly open mind, hoping to learn something about a culture I’m not familiar with by normal standards: the culture of fraternal brotherhood. Ironically, a Dungeons and Dragons conference was being held in the same hotel at the same time, creating a cultural spectacle of mages and paladins with wands, face-paint, and swords walking amongst super bro’d out, clean-cut athletic men. On multiple occasions I heard the D & D gamers talk about how many “shallow, egotistical meatheads” there were walking around, while at the same time, the frat bros harped on the gamers for being “overweight, lazy, and weird.” Here’s what strikes me as interesting: I bet some of these gelled-up tough guys enjoy a good role playing game every now and then, and some of these gamers probably like to bro-out every once in a while.

One of the facilitators for our Whitman Chapter, Tricia, introduced herself as a proud AWOB: an Awesome Wife of Beta! On the first day of the weekend-long conference, we tried to be completely serious when discussing brotherhood in order to fit in with the rest of our brothers from the region. But, Tricia would soon realize that we were not serious at all. On the contrary, as my fellow brother Kai Tamulonis put it, we are “cripplingly sarcastic.” But, honestly, it’s hard to be serious when there is a giant screen that says “Betas go into business, politics, and ‘the other professions,'” while at the same time a corny, brainwashing pop song (about how awesome Beta is), reminiscent of the movie “Jesus Camp” is playing on the loud speakers.

Friendship, brotherhood, and meaningful experiences are all good things–yes–but the problem is that the whole general fraternity is fake in a lot of ways. I am technically “brothers” with people I don’t know a single thing about, other than we know the same Beta songs (which our chapter doesn’t really sing) and practice the same Beta rituals (which our chapter doesn’t really do). But, I am glad that we don’t practice these rituals because I’d rather spend my time some other way than memorizing song lyrics to “Good Betas Sing Forever” or studying the names of the founding fathers and the years they graduated from college. I’d like to think that people become friends because they like each other, they respect each other, and they share valuable memories, rather than simply sharing a fraternal title.

I’ll credit the Keystone Conference in inspiring us to improve our house in a lot of ways regarding philanthropy, recruitment, and alumni relations etc., and helping us realize that although we love to joke, we can be serious too (maybe). Most importantly, the conference reinforced my belief that scrawny dudes who are smart, funny, kind, artistic, and cultural can be “men of principle” too, even if they don’t kick ass in the weight room and gel their hair up into bleached tips.

– Joe Wheeler ’11