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BY MENGHAN JIN

In print | Published October 28, 2010

In recent history, Greek presence at Swarthmore has been, to say the least, sparse. But a rise in membership of both fraternities — Delta Upsilon and Phi Psi — in the past two years may resuscitate Greek life as we know it today.

Just last year alone, the proportion of male students in fraternities at Swarthmore spiked from 5% in the 2008-09 academic year to 11.8%. This year’s pledge classes seem to be following the same trend. In Phi Psi, the new pledge class consists of 18 students — an increase of four pledges from last year; in DU, the pledge class increased from 17 pledges last year to 18 this year.

Previous years past have seen pledge classes of as low as five and nine.

“DU definitely has grown in my time there,” David Dulaney ’11 said. “My pledge class was the start of the … last four years of rather large classes.” During his freshman year as a pledge, Dulaney was among roughly 30 DU brothers. Now, including the new pledge class, numbers have reached 55.
In next house over, total membership at Phi Psi will spike to 49, including the current pledges. And of the active brothers, just five from the pledge class of 2007 remain.

In the 1950s, fraternity presence at Swarthmore was not meager; in fact, there were a total of seven fraternities on campus. But due to a mixture of declining interest and financial insolvencies, the fraternities slowly dwindled to two.

And though several incidents in the past have put the fraternities at Swarthmore in a negative light, members have been working hard to quash these connotations. Engaging in community service work and joining the DART team are among several of the initiatives they have taken over the past couple years.

“They are working hard individually and together to change their image,” Associate Dean of Student Life Myrt Westphal said. “They don’t want to be seen as irresponsible party people.”

These changes, Westphal believes, seem to be attracting more people who want to be part of a positive organization on campus.

Not only have DU and Phi Psi increased in size over the past couple years, both fraternities are also attracting a more diverse group of pledges. Like Westphal, most brothers see this trend as a response to the move of the Greek system at Swarthmore out of a stereotypical fraternal atmosphere.

“The image of our Greek life has changed and is changing for the better,” said Phi Psi pledge Jake Benveniste ’13. “It’s not necessarily a place that the rumors say they were.”

Traditionally, DU has housed mostly baseball players, while Phi Psi usually consists of lacrosse players, but in recent years, both fraternities have experienced a shift away from the homogeneity of the usual athletes to a better mix of non-athletes and athletes.

“It’s become a much more eclectic group of people that have a much wider range of interests and things that they do outside of Phi Psi and that they do for the school and for themselves as well,” said Vice President of Phi Psi Joe Spagna ’11, who himself is not an athlete.

Phi Psi Pledge President Rakan Nimr ’12 estimates the current group of Phi Psi brothers to be 80% athlete and 20% non-athlete. “This split may not seem that serious, but … a few years ago, there may have been one non-athlete in the fraternity,” he said.

DU has experienced a greater split. Currently, out of the 55 members of DU, 30 are athletes and 25 are non-athletes.

“When I came in, it was a baseball frat with some other people in it, and now it just has baseball players,” DU President Adam Koshkin ’11 said. He accredits DU’s rise in membership and diversity to the success of the Rush Director, Matt Lamb ’12, in recruiting prospective members during rush last year.

“He was very competent and did a great job pulling everything together,” Koshkin said.

As Rush Director of DU, Lamb was responsible for organizing the entire rush process, including fundraising, planning events and allocating funds. With the help of some other members last semester, Lamb was able to bring together the largest pledge class ever to enter DU.

“The immediate increase is clearly due to the successful rush process,” Lamb, abroad in Prague, said in an e-mail. “DU has become a much more diverse fraternity than in the past … [and] we are really conveying the positive aspects of brotherhood. Students are starting to understand the strong bonds and friendships that we get through the fraternity process.”

It is the campus’s growing awareness of the social benefits of being in a fraternity that Nimr attributes to the rise in membership and diversity at Phi Psi, though physical improvements in the house could have attracted some new pledges.

“A lot of students want to be a part of something and to find a sense of camaraderie with their peers,” he said. “This is definitely the reason I pledged a fraternity at Swarthmore, and it seems to be catching on more and more every year.”

And for most pledges, this rationale rings true.

“You build strong friendships with the brothers,” said DU pledge Isaac Opoku ’14. “I’m not in yet, and they already treat me like a brother.”

An international student from Ghana and a non-athlete, Opoku found his experience rushing DU extremely rewarding, for he not only bonded with brothers from both DU and Phi Psi, but was also able to meet people outside of the frats through connections with his brothers. “I feel more at home here at Swarthmore because I have more friends. I generally didn’t think I’d have so many friends,” he said.

Apart from being a home on campus for some students, the fraternities also guarantee a social scene for the brothers as well as for the whole campus community.

“It’s not meant to be this exclusive thing,” Spagna said. “It’s meant to be something where we hope that everyone feels comfortable always coming down to hang out whenever they want.”

Though incidents with the fraternities on the social front have surfaced in the past, Westphal is not worried about increasing fraternity members on campus. “As long as they continue on this path of being contributing and responsible members of this community, I think it’s fine,” she said.

From these increases, the two fraternities can only grow from here, Koshkin said. With more members will come more funds, more events and potentially even more prospective members in the future.

For now, though, this change will have little impact on social life within the house. As Koshkin said, “Frat life will go on as it always has.”

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