The brothers of my fraternity choose to be part of a Greek house. Liberal education, surely, aims to facilitate independent thought, to enable students to identify their conception of the good life and to act in its pursuit, and so relies on the capacity of students to make moral choices regarding the direction of their lives, and to freely express any viewpoint. Even many critics of fraternities, like Freedman, recognize the imperative that students be allowed to act independently within a liberal educational institution, whose objective, after all, is to produce independent thinkers, who are skeptical of authority, as Freedman noted at Willamette University last February. Educators, of course, disagree on the educational merits of Greek societies themselves. On the other hand, you could get swept up in leadership and community service.
Fraternities provide a comfort zone for students to consider and debate uncleansed ideas.
That's why Dartmouth wants them broken into atomized pieces, the better to remold them into the new Dartmouth mindset. Whatever the particular merits of the Greek system, Dartmouth's move to tightly regulate the social lives of students on and off-campus signals the adoption of the in loco parentis role that universities abandoned in the 1960s and 70s in response to student protests. It's clearly a break from the past. There is something troubling about students working so hard to fulfill the dreams of others. It makes it harder for them to discover something of their own, get excited and pursue it.