A night of abuse

Meanwhile, in far-off New Haven
    By Ben Smith

Last Thursday night, "pre-tap night" for many secret societies, an athletic looking guy recited Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham at the High Street Gate to Old Campus while robed figures wearing bird masks wandered around Elm Street. A graduate student led a section sitting in a circle on the grass between WLH and Calhoun, and a guy in a wig and pink tights stood shouting on one of the corners, while the Take Back the Night rally against rape and sexual abuse on Cross Campus could be heard in the background. Chrysanthi Settlage, MC '99, was walking from her high-class, robe-free secret society Scroll & Key on College Street to the Take Back the Night rally. Suddenly somebody grabbed her from behind. She pulled away, shouted "Don't touch me, leave me alone," and tried to keep walking. The student who grabbed her, she thought, wasn't wearing a robe, but two of his friends standing close by were, and a handful of other robed men stood nearby. The person behind her reached across her, grabbed her arm and then her breast, and one of the people standing nearby snapped a photo. Settlage pulled free and walked up Cross Campus to the rally.

When Settlage and a friend approached two Yale Police officers parked on Wall Street outside WLH to report being harassed, one officer told her, "Well, you know, it's tap night, people do silly things." When she and her friend pressed the point, the officers said they'd keep their eyes open. They didn't offer to take her name or register a complaint, and Settlage was too shaken to insist.

Slightly earlier in the evening, at the rally outside Sterling Memorial Library, organizer John Pluecker, ES '01, called the police when he noticed robed figures videotaping the testimonies of rape and sexual abuse survivors—which would have been threatening even if the videotapers hadn't been hiding their own faces. With the police present, the videotapers met Pluecker's demand that they erase their tape. I don't know if the men harassing Settlage were the same ones at the rally—I'm not sure if that would make it better or worse.

A group of men openly harassing a lone woman is the kind of familiarly scary scenario that we don't like to think happens around here; secretly taping the testimony of rape survivors is strange and sinister. I don't quite know how to interpret the two events. Pluecker suggested that I write this column on the prevalence of homophobia and sexual violence at Yale; Settlage thought that tap night, and the presence of secret societies, opened dangerous possibilities. "The snobbery, the elitism is one thing, but this darker stuff really scares me," she said.

My friends in secret societies give the obvious responses: their dumb rituals are utterly harmless, and the large bunch of seniors in secret societies, singing groups, fraternities, and Yale's other cults shouldn't be blamed for the actions of a few people who choose to wear robes on a Thursday night. The problem with that dismissal is that it doesn't quite explain the reaction of Yale's Police officers to a woman who said she'd been harassed—there was something about the magic of tap night that charmed the officers right out of their duties.

Secret societies, like fraternities everywhere, have anti-social hazing rituals intended to humiliate the members and alienate the rest of the community. That's what tap night is all about, and if I had to guess, I'd imagine that that explains at least some of what happened on Cross Campus on Thursday. The particular form that the hazing took, however, needs further explanation. Yale's rituals and traditions, it seems, open the gates to a bad old Yale that never really left us, a rigidly male university which fights to remind newcomers of its lasting control.

This story doesn't rest on the actions of a few robed assholes with reactionary motives. We always knew that Yale had its fair share of people like that. The behavior of two Yale Police officers Thursday night indicates a deeper problem. A large part of the police indifference comes from the fact that they aren't here to protect us from each other; they're here to hold off the ravaging New Haven hordes. Meanwhile, secret societies reproduce, in microcosm, Yale's isolation from the city around it. While I'm bothered by the elitism inherent in secret societies, there are worse things than elitism. The societies help create a dream University—a magical, unreal place which surfaced most vividly last Thursday night on Cross Campus, a place where anonymous students abuse their peers and no one even thinks of taking names or handing out punishment.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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