According to tipsters and Darmouthian speculation, the fire that successfully shuttered Phi Delta Alpha last week was caused by a steamy, overheated chimney-pipe… (sexiness not intended). According to Hanover Fire Department Captain Mike Gilbert:

It is possible that heat radiating from a steam pipe inside the chimney ignited the material between the wall and the chimney.

In laymen’s terms, it appears that someone left the fireplace burning all night. Now, nobody should expect thermodynamics to be one of Phi Delt’s specialities, but a little foresight here may have been useful.

Although firefighters covered some of the students’ belongings with tarp, most of their personal property was destroyed…Approximately half of the fraternity members lost their laptops…Most of the Phi Delt members’ textbooks and schoolwork were also destroyed.

Things just keep getting worse for the embattled frat, which rang in the 21st century with an expired lease, and was punished by the Dartmouth administration a couple years back for, um, providing alcohol to pre-frosh. (Wow, Hanover just seems more fun every day. Forced sobriety and infernos!)

Unfortunately, Phi Delta Alpha’s charred, waterlogged doors will be shut until the end of this year, at least. In the interim, the displaced bros will sooth their wounds with “personal and academic counseling” provided by the University, and reap the rewards of Dartmouth-wide clothing drives, free gift cards, Panhellenic Council funds and their “parents’ homeowners insurance.” A worthy cause indeed.

And never fear, they’ll be raging too:

Although Phi Delt members will be unable to enter the building, they plan to partner with other campus organizations to remain active socially, Alekna said. “We will definitely be out there,” he said.

Just don’t let them near your fireplace, hot-plate, or bunsen-burner (or flammable girlfriend).

(Image by Tilman Dette, The Dartmouth Senior Staff)

It’s no secret that many frat parties are privy to bullish meatheads, jostling and yelling at one other in a desperate attempt to earn masculinity points; it just never occurred to me that you could make artwork out of it. (After all, Yale and art have a rather tenuous relationship.) I guess that’s why I’m not a creative genius, like artist and filmmaker Richard Mosse, who has given us the ingeniously simple “Fraternity.” In the short film, he challenges a group of brothers at Yale’s oldest and meatiest jock fraternity, DKE, to scream at the camera, as loudly and for as long as possible; winner gets bragging rights. The big boys heartily oblige. And why not? As Mosse explains:

The men were happy to participate in the project in exchange for a keg of beer.

The rules:

They compete against each other to shout or scream the loudest and for the longest time. When they cannot scream any longer they must stop, and cannot begin again.

The piece, beautifully shot, starts off hilarious, then enters the sublime, and finally, vaguely disturbs. This shit is primal. The triumphant, longest lasting bro screams as if giving birth, his face turning beet-red, and sweat (tears?) beading down his cheeks. Snuff-film associations abound, as well as a discomfiting sense of visual assault. Most worrying of all? Mosse hits the nail on the head:

DKE (pronounced Deke) stands for Delta Kappa Epsilon, and counts five US presidents in its alumni, including George Bush Jr, George Bush Sr, Gerald Ford and Theodore Roosevelt. Other famous Dekes include three Justices of the US Supreme Court, one Vice President, and countless State Governors, Senators and Speakers.

In short, this is something that every Ivy Leaguer should see, not just for its visceral minimalism and artistic oomph, but also to spur an intense appreciation for every single one of your IQ points.

(N.B.: I definitely called the winner from the get-go. Can you?)

(h/t Pablo Torre)

Yesterday, the Cornell Sun published a photo of a severed pig’s head on the Arts Quad, displayed in all its rotten glory along with a sign proclaiming, “Maybe it’s the beast, maybe it’s just us.”

According to Dear Uncle Ezra, a campus-related advice blog and Cornell’s own stand-in Carrie Bradshaw, the slaughtered head may have been a fraternity’s collegiate reference to Slope Day, Cornell’s drunken end-of-the-year party. It might also be a literary reference to Lord of the Flies. (Too stupid to create their own reputation so they had to steal Dartmouth’s and Brown’s? We thought as much.) Uncle Ezra went on to elaborate on the accused frat members:

Perhaps, deep inside, they truly crave the common sense authority that members of a mainstream society have and yet they have been denied by this godless institution where apparently “adult” students behave within a supposed institution of higher-learning as if it was merely high school with no rules…. I would hope that, in the future … other students at Cornell would see past some silly fraternity idiocy and be more disgusted by the deplorable self-poisoning and immorality occurring around the fraternity’s fitting choice of symbolism…

Come on, Uncle Ezra, cut them some slack. How else are Cornellians going to allude to Hogsmeade in order to hang onto the one piece of good publicity in a decade?

Dartmouth in the summer must be a lonely, spooky place. According to Hampshire lore, when a heat wave breaks through Hanover, the sycamores and oaks of the forest speak these words to obnoxious frat boys: “Harass Kappa Kappa Gamma… Call them bitches and whores… Beware… Beware!”

Last Wednesday night, the brothers of Theta Delta Chi heeded Ancient Master Oak’s advice. Quoth The Dartmouth:

Wednesday night around 9:30 p.m., a group of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority members going to Theta Delta Chi fraternity were met at the back door of the fraternity by its members shouting slurs and throwing items in their direction from the windows above them. The Kappa members were on their way to a prearranged, private function they were to hold in Theta Delt’s basement.

In an e-mail to five of the other six Dartmouth sorority presidents, Kappa President Amanda Young ‘09 described the scene and called for a Theta Delt boycott for the term:

We arrived at TDX tonight at 9:30, the time we had agreed upon to arrive, and were treated worse than I could have ever imagined. We all walked up and boys came pouring out of the windows, the doors, the woods, yelling obscenities at us. We are women. We deserve to be treated with more respect. The words, “bitch” and “whore” were yelled in every sentence. These are guys who we thought were friends of ours. We were proven wrong. Following the screaming, they proceeded on to trash their basement and tip over all pong tables. The state that the basement was in when we entered was atrocious.

Young told The Dartmouth that she was “pleased with Theta Delt’s behavior” the next day; the two might learn to love again, she said, but it “depends on the continued response.”

Theta Delt, which has a recent history of harassment issues, wants the Greek community to know their side of the story. Frat President Ben Beisswenger ‘09, after covering his own ass by saying he “was in his room and did not personally witness the events in question,” attributes his frat’s behavior to the tense meetings they had held beforehand:

“The guys were all hyped-up and very testosterone-filled,” [Beisswenger] said. “It was an atmosphere before any of this happened and a lot of guys didn’t even know [the girls] were there.”

Hmm… At least it’s better than “Those Kappa sluts must all be on their periods and shit.”

After the jump, Amanda Young’s full letter to other sorority heads.

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