Theta Delta Chi: Fun in black & white @ Brown
 

Travis Rowley: Fun and faceoffs -- Tweaking the campus left at Brown

01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, August 27, 2005
BROWN UNIVERSITY'S contempt for its athletes was often proudly pronounced. In a special freshman-orientation edition of The Brown Daily Herald, designed to familiarize first-yearers with campus specifics, the paper declared, "Our football stadium is two miles off campus, and we like to keep it that way." Within this Ivy League fortress of tolerance, for some reason the only unacceptable lifestyle was spending afternoons kicking a ball around.
We who played football were considered the campus idiots. No doubt we were the Ivy League's "Flyover Country": noticeably right-wing, and therefore lazily regarded by liberals as stupid -- a group unworthy of intellectual engagement. But my non-football classmates never struck me as more intelligent than my teammates. In my eyes, the campus left had miscalculated when they decided that our conservatism was a result of inferior intellect, rather than an athletic lifestyle that taught us to despise leftist ideals.
There is no doubt of the connection between athletes' conservatism and the vilification of them. We were a proud and blatant campus minority, wearing Gap and Abercrombie, playing sports, occupying the off-campus bars, and dominating fraternity life. Oh, how they hated us.
Ironically, Brown's athletes were the most likely to be found implementing the leftist creed of alleged acceptance and diversity. Walk onto Brown's campus and ask where the Ratty is. (The Ratty, believe it or not, is what students call the cafeteria, or refectory.) When you enter the Ratty, you will notice the dining tables ethnically divided: black students sitting with other black students; whites with other whites; Asians with Asians. This wasn't a strict rule, but it was reliably commonplace. There was one group, however, that you could always catch exercising diversity dining. The athletes.
Answering one of my black teammates who had asked me where I'd found the fresh apple pie on my tray, I jokingly said, "Oh it's over by the silverware -- you know, right next to the black section," referring to the side of the cafeteria occupied by African-American students. He and I laughed, not because it was a stunning observation, but because of my insensitive candor about a previously unspoken truth.
In other words, it was the university's speech codes that made something so obvious so funny.
Not that this type of honesty was rare from Brown athletes. As I said, conservatives were much more comfortable with themselves, unashamed of who they were. We were much less concerned than other students with saying the "correct" thing.
During the spring of my junior year, it came time for the fraternities to elect their officers for the fall semester. Brown's Greek life was dominated by the athletes, and Theta Delta Chi (Thete, for short) was predominantly occupied by members of the football team. It was the "football house."
Well, members of Thete had elected one of their black fraternity brothers as next year's president, and their annual custom was to induct that person by putting him through some sort of hazing.
While being elected president of anything is always an honor, this tradition almost dissuaded Thete members from wishing it upon themselves. The practical joke that was played on the elected was typically unpleasant. And that spring my teammates decided to kidnap their new executive, tie him to a chair in the middle of the quad, and paint himwhite.
Pause for a second and think about that.
If more people (or perhaps certain people) had seen this episode, you can be sure there would have been expulsions, a heated controversy, or some sort of campus upheaval. Certainly, someone would have had some explaining to do.
Fortunately, this politically incorrect event slipped under the campus radar, for the most part. I heard about it only because my friends had organized and conducted the "paint incident."
Still, one black female student, walking by, did witness the horror. Later she made her repulsion known to my teammates as she informed them just how appalled she was at their insensitivity. Upon learning how upset she had been, a few of my teammates approached her later to apologize.
Insensitive? On Brown's campus, the "paint incident" was much more than insensitive. It was a mortal sin. It was exactly the type of thing that could have caused a riot, earning my classmates appearances on national news programs as they protested the atrocity. For that reason, when I was told what they had done to their new president, I was shocked: My teammates had not heeded the warnings of the Ivy social order; they had risked all for the sake of tradition, laughs and brotherhood.
Events such as this are how Brown's athletes distinguished themselves from the liberal pack. While most College Hill conservatives kept quiet, the Brown athletes were more candid and visible -- a highly self-confident group, more difficult for liberals to gag.
And we were colorblind. If there were any racists on campus, it certainly wasn't us. So confident were my teammates that they were not bigoted that they defied Brown's campus correctness in the middle of the quad for all to see. They stared every speech code, every meeting on diversity, and all of Brown's sensitivity training right in the eye and said, "This is our friend, our president, our teammate. And we're painting him white."
I don't know if anyone other than another Brown conservative can appreciate how hilarious I found this story to be. Although I was at first knocked off my stool -- stunned! dazed! -- it was only because I couldn't believe the spectacle they had dared to create. But I understood all of it; I knew these guys, and where they were coming from. To them, it was funny and innocent. They had elected their friend as next year's president, and they would do what they had always done. They would play a practical joke that was relevant to their own personal relationship. If campus lefties had a problem with it, they could all go to hell.
The defiance of campus correctness: This is why athletes were despised so much. Because we were honest.
As for liberals, truth meant nothing to them. Diversity meant nothing to them. An assault on all that is traditional was the left's agenda. They worked for a new order, a new religion. But they were the most disingenuous people on campus, actually maligning those who dared to exercise their mantra of diversity.

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Travis Rowley, of the Brown University class of 2002, was captain of the varsity football team and is now a writer based in Providence (trowley [at] idiversity.org). This is an excerpt from his book manuscript Out of Ivy: How a Liberal Ivy Created a Committed Conservative.