Kappa Kappa Questionable

On not attending my college reunion

My twenty year college reunion is happening this coming weekend, and I won’t be there. I would like to be. If it didn’t involve eight or more hours of travel each way and the associated costs of said travel, I probably would attend. As fascinated as I am with memory, I hate to miss the opportunity for reflection that a reunion weekend would provide.

A picture of me in college and more recently. Note: color photography was available when I was in college.

I’ve written on here before about how I felt socially disconnected in college as I grappled with the seeming contradictions in my own belief system. When I think about why I’d want to return for a reunion weekend, a lot of my motivation would be to prove to myself that I could have fit in better, which reminds me of that meme format,

Nobody:

Me: I could have been cool!

Fraternity and sorority culture on campus

Greek life was a big part of the social scene on my college campus. Almost all of the frats were in an area called “The Hill” where the frat guys lived and ate their meals. Women who were in sororities did not live in the sorority houses, which were a couple blocks off campus. Supposedly, this was because of an antiquated town law meant to prevent brothels; however, I lived in the Women’s House with at least ten other women and there was an all female dorm, so I’m skeptical that the legality issue couldn’t have been addressed.

It didn’t occur to me until David and I moved to Amherst College’s campus, where fraternities were banned in the 1980s, how much clout the men at my college held because they were able to live, eat, and socialize on “The Hill.” Even the name of the area, which I don’t remember being too much higher in elevation than the nearby dorms, suggests it was a source of power.

A ritual, a dream, and questionable Greek acronyms

There was one fraternity at my college that had a tradition of covering the sidewalk between the residential and academic sides of campus with chalk drawn 9’s once a year. This would happen overnight, so those of us not involved would wake up to this eery sidewalk message of repeating 9’s. Eventually, the rain would wash them away.

I think it must have been the memory of the nines that seeded this dream I had the other night. In the dream, I stumbled upon these fraternity brothers who were making some artwork on the street but then covering it with asphalt. One of the brothers was wearing a sweatshirt that indicated he was part of Kappa Kappa Kappa, but only the Greek letters appeared on the shirt, KKK.

In the dream, I registered the acronym as a questionable choice because of the association of those letters with the Ku Klux Klan, and upon waking, I wanted to figure out if any Greek organization had ever gone by this name.

A simple Google search led to a fraternity on Dartmouth’s campus, currently called Kappa Pi Kappa. This fraternity was originally named Kappa Kappa Kappa when it was established in 1842, well before the establishment of the Ku Klux Klan which followed the Civil War. According to the articles I read on The Dartmouth, the journey from Tri-Kap to Pi-Kap was not straightforward. The fraternity first changed its name from Kappa Kappa Kappa to Kappa Chi Kappa in 1992 but then reverted to the name Kappa Kappa Kappa in 1995. The more recent change to Kappa Pi Kappa occurred in 2022. Although I didn’t read this, I’m assuming the first change might have happened in response to the violence against Rodney King, which happened in 1991, and the latter change was in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, which gained momentum following the death of George Floyd in 2020.

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