LAST WEEK I argued that secret society tags should be removed from Grounds, but did not really address the argument that I most frequently hear on their behalf, which is summed up by the word "tradition." The tags have always been there; they were good enough for our predecessors; therefore, they are good enough for today's University.
I realize my argument faces an uphill battle because tradition is an incredibly powerful force. A peripatetic and adventurous cousin of mine told me a germane story from his travels across Yemen. He was waiting for a bus when he was approached by several machine-gun-wielding locals. They asked my cousin, a Jew, what religion he believed in. Wisely choosing not to fall on his sword, but obviously not Muslim, he told them he was Christian. His unhappy interlocutors asked him why he was not Muslim. He told them "because my father was Christian" and so was a tense and potentially dangerous situation defused. By appealing to tradition he was appealing to an argument beyond logic. Similarly, proponents of the secret society tags point to past practices to justify present ones in a sentimental rather than a rational sense.
My hope rests in the fact that whereas religion provides a vehicle for the passage of tradition within the family and the clan, University traditions are embraced voluntarily by adults. Within a university, tradition can create a valuable bond between past and present, but must be embraced anew each generation by rational individuals. The fact that a ritual, a practice or a piece of graffiti has a pedigree does not prevent us questioning whether its place is proper, and eliminating it if we realize it is odious to the nature of the institution.
University traditions can be quite beautiful. The cadets of West Point speak of the "long gray line" that connects today's cadets to those of the past through ties of duty, honor and venerable traditions. On the Thayer gate of Harvard Yard is a stone tablet that quotes Emerson, who wrote of the long winding train of the alumni procession at that university's bicentennial reaching "back into eternity." Such processions are recreated by the reunion classes there each year.
But the importance and beauty of traditions must be weighed against whether they contravene other important values, such as equality and an open exchange of ideas. We have the opportunity and the responsibility to ask whether we ought to accept all of the patrimony bequeathed to us by previous generations, and we should abandon traditions that no longer serve our deeply held principles.
Students at the University are particularly rich in bequests from the past, good and bad -- from the single sanction honor system and the secret societies to football game formalities, the fourth-year fifth, streaking the Lawn and the lore of Mr. Jefferson. I don't suggest eliminating all of the University's traditions. I believe in a conservative approach that would presume the propriety of our traditions and only eliminate those that are in opposition to the University's mission as a leading public educational institution.
In the specific case of secret society tags, I believe this tradition does go against other important values. To reiterate a point made in my last column, these secret society tags and the fact they have not been removed represent a claim of ownership to the University by these societies to which the University assents. But the University is owned by the public and is cared for by the general alumni community -- it does not belong to any single alumni constituency. It is right and proper for the University to honor its distinguished alumni who make extraordinary contributions to the institution or to the world, but simply strange to celebrate organizations that cloak themselves in mystery and whose motives and personnel are opaque.
Here at the University reevaluation of traditions is perhaps a more pressing problem than elsewhere. Neither the racial nor the gender policies of the University in its past, nor those of the Commonwealth in which it is located, acquit themselves well today. It is hardly surprising that the Purple Shadows, a secret society that asserted in a 1963 letter to The Cavalier Daily its hope for "safeguarding, by constant vigil, of the fundamental traditions which have made this university a unique and renowned institution" dress themselves up in robes that echo those of that other famous defender of Southern traditions, the Ku Klux Klan.
Andrew Winerman's columns appear Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at awinerman@cavalierdaily.com.
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