Greek life, and the power elite
While universities are generally regarded as pathways to attaining knowledge, many applicants consider the networking potential these universities offer more than they consider anything else. These applicants may even do so unknowingly: as a legacy student at a particular university, admission would cement your position of power by virtue of a social network of similarly stationed people with high aspirations. The principle that network structures determine power is at the heart of the research of sociologist C. Wright Mills, and Cornell is one of the network-heavy “eastern establishment universities” described by Mills in his 1956 book, The Power Elite. Mills’ work essentially states that the elite are those in positions of power, who are able to make important decisions by virtue of their position in the scope of the world. These decisions impact those with less power. The decisions are able to be made because the elite have amassed for themselves extensive networks of equally powerful people connected not by strong relationships (or strong ties), but by similar affiliations (weak ties).
Recently, faculty at Cornell have been considering dismantling the Greek life system, which is a cornerstone of its network. If these eastern establishment universities are so prized for their networking potential, then the question arises: how could this be done? If Cornell follows the framework set up by Harvard, then they are likely to receive the same treatment, namely, lawsuits. In this article, the Harvard Crimson discusses this lawsuit, and the particular arguments involved. Dismantling the Greek life system, whether for better or worse, would be fundamentally changing the way that students gain access to resources as members of a university’s community. This is evidenced by the extreme backlash to the specific policies laid out by the university, in the form of these lawsuits.
The policies prevent members of a Greek network from joining another campus-specific network; students who are part of a Greek network cannot gain access to a non-Greek network, invalidating the reason a lot of students have for joining Greek life in the first place. Specifically, the policies employed by Harvard and Yale in recent years serve to “bar members of single-gender final clubs and Greek organizations from holding campus leadership positions, varsity team athletic captaincies, and from receiving College endorsement for prestigious fellowships like the Rhodes” (The Harvard Crimson). Members of Greek life cannot also be leaders of campus-affiliated groups, and are ineligible for endorsement for fellowships. These groups and fellowships are, like Greek networks, examples of networks with automatic weak-ties to other members based on a sense of identity.
Weak ties, like those provided by Greek life and other shared affiliations, are the most valuable to building a powerful ego network. This is evidenced by the work of Mills, but also by examining the structure of a social network with regards to the strong triadic closure property: two strong ties between neighbor nodes yield some other tie between the remaining node, and now, power is shared in an equal distribution instead of the oft-favored unequal one. Harvard’s policy prohibits the forming of those favorable weak ties by barring access to other affiliations for those with Greek affiliations, meaning the Greek affiliations suddenly become a handicap to other networking opportunities. Some of these other non-Greek networking opportunities might even be more career or major specific, making Greek life membership significantly less of an advantage for a particular student. Mills likes to emphasize that, even if it’s not done on purpose, students at old, established universities are attending largely for the networking potential. By removing the potential to network for Greek-involved students, a university, particularly Cornell, would be significantly reducing the power Greek associations are able to bestow.