FAYETTEVILLE--Rush week, Tuesday afternoon. "You can do this" say the T-shirts the prospects are required to wear. Almost all white and mostly blonde, they hustle east and west on Maple Street, hatless, eyes unshaded, faces sweaty and cheerful in the August sun.
The sororities hang banners to announce the causes they support, which present a Zen puzzle to the pedestrian whose only cause is liberal arts education for young women.
"Liberal arts" is often used as shorthand for "arts and humanities." It's a dangerous shorthand because it means that we have forgotten that math and the natural sciences were not handed down at Sinai, that they contain no immutable truths, that they are bumbling human endeavors just like sculpture and politics and poetry.
Forgetting leads to utterances such as "I am the science" and "thank you for your science" and "I believe in science," all of which are staggering violations of the principles and spirit of scientific inquiry. Science doesn't ask for belief, only for adherence to its method.
A liberal arts education at a modern land grant university should begin with rigorous math and foreign language requirements, followed by broad exposure to the natural sciences (geology is a natural in Fayetteville) and humanities (including history and modern literature), and then a chronologically-ordered study of music and the visual arts, especially architecture.
Cheerleaders for the economic development cargo cult often lament that only 20 percent of Arkansawyers have bachelor's degrees. If anything, 20 percent is too much. We have a lot of very smart people in this state who deserve to go to trade school or straight to work, start making a good living, and take care of the rest of us.
Those who do go in for four years of college need a real liberal arts education, no one more so than the young women seeking sisterhood on Maple Street last week. Whether they work outside of the home or not, most will become wives and mothers of Arkansas' upper middle class. They will run households. They will direct great rivers of discretionary spending. They will raise the young.
Should preparation for running a household and raising the young mean taking classes in nutrition and child development and thread count? No. That stuff can be picked up on the job, by a mind well trained to absorb and evaluate new information.
For all its joys, child rearing is a tedious business. So is housewifery. Having a rich life of the mind is the best way to endure the tedium and to be present for the joys. It's also the way to mature and aesthetically informed philanthropy; when the young women of Maple Street learn that both the Chi Omega house and the Chi Omega Greek theater are on the National Register of Historic Places, they're likely to bring awareness of historic properties back out into the state. I'm thinking of the time the Little Rock Junior League saved the Woman's City Club--an effort led by a Tri-Delt.
. . .
Black sororities have a big presence in Little Rock; I see T-shirts and license plates everywhere, I see groups of women and photos in the paper. Maybe I'm not walking in the right places in Fayetteville, because apart from one gathering on Mount Sequoyah circa 2005, I don't know that I've ever encountered a Black sorority here.
I'm looking at the university's website to confirm their existence. It turns out that the white sororities are governed by the Panhellenic Council, while the Black sororities and fraternities are governed by the National Pan-Hellenic Council.
Delta Sigma Theta was the first Black sorority to establish a chapter at the University of Arkansas (1974). The sorority was founded at Howard University in 1913 and claims Aretha Franklin as an alumna. Zeta Phi Beta, established here in 1978 and also founded at Howard, claims Zora Neale Hurston.
Alpha Kappa Alpha, also founded at Howard, established a chapter here in 1976. They claim Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Phylicia Rashad, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Sigma Gamma Rho, founded at Butler University in Indiana, has been here since 1993. They claim Hattie McDaniel, probably the most beloved American actress of all time.
I'm a little distressed to discover the existence of an Office of Greek Life. What is its budget? Every administrator hired is a teacher not hired. In a perfect world, faculty and students would run the entire university.
The ancient Greeks invented the bumbling human art of self-government; instead of raising money for charities, our university Greeks should spend their spare time learning it.