Wabash College - Class of 1991

The discussion continues, both on this blog,on campus, and in today’s New York Times:

Rift on Indiana Campus After Student Dies

November 28, 2008
By DIRK JOHNSON

CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ind. — A sort of philosophy class in a frat house, the students at Wabash College milled around a pool table in the Phi Gamma Delta house, exploring the dimensions of choice and consequence through the prism of tragedy.

“When something terrible happens, people want answers,” said John Bogucki, a lanky freshman with arms folded across his chest. “But I’m a big believer in personal responsibility.”

This was no theoretical discussion. An 18-year-old freshman, Johnny Smith, died last month while drunk at another fraternity on campus, Delta Tau Delta. In the aftermath, the college ordered Delta Tau Delta disbanded and took over the lease on its house.

Since then, Wabash, an all-male school of about 900 students known for academic rigor and a pugnacious libertarian streak (“Wabash Always Fights” is its motto), has had some contentious meetings between school officials and students over the fairness of punishing the entire fraternity. The police have filed no charges in the case, but they say the investigation continues.

“Some of the students are very upset with me,” said the college’s president, Patrick E. White, who has been holding meetings with students, alumni and parents.

Both sides in the dispute draw heavily on the college’s chief governing principle, known here as the Gentleman’s Rule. Wabash students are expected to act as gentlemen on and off campus at all times. No other rules are said to be necessary.

In Dr. White’s view, the presence of a severely intoxicated minor in a fraternity house clearly qualifies as illegal conduct that violates the behavior code. But the closing of the fraternity, he acknowledged, has been regarded by some students “as an attack on the Gentleman’s Rule.”

As some students see it, the closing of an entire fraternity before the police have even completed an investigation punishes innocent students.

To Mr. Bogucki and many others at Wabash, who say the college has always prized treating students like men, not boys, the fraternity’s disbanding without discussion with student groups “left students in the dark” and came off as patronizing.

Founded in 1832, Wabash has long enjoyed a reputation as a place where students can speak their mind, though in a respectful manner. But on this woodsy campus, set in a charming little Main Street town that could pass for the setting of a Frank Capra tale, students lately are skittish about talking about the frat house drinking episode.

Kevin Andrews, the president of Phi Gamma Delta, spoke up for his friends at the shuttered Delta Tau Delta house, saying they had been put through torment as they tried to cope with the death of a fraternity member. While younger students were allowed to stay in the house, the college evicted those 21 and older.

“They had to drop everything they were doing to find another place to live,” said Mr. Andrews, 21, who intends to go to law school or divinity school after graduation. “They had papers to write, tests to prepare for. But they were left almost unable to function academically.”

Some fraternity members, staggered by Mr. Smith’s death, complained that closing the fraternity deprived them of solace. “When they took that away it stopped us from healing,” one member, Stevan Stankovich, told the college newspaper, The Bachelor. “Instead of losing one brother, I’ve now lost 20 brothers.”

The death also provoked talk here about heavy drinking among young people.

Rick Warner, an associate dean of students, who stopped to hang out briefly with the fraternity brothers at Phi Gamma Delta the other day, said there could be little dispute that “binge drinking has increased all over the country” and that even Wabash, known for its studious, earnest student body, was not immune.

The problems of binge drinking prompted 130 college presidents this year to sign the Amethyst Initiative, calling for a discussion about whether to lower the drinking age to 18, since, they said, “21 is not working.” As it is now, said the initiative’s leader, John M. McCardell Jr., a former president of Middlebury College in Vermont, “students lock themselves in dorm rooms and do shots.”

But Dr. White, who did not sign the Amethyst petition, said events like the death of Mr. Smith showed that 18-year-olds were not old enough to handle alcohol. Lowering the drinking age, he said, “isn’t going to fix the problem.”

Since last year, alcohol has been prohibited at fraternity houses at Wabash, even for students 21 or over. But inside the Phi Gamma Delta house, many made clear that rules, laws and lectures were unlikely to stop young people from drinking.

“Teaching us that alcohol is bad,” said one student, Brian Casey, “is clearly not going to change our behavior.”

Dr. White, meanwhile, welcomes the discussion, even among detractors of school policy. He said it reflected the Gentleman’s Rule.

The Wabash man,” he said, “values the ability to think critically,” as well as act responsibly.

In all the talk about policies and laws, however, many students said they wanted to make sure one thing did not get lost: His friends miss Johnny Smith.

The last issue Bachelor before Thanksgiving break was chock full of editorials and news resulting from the fallout following the death of a Delt pledge and the removal of his chapter. Classmate Pete Miesel weighed in with his recounting of the Pony Key Race during Pan Hel of our sophomore year. Sometimes I wonder how we ever survived our youth.

Sir-

When I was a sophomore, there used to be a Student Senate sponsored event called a Pony Keg race. Each fraternity would field a team of six drinkers, arm them with a pony keg, and would compete on the Mall to see who could finish their keg first. One of my pledge brothers tried to singlehandedly win the contest on his own, drinking at least five full pitchers of beer himself in little under half an hour. He staggered around yelling that real men don’t puke, and was cheered on by the crowd as he binged on each successive pitcher. When we carried him back to the house, he promptly collapsed in the shower and his breathing became somewhat labored. We ended up having to give him some medicine to make him throw up, which he proceeded to do for nearly half an hour. At the time, this incident became part of house lore. Looking back at it, we should have realized that our brother came very close to meeting the same fate as your classmate.

I don’t say this to air my fraternity’s dirty laundry, I am telling you this to remind you guys that there’s often a real close edge from being mind numbingly drunk and actually dying. That day, my chapter could very well have faced the same legal issues and personal tragedy that the former Delts are currently dealing with. Suffice to say, no one in my chapter really had the maturity or wisdom to really think of such matters at the time the pony keg race began.

I know that a lot of you want to rage at the system and act as if the college has somehow done all of you a tremendous injustice. I can’t help but wonder if all the facts were revealed by the college to the student body, that a fair number of you still wouldn’t feel that the Delt chapter bore any responsibility anyway. Take a step back from the emotions that you are undoubtedly feeling and put yourself in the shoes of the college, or more importantly, in the shoes of that young man’s family. There is no logical way you can argue that the college had any other choice of a resolution than the one that they chose. You might think that alcohol laws are inconveniences, but once someone dies, you can’t pretend that Wabash tradition somehow trumps the law of the land.

I know that this is harsh having to hear this, but being a Gentleman means that you have to accept responsibility. Frankly, what I’m seeing is far too many Wabash men trying to abscond from that.

Peter Miesel
Class of 1991

I knew it.

The one thing I can count about the Class of ‘91 is that we all have good opinions and observations.

Dave Stone writes: “Marty Touhy and I have been exchanging comments on the blog–I put a couple of links in my comment that might be worth putting in a main blog entry, since I think the class as a whole would be interested: the Bachelor story on the closing and an alumni discussion on LinkedIn about the closing. The students are angry; the alumni are sad but believe the college had no choice.  An interesting dichotomy.”

Pete Miesel writes: “I fully understand the frustration that people are feeling about the apparent lack of transparency from the college concerning the disbanding of the Delt House. However, considering both the seriousness of the incident and the current state of liability laws, why was anyone expecting a different result out of the school’s investigation? If you think about it, fraternities at Wabash are generally left alone except in three key areas: Flagrant Drug/Alcohol violations, Hazing, not repaying debts to the school. I’m not going to air dirty laundry but when we attended Wabash, virtually every house on campus (including ours) was busted in these areas. People venting their spleens about how unfair the college is being towards the Delt house ought to reflect on the actions THEY did was Wabash students and think about how lucky THEY were that they and their houses didn’t meet the same fate. I find a lot of this outrage to be slightly misplaced.”

Keep those opinions coming…

This is a first. Will Grannan sent me his observations via Facebook message. He brings up some very good points about the current state of Wabash. Please read and discuss…

Hi, Hugh!

I always enjoy your missives, and you are certainly a locus of information about all things Wabash, so I wanted to bounce some observations and impressions off you.
I went to the College for the first time in eight years yesterday. My first impression was of all the recent capital improvement that has transpired. While there’s a little less architectural uniformity, I know in 20 years there’s going to be a patina of familiarity and consistency that eases that jolt. I wish I’d had time for a full and thorough exploration particularly of the MXI and Lilly Religion Teaching buildings.

On the walk to the stadium I overheard a conversation that I found very instructive. A couple of DePauw girls (in “cute” outfits, young enough that I could have fathered them–Egad!) were saying: “What I think is funny is how much energy they put into hating us.” “Yeah, and we just don’t even care about hating them.” So exactly why had you bothered to make the drive, sister? I wonder what it is like to have no attachment to a thing bigger than your own little belly button. Would we be happier if we just didn’t care? Would we have more fun? It’s exactly what I dislike about Dannies: they aren’t engaged.

The game: boy, the Little Giants stunk it up. Couldn’t get a thing going; couldn’t buy a piece of luck; couldn’t stiffen up fast enough. They just sliced up the backfield on offense, while we couldn’t get a ball to go where it needed to be. The team gave a respectable performance, but they sure didn’t look like champions on November 15th. Which leads me to my central point…

It seems to me that the Monon Bell Classic is a ceremony outside the regular football campaign. We’ve all experienced seasons vindicated by a Bell win, and successful years without that trophy seem hollow. I think the game has spiritual overtones, and Wabash’s execution depends upon our spiritual fitness. I didn’t see much evidence of the ol’ Little Giant Caveman attitude. Our stands were muted (no cacophonous pep band, no packs of rhynes trying to out-cheer the next bunch), just a lot of cold dudes squinting into the wind [I forgot how the wind feels blowing from across the Great Plains without geographic interruption]. The team was tense, not like a bowstring, but like an accountant in need of a footrub. I saw a lot of purple armbands and Delta Tau Delta paraphernalia. Three separate students told me that the campus was angry and alienated; I had a chat with a senior at the TKE house where he expressed mistrust of the administration, a sense that that the college had his money and no longer cared what he thought of them.

Steve Webb wrote an eloquent letter to the Bachelor about virtue, trust, and the Gentleman’s Rule. I think that trust has broken down at Wabash because there is no transparency, no communication of shared mission, no assumption of mutual respect. In such an environment, the Gentleman’s Rule can’t exist. The sole arbiter of gentlemanly behavior is acting without explaining.

It may be that we are seeing this first stirrings of the end of Greek letter organizations at Wabash. When we were in school, we settled the issue of admitting women. We did it while giving all sides a voice, and even those who were unhappy with the choice knew they had been heard, and could weigh their values and judgment against their love of Wabash College. Now fraternities know they can be summarily closed by a star-chamber court, privacy concerns cited as a reason for silence, and a claim that the action is in the best interests of the College.

It’s happened, and can happen again, and you are not safe.In that sense, now we’re all Delts.

With all the hand wringing going on at Wabash these days, this article from senior Brent Kent in this week’s Bachelor should remind us all what’s important. I still really don’t know what to say except that sometimes small actions reap great rewards.

A Responsibility to the Future of Wabash

To my friends who already know the things I will discuss in this article this may seem out of character. To my friends who do not, I am sorry, but I am the least sentimental and nostalgic and until recently it has been irrelevant to discussion.

For the past three and a half years I have avoided conversations about home. I wanted to spend my college career anonymously and not to be known for my past. So it is my hope that I have not spoken too soon in sharing with you today my journey to Wabash.

I was an emancipated student in high school. My twin brother and I were born to a single mother with four other children. She was only my age when child welfare and foster homes first separated us from the impoverished young woman, my mother. Use your imagination and fast forward fifteen years or so; I am seventeen. I had a homeless twin brother and a family whom I still have not seen in as many years. I lived on my own, held several jobs, and was trying to find a way to college.

That was when Mike Reidy came to my high school to recruit me and another student to Wabash. He asked us what we did in school. Tim said, “I’m the captain of the basketball team, in the National Honor Society, volunteer at the [Insert all Lilly scholar qualifications].” When he turned to me I shrugged my shoulders and said indignantly, “Nothing.” My guidance counselor, Mrs. O’Neal, kicked me under the table. “He is the president of his class.” I really did not want to go to Wabash.

I wanted to be at IU. I could not come up with the thirtysomething a year Wabash price tag. IU was a state school so I would be able to make it there I decided. After all there were no girls at Wabash and my best friend had left to DePauw the year before.

Spring came with my acceptance letter to IU. Unfortunately my financial aid award letter came soon after. There are many things an emancipated student must consider outside of the traditional “cost of education” but, unable to even apply to traditional scholarships without my parents’ signature or information, my award letters would not cover my tuition. I also had no idea how to fill out those FASFA forms without having them sent back to me “Incomplete,” requiring my parent’s information.

As my friends’ started planning their open houses, it was becoming increasingly obvious that I would not be going to college with the rest of my class that August. With each passing week, appeal letter to college boards, and meeting between my concerned high school teachers and college financial aid staff, I was giving up.

But I was told not to pass up a private school based on the tuition cost, so out of sheer desperation I made a trip to a private university not very far from Crawfordsville. I had no idea how to approach applying to college, so without scheduling a visit I skipped school and drove to the campus one morning, walked in to the admissions office, and sheepishly asked to speak to someone about admissions.

After telling them my story and my test scores to convince them that I was not a criminal or a runaway, that I deserved to go to college like everyone else, they said something I had heard half a dozen times before with a look that still puts knots in my stomach; “I don’t know how to help you.” The meeting finally ended when I was told to consider a technical school and walked out of because I could barely hold it together.

The year progressed. My commencement speech was written and classes were almost over. I had decided I was not going anywhere that fall and that I would not make the mistake of getting my hopes up again.

Luckily for me, something truly life changing happened. The kind of thing that is not untypical of this place. The Indianapolis Star wrote an article about my senior project, a mentoring program for elementary children. It caught the attention of someone I had never met, Hugh Vandivier Class of ‘91, who called the college on my behalf. Everything happened very quickly after that.

That same day a voice on the intercom called me out of math class. Mrs. O’Neal was at her desk and smiling through her tears; Mike Reidy from Wabash College was on the telephone.

The very next day I missed class again. This time a Matt Hanson, Class of ’91, was driving me to the campus of Wabash College. It was almost May. Schools including Wabash had stopped accepting applications, and a freshman named Josh Harris gave me a tour, explaining that everyone was busy for finals week.

I can remember it clearly. Matt Hanson ’91 and Josh Harris ’08 were both brothers of Phi Kappa Psi. They seemed to share something though they did not know each other, and I marveled as they walked me around campus sharing with me everything they loved about this sacred place.

I sat down with Clint Gasaway and told him my situation, but he did not ask for legal documents. I did not need my principal or track coach to vouch for my story or my integrity. He spoke to me with an honesty that I had not been met with in other college offices, that things would work out and that this place would be my new home.

It will be four years ago this May that I became a Wabash man, but my story is not unique in our history or even the 2008 class. Lately, however, I have found I need to remind myself of how I got here and the difference it made for me.

This place is special. The people here, the people who were here before us, they are what makes it so. My father and his did not build this college, but I was still given an opportunity to a life they could have never dreamed. Now I too own part of its legacy.

I was also given a responsibility. We stand on the shoulders of great men; as benefactors of their love to these sacred halls, we also owe an obligation, to protect the integrity of this college and to pass on to the generation that precedes us something just as special and just as hopeful as we received it.

Let us remember in these troubled days that this is our obligation to the college as students and as alumni, and that this burden does not belong solely to those who manage it. It belongs to us and to our sons who will fill these sacred halls when we are gone.

I ask you today and hope that it echoes hereafter, what will you leave them?

Lest we forget, today is Veterans Day, as Tom Runge so poignantly points out. (Check this out!) On this day, we commemorate the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, and I join him in sincerely thanking them for their service.

On this day, I remember two family members who served in very different capacities:

• My dad’s cousin Norman Vandivier, who was a Navy aviator in WWII. As a kid, my father would tell the story of Cousin Norman, who fought the Battle of Midway. He, along with many in his squadron, elected to take on more bombs than fuel. After making a bombing run, he ran out of fuel and ditched in the ocean. He was last seen waving to the other planes. When they went back to recover him, his plane was gone. His squadron was depicted in the 1976 movie Midway. Cousin Norman was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross and had a destroyer escort named after him.

• My late father, Richard W. Vandivier, who “defended Arkansas from the Russians” during the Korean Conflict. His father, my namesake, happened to be head of the draft board, so my father enlisted during his sophomore year at Franklin College. Sent to Ft. Smith to instruct in artillery, he never said much more about his military service until we were watching a made-for-TV movie called Nightbreaker in 1989. Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez starred as a GI exposed to radiation during atom bomb tests in the Nevada desert in the ’50s. As we were watching, my dad suddenly said, “I was there.” Shocked, I heard him tell of his platoon taking a train to Nevada. They huddled “asses to elbows” in a trench a few miles from ground zero. “When the bomb went off,” my dad recalled, “I could see through my closed eyelids the bones of the soldier in front of me.” Years later, he said he received a letter from the U.S. Army informing him that several soldiers had reported themselves impotent as a result of the exposure. Dad, in his usual dry style, wrote back and thanked the Army for its concern but reported that, as a father of five, he did not suffer such side effects.

Today is also the 90th anniversary of the creation of this day and the 86th birthday of the late Kurt Vonnegut, who irreverently ruminated on both in his book Breakfast of Champions:

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

The Kilbane News Network is in full swing. I had to pass along this great piece of journalism that Tom sent me. Enjoy.

South Bend Tribune
Nov 11, 2008

Battling to be Bell of the ball

Intensity makes Wabash vs. DePauw no ordinary rivalry

by AL LESAR

Nick Etzcorn’s first memory of the Monon Bell Classic is burned in his mind.

Two years ago, just a freshman at DePauw, Etzcorn was on the Tiger football team bus as it pulled up to Hollett Little Giant Stadium on the Wabash College campus.

“A lady who had to be in her 80s was sitting in her wheelchair tailgating,” Etzcorn said. “She had her oxygen hooked up and a Wabash blanket wrapped around her.”

As the bus stopped, Etzcorn said the old lady swiveled her chair, realized who was on the bus, and made an obscene gesture.

“I remember thinking, ‘What am I getting myself into?’” Etzcorn said.This is small college football at its finest. Wabash vs. DePauw. It’s the purest form of a rivalry.

Saturday’s 115th renewal (Wabash holds a 53-52-9 edge) of the war between the colleges barely 30 miles apart is special. Just ask the 12,000 people who will be watching, more than half of whom will be situated on portable bleachers on the perimeter of the stadium, and the television audience from across the country that will be tuned into Mark Cuban’s HDNet.

“Coming in as a freshman, I thought this would be something like Penn-Mishawaka or St. Joe-Marian,” said Penn High grad Evan Sobecki, a 5-foot-10, 195-pound junior running back for Wabash. “You see the fans in the extra stands; you see the TV crews setting up days ahead of time. You realize, ‘Yeah, maybe this is pretty special.’”"This rivalry yells out college football,” said Niles High grad Etzcorn, a 6-foot-3, 215-pound wide receiver for DePauw. “Nobody playing in this game is going to the NFL. Nobody out there is getting a shoe deal. The weather’s always cold and nasty. It’s the way college football should be played.”

It was a wild game last year at DePauw. The Tigers trailed by eight with four minutes to play and ended up winning 24-21 with a late 47-yard field goal by Jordan Havercamp, a guy who had never kicked a field goal in college before.

“Late in the game, we were in the huddle and couldn’t hear a word anyone was saying,” Etzcorn said. “We had to leave the huddle, go over to our student section and quiet them down, get back to the huddle and run the play.”

“All week in practice leading up to the DePauw game, if you’re not involved in the play, you have to be yelling,” Sobecki said. “We try to get used to the noise.”There’s no getting used to the intensity. Wabash comes into the game 9-0, already having clinched an NCAA Division III playoff spot. DePauw is 7-2, looking for a way to end its season on a high note.

“There are signs in our locker room all year that say, ‘What have you done today to beat DePauw?’” said Sobecki. “Profs don’t give tests or have papers due this week. The campus and the community take this seriously.”

“You realize you’re not playing just for your team,” Etzcorn said. “You’re playing for the community; you’re playing for the alumni; you’re playing for that grad who wants to have bragging rights at his office for a year. It’s huge.”

Yet, a couple hours after last year’s game, a mutual friend brought Etzcorn and Sobecki together to share some time.

“It was weird,” Etzcorn said. “A couple hours earlier, I wanted to rip his head off just because he was wearing that uniform. Then, we’re sitting together talking about how great of an experience it was.”Maybe that’s really what makes the game a classic.

For those of you in the Indiana area, you can draw first blood this week by rolling up your sleeves and participating in the the Bleed for the Bell.

It’s a blood drive to benefit the Indiana Blood Center (IBC) pitting the Wabash faithful against our DePauw counterparts. The IBC needs roughly 500 units per day for Indiana residents in need of blood transfusions and life-saving blood products. 

Any Wabash friend or family member can donate; just identify yourself at as a “Wabash Donor” when you donate at any of the five Indianapolis or 13 statewide locations. For more information, contact Steve Woods ‘93 at swoods@fountainheadsearch.com or (317) 251-0011.

At last check, the sons of Wabash were winning 226-175. You can still give up until Thursday, November 13.

I was up on campus this weekend and saw this flyer taped to a door in the Phi Delt house.

I asked one of the Phi Delts, “Who is running this meeting?”

“The Senior Council,” he replied. “No faculty, no administration, no alumni, just us students.”

Feeling the shock of the Wabash administration’s removal of the Delt chapter last week and with Bell week approaching, they called this meeting to discuss how they can be better gentlemen and more responsible citizens.

It’s a serious conversation that is long overdue, and it took a tragedy to bring the campus together.

Student led. United in the cause of a stronger Wabash. I wish them all the best.