Fraternities Get the Grip

How deeply does the 1964 Civil Rights Act's Title VI -- the provision that empowers the Federal Government to withhold funds from recipients practicing racial discrimination -- cut into the social texture of U.S. academic life? Commissioner of Education Fran cis Keppel last week provided a measurement by ruling that any fraternity's refusal to admit a Negro on racial grounds could imperil the many millions of dollars that a university might be getting from the Government.

Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. It was a sweetheart deal of Sigma Chi that spurred the ruling. In the late '30s, nearly all of the 61 major social fraternities carried exclusion clauses in their constitutions, typically limiting member ship to "whites of full Aryan blood" or "Christian Caucasians," and banning "the black, Malay, Mongolian or Semitic races." Discrimination first became a hot campus issue in 1946 when Amherst College bluntly ordered its 13 fraternity chapters to purge themselves of bias or close their doors. By 1955, largely because of pressure from college administrations, only ten specific discrimination clauses remained. By 1964, at least 125 colleges had adopted policies condemning such discrimination, and more than 50 had ordered local chapters not only to get rid of bias clauses but to stop racial or religious discrimination in actual practice. The barriers generally have fallen first for Jews, then Negroes.

But to this day at least four fraternities -- Sigma Chi, Phi Gamma Delta, Alpha Tau Omega and Phi Delta Theta -- either have switched to constitutional euphemisms or have reached unwritten "gentlemen's agreements" that require members to be "socially acceptable" to all other members. A member pledged in California, for example, must not be likely to offend a member in Alabama. A fifth, Sigma Nu, still retains a "whites only" clause, but has permitted chapters, if pressured by college officials, to request special dispensation to admit Negroes. Sigma Chi requires national approval of every member by a screening committee supplied with racial and religious information on each applicant -- and a photograph to boot.

A High-Class Chinese? Last April Sigma Chi suspended its Stanford chapter after the local asked Negro Student Kenneth M. Washington, son of a Denver urologist, to join. Sigma Chi's National Grand Consul, Harry V. Wade, an Indianapolis insurance executive, who said in a letter to the Stanford chapter: "I personally would not resent having a high-class Chinese or Japanese boy admitted to Sigma Chi. But I know full well that his presence would be highly resented on the West Coast. Therefore I must submerge any personal feeling and refrain from proposing a Japanese or Chinese boy because of the reaction it would cause among your alumni." Sigma Chi's attitude so irked Montana Senator Lee Metcalf, who joined Sigma Chi at Stanford, that he asked Keppel whether such discrimination violated the Civil Rights Act.

Keppel timed his reply to coincide with last week's national Sigma Chi convention in Denver, where Stanford and other delegates fought to gain local autonomy on member selection. The convention left Stanford still suspended, but authorized a commission to study "relationships with local colleges." All the same, the Stanford case had inspired a landmark ruling certain to affect fraternity life profoundly.

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