Television
The Hollywood films that have fallen foul of my ignorance of American football are too many to count (that last half hour of M*A*S*H still rankles), but even more assume a familiarity with the subtleties of the US's higher education system. Having seen Rush, the first of a new series of documentaries from around the world (Under the Sun, Tuesdays, BBC2), I'll at least be more confident the next time I watch National Lampoon's Animal House - assuming there is a next time.
"Rush" is the week when students rush around exclusive university boarding houses vetting them and being vetted. Mysteriously named after the letters of the Greek alphabet (Animal Belushi's was Delta House), these luxurious single-sex dorms are also secret societies - fraternities and sororities - with their own passwords, handshakes and initiation rites. Members pledge lifelong support to one another. All but two American presidents since 1825 have come out of the "Greek system", as do 85 per cent of Congress and the Supreme Court. Without making a Masonic conspiracy theory of them, you appreciate the weight they punch by the fact that parents spend an extra $11,000 to maintain their children's membership and hardly complain when a fraternity blows the cash on its own private fire engine.
The secrecy of the system is such that access to any part of it is rare. The director Stuart Greig, a Scot who could occasionally be heard asking sceptical questions, can hardly have believed his luck when he pitched up at Iowa University's Rush last August to find the Monica Lewinsky scandal reaching one of its climaxes. The Alpha Phi Omega alumnus so imaginatively occupying the Oval Office was, we were invited to think, behaving in keeping with the sacred vows of his frat house, for although originally set up by students who wanted to discuss politics out of sight of their professors, the fraternities have long since concentrated on baser extra-mural activities.
At Pi Kappa Alpha, Mick, the social secretary, paced the floor like a caged libido as he explained to a row of bull males what these were. Iowa's other 19 frat houses might boast of their beer consumption. The "Pikes" had a different specialism. "We pull pussy," he exclaimed, producing, with a magician's flourish, an assortment of trophy knickers, which he then trod on. The Pikes were naturally unfazed by Bill Clinton's mea culpa when it came midway through Rush week.
Averting its gaze a little too hastily, the film spent more time at the sororities, where proceedings were more refined but also more tense: their thin-lipped recruitments proceeding through "Hi! Nice to Meet You Day" and "RSVP Day" to "Preference Night". The girls' houses prided themselves on their naturalness and sincerity, qualities they no doubt felt were reinforced by the rule about walking with your hands behind your back, the prohibition on mentioning the four Bs (boys, booze, banks and bars), and their ensemble lullabies: "Goodnight from Alpha Chi. We'll see you in our dreams. The night shades are falling. The moonlight gleams."
Greig followed the female Rush through the eyes of Amy Jones, an accountant's daughter from Texas who counted herself a rebel. Her rebelliousness amounted to cracking a joke during an interview and wearing a leopard-skin-pattern dress rather than a little black one, yet it was enough to get her rejected by all her first preferences. She finally decided she would accept an offer from Kappa Kappa Gamma or none at all - which, she was told, is what the rule book calls "suiciding". Amy made it, but four months later left to shack up with her boyfriend in Des Moines, reducing, whatever else, her chances of having her butt whacked by the fraternal barfly we saw in the final minutes of the programme.
The film tried to be as balanced as possible and still could find nothing good to say about the Greek system - although fairness would note it is the nearest an American comes to a classical education. Mary Peterson, Iowa's director of student life, attempted an anthropological defence: "I think there is real health in men being just men and women just being women. There's a learning process in that." Exactly, and so much for the myth of rampant political correctness on American campuses: the University of Iowa officially encourages gender re-enforcement.
Yet it is not simply gender roles the system passes on, but a liking of secrecy, administrative and emotional, itself - the actual oral fetish that nearly did for Clinton. A few questions remained. Are there real differences, political or social, between the various houses? Do the rivalries endure past Rush week? In later life would an Alpha Chi Omegan do down a Pi Kappa Alpharite or is mere membership of the Greek system enough (four-fifths of US students never join)? Also: does Iowa actually take any black students? What's for certain is that Lewinsky, for all she might know the meaning of Greek in other contexts, was never a sorority girl. Mon shared digs at Lewis and Clark College, Portland.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
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