Secret societies - those fabled college clubs, illicit, mysterious, mythical bastions of every campy college flick and also, Gilmore Girls. They exist. Even at Wash U, with our ‘progressive’ values and midwestern goodwill. “Seven,” founded as a male-only society decades ago; the original lore of “Thurtene,” a now above ground group (featured in the popular youtube documentary); and the historical “Hatchet Society.” The grapevine, occasionally corroborated by “out-ed” friends, tells stories about how secret societies use their access to wealth, university funds, connections and power to influence WUSTL power structures, student community and build their own resumes. Others will tout their harmlessness, or even their complete absence.
At a certain point early in my undergraduate degree, I had found a solid group of friends and some older students who had taken me under their wing and done some work to connect me to aspects of the community that seemed somewhat out of the college ‘bubble.’ When we enter college, we are all searching for the community that will be our new home. I believe that the draw of the secret society as an entity is to feel special and prestigious; there is an old-money mystery and a sense of Ivy League wealth and power that is fairly tantalizing, as well as the kind of special social world that can be super appealing to a new college student. My sophomore year I experienced a week of discomforting events that was later contextualized for me as being “tapped” by the WashU secret society Seven, which ostensibly chooses 7 students a year to induct. They started by emailing me one-sentence phrases from an anonymous email. Instructions via phone calls from blocked numbers followed. As a femme person in the university who had already attended enough parties to know that this liberal bubble doesn’t protect you, I was disturbed and made to feel stalked and violated. I responded angrily, not following the instructions, and sending back emails questioning their secrecy and asking them to level with me honestly if they were truly interested in my participation. Upon questioning their authority to send instructions and expect them followed, the calls and emails stopped. Over the next year or two, a few close friends drifted conspicuously away, people that I did not previously understand to walk in the same social worlds became extraordinarily close, a seemingly random assortment of students I knew peripherally all started living in a flashy house just west of Big Bend. My greatest sadness was that a lot of the politically activated students I knew seemed to disappear from the community, or at least ceased their critiques, and cropped back up again as student group leaders - with access to insane amounts of funding directly from the university.
Let’s be completely clear about something: this is no accident. Whether it is a mechanism of the type of highly privileged and ambitious student body or an indirect plucking of activist-minded students by the administration to enter the fold of the institution, the secret societies of WashU encourage political repression in the student body, and prevent honest community and affinity between students.
Secret Societies are historically a function of old money and wealth, and have their roots in uppercrust resistance to the democratization of public (and private!) education - rich white men who did not want to share their power and wealth with their peers that were increasingly women/working class/not white. They still today function as a way to give extra access to resources outside of normal university channels. Even as societies like Seven purport an aura of ‘Social Justice’ and ‘Change,’ the very structure replicates the invisible maps of elitism that plague St. Louis and the greater country, and intrinsically blocks people who seek to dismantle these systems of structural inequality. I think this is exemplified in the way they responded to my probing of whose authority I was being asked to acquiesce to. Why should we ever acquiesce to domination like that? The prospect of an elite social club can be extremely alluring (who doesn’t love a good secret?), but if you come into contact with the secret societies at WashU, consider that your refusal to participate is a radical political act. How can we as young people and activists engage in creating the kind of world we want to live in? Does this not start in dismantling systems of oppression in our personal and interpersonal lives, from how we treat our friends to how we structure our social groups? ✺
At a certain point early in my undergraduate degree, I had found a solid group of friends and some older students who had taken me under their wing and done some work to connect me to aspects of the community that seemed somewhat out of the college ‘bubble.’ When we enter college, we are all searching for the community that will be our new home. I believe that the draw of the secret society as an entity is to feel special and prestigious; there is an old-money mystery and a sense of Ivy League wealth and power that is fairly tantalizing, as well as the kind of special social world that can be super appealing to a new college student. My sophomore year I experienced a week of discomforting events that was later contextualized for me as being “tapped” by the WashU secret society Seven, which ostensibly chooses 7 students a year to induct. They started by emailing me one-sentence phrases from an anonymous email. Instructions via phone calls from blocked numbers followed. As a femme person in the university who had already attended enough parties to know that this liberal bubble doesn’t protect you, I was disturbed and made to feel stalked and violated. I responded angrily, not following the instructions, and sending back emails questioning their secrecy and asking them to level with me honestly if they were truly interested in my participation. Upon questioning their authority to send instructions and expect them followed, the calls and emails stopped. Over the next year or two, a few close friends drifted conspicuously away, people that I did not previously understand to walk in the same social worlds became extraordinarily close, a seemingly random assortment of students I knew peripherally all started living in a flashy house just west of Big Bend. My greatest sadness was that a lot of the politically activated students I knew seemed to disappear from the community, or at least ceased their critiques, and cropped back up again as student group leaders - with access to insane amounts of funding directly from the university.
Let’s be completely clear about something: this is no accident. Whether it is a mechanism of the type of highly privileged and ambitious student body or an indirect plucking of activist-minded students by the administration to enter the fold of the institution, the secret societies of WashU encourage political repression in the student body, and prevent honest community and affinity between students.
Secret Societies are historically a function of old money and wealth, and have their roots in uppercrust resistance to the democratization of public (and private!) education - rich white men who did not want to share their power and wealth with their peers that were increasingly women/working class/not white. They still today function as a way to give extra access to resources outside of normal university channels. Even as societies like Seven purport an aura of ‘Social Justice’ and ‘Change,’ the very structure replicates the invisible maps of elitism that plague St. Louis and the greater country, and intrinsically blocks people who seek to dismantle these systems of structural inequality. I think this is exemplified in the way they responded to my probing of whose authority I was being asked to acquiesce to. Why should we ever acquiesce to domination like that? The prospect of an elite social club can be extremely alluring (who doesn’t love a good secret?), but if you come into contact with the secret societies at WashU, consider that your refusal to participate is a radical political act. How can we as young people and activists engage in creating the kind of world we want to live in? Does this not start in dismantling systems of oppression in our personal and interpersonal lives, from how we treat our friends to how we structure our social groups? ✺
From an additional source:
When I think about Seven now that I'm a few years out of WashU, I am mostly saddened at how it marginalized some really amazing students' efforts. There were so many leaders who initiated and organized student groups and improved the WashU community, but at the end of our tenure, the students [formally] recognized were mostly those in Seven. I just hope that it didn't make students feel like they had not impacted our campus. At the time, all I wished for was that students knew about Seven so that they could brush off the politics if the politics affected them, like we did with Thurtene. I know that one year the StudLife Editor-in-Chief contemplated exposing Seven, but they had been/were in a relationship with someone in it. Seems like whenever Seven might be exposed, someone finds a way to silence it. It could be that WashU admin also helped keep Seven underground. They are given a mentor and the house off Big Bend that belonged to a former WashU professor. It's astounding how threatening secrecy can be! As I write these words I flirt with the possibility that someone is going to figure me out and treat me differently. Included above are emails sent to me by Seven. ✺