Whether they notice it or not, being
a part of any societal group can have its implications on one’s personal rights
of expression, and failure to conform to a community’s particular standards
could lead to expulsion from the group. But to what degree are these
implications acceptable, and at what point should a person say no to these limitations?
Some of these hindrances are obvious and understandable, such as one’s physical
appearance at their workplace or monitoring of a student’s language in a
classroom setting. Others, however, are slightly less acceptable. One
particular example of imposition on one’s free expression can be seen through
Greek life communities at certain universities.
An article in the HuffingtonPost specifically examined the impact of fraternity membership on one’s freedom
of expression, and pointed out one particularly crude example of this. At Yale
University in 2010, the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) forced their pledge members
to walk around the campus while chanting the words “My name is Jack, I'm a
necrophiliac, I fuck dead women" and "No means yes, yes means anal.”
While it is obvious that pledges who
were strongly opposed to participating in this activity could drop out of DKE,
it is also acceptable to say that this group went too far in exercising their
power over the pledges and requiring them to express something that
(presumably) most of the men did not agree with. The university did become
angered by this action and DKE later apologized for their crude language, but
the overall point of the situation should not go overlooked: Greek life is one
societal group that can have an influence over its members’ freedoms of
expression.
To avoid the generalization of all
Greek life communities, it is important to note that this instance is not a
reflection on all sororities or fraternities and that some Greek life societies
are much more extreme than others. However, those that do impose upon their
members’ personal expressions should not go overlooked. The mere action of a
sorority prohibiting certain behaviors that could look badly upon the group, or
of a fraternity forcing members to act in a certain way and say certain things,
is an imposition upon those people and their freedoms and it expresses a
manipulated hierarchy of power. It is peer pressure that, yes, these people
could avoid by extracting themselves from that certain organization, but it is
also a pressure that should not be exerted in the first place.