THE CHOATE CLUB

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Exposure of the Choate Club at the Law School raises a number or issues which deserve comment. I realize that any outsider who criticizes a secret society runs the risk of charges of sour grapes; nevertheless I hazard a few disapproving thoughts because I feel strongly that the existence of the Club runs counter to much of what the Law School does, and should, stand for.

Secret societies are difficult to justify in a democracy and at an institution where rewards are supposedly on merit. Unlike the groups of early Christians or the cells of the French Resistance, justification derives not from an oppressive outer force but rather from the members' inner needs for exclusivity. As James Baldwin has pointed out, everyone needs his "nigger." We are told by the Choate Club president that secrecy was necessary in order to avoid the anxiety suffered by those who weren't chosen. I suggest rather that secrecy at the Choate Club, in an egalitarian age where restrictive barriers are collapsing and on a campus where fraternal orders are viewed with some disdain, was the means by which Choate members avoided their own anxiety in having to justify their organization to the rest of the world.

Although the need for a secret society can be questioned on ideological grounds, the harm of such a group at the Law School is something which touches everybody. There is little doubt that objection to the Choate Club would be minimal if the group were composed entirely of students, or of faculty, and if the Law School were a low-key institution run on a pass-fail system. The outsiders could brush it off as "the beautiful people doing their thing." But a secret fraternal order of faculty and students does great damage at a competitive institution which justifies its competitiveness on the accuracy of its system for rewarding merit. Where one decimal point in the grade average means a jump in class rank of twenty places and where a good letter of recommendation from a faculty member can be the difference between two students lumped at the middle of the class, there are few students who would not welcome the chance to fraternize with faculty on a regular basis. This "competitive advantage' of membership is accentuated when other students are considered, and rejected, by both students and faculty.

But above and beyond the competition point is the fact that faculty contact is one of the rare excitements at the Law School, and faculty time is at a premium. To secretly institutionalize informal social contact between students and faculty, and to bestow membership on those students whose gentility will no doubt' profit them, in time, outside the ivory tower, is to taint the ivory tower with a bit too much of the real world.

The black students at the Law School have led the way in calling attention to an atmosphere which seems to them foreign and irrelevant. But the problem of alienation at the Law School extends beyond the problems of a disaffected minority. It may extend as well to the vast majority of students who are not in the top handful in class rank or who lack the social acceptability which members of the Choate Club esteem so highly. Roger Lowenstein, 3L