Animal House-Hunting

There are no “For Sale” signs plastered to big, beautiful houses around Harvard Square, which is too bad for the brothers of Pi Kappa Alpha (“Pike”), Harvard’s newest fraternity. They hope one day to have their own place to party despite the discouraging state of the Cambridge real estate market and the fact that other fraternities have tried and failed to maintain a building—or a high profile—on campus.

Perhaps Pike will have a different fate. For one thing, its alums include Strom Thurmond, Ted Koppel and S. Truett Cathy, the founder and CEO of Chick-Fil-A. But it’s not just the illustrious past of PKA that has attracted over a dozen Harvard students to its Cambridge colony. Harvard’s PKA, which joins four male and two female Greek organizations on campus, promises to be a place for all party-seekers.

“If you want to have a good time, if you’re willing to pay a couple bucks for beer and you’re not looking to cause trouble,” says George A. Parry ’04, a member of the football team and a founding member of PKA, “we won’t keep you outside.”

Parry is enthusiastic about setting up the frat, though it wasn’t his idea originally. Last month he received a phone call from a PKA recruiter, courting him to launch the fraternity at Harvard. Parry says Pike develops new chapters based on recommendations from other members across the country, and he was recommended by his friends at Southern Methodist University and Vanderbilt University. After contacting Parry and asking for further recommendations, Pike also contacted the Kappa Alpha Theta and Delta Gamma sororities on campus and asked members to suggest Harvard guys who qualified, in the words of the frat website, as “individuals who set scholarship as their top priority; who involve themselves on campus and in the community; who are competitive and team players; and who treat themselves and others with respect.” Apparently this description fits more than 25 Harvard students who are currently in the process of joining the fraternity. While most Greek organizations have open-rush policies, these would-be Pikes were recommended by members of other Pike chapters, by Harvard’s DG chapter and by Parry himself.

Some students are mystified as to why anyone would start another fraternity in light of the relative obscurity of the current frats, although others expressed conditional interest. Kyle A. Lehman ’05, whose father was a Pike at the University of Maryland, says he believes that “depending on the housing situation, [the frat] will provide social opportunity outside of house parties and give other options to many guys who are left standing outside final clubs.”

Parry and others say the new frat is not a reaction against final club elitism.

“I’m not knocking final clubs,” Parry says. He does promise, however, that PKA will be “a place where you don’t have to check in friends at the door.”

But what door? No fraternity at Harvard currently has a house to call home. Along with its own fundraising efforts, the undergraduate chapter might be able to reap the benefits of Harvard’s extensive alumni network in order to attain something many think impossible: a frat house in the exclusive area around Harvard Square.

For the next few months Pike will risk following the wayward path of Harvard’s current frats, but if PKA catches fire, Harvard students may look back on the days before Pike and wonder how they ever lived without it. “It could change the face of Harvard social life,” Parry says.