The odd couple: how co-op and Greek life both shape Stanford campus culture

Note: Simon Lee has lived in Columbae for the past two years. He has never lived in SNu but halfheartedly apologizes to any brothers offended by the following description.

Walking up the Row on a Friday afternoon, you might come across a cadre of tofu-eating hippies lounging on the Columbae porch painting colorful messages on the weather-beaten picnic table outside. These are my housemates — friends and peers I’ve gotten to know over my last two years living in the house. Walk a little farther — and do ignore Mars, since it messes with my framing device — and you’ll observe a performatively shirtless game of spikeball on the Sigma Nu (SNu) lawn. Squint through the haze of Axe body spray, and you see preparations for a party. 

The differences between Columbae and SNu, and between cooperative housing (co-ops) and Greek organizations more broadly, might seem too many to count: hair dye, vegan meals, a willingness to enforce the consent affirmation at the door. On a deeper level, co-ops stake out alternative spaces of community outside the university’s social mainstream, often centering those historically pushed to its margins, while Greek life tends to plant its flag squarely in tradition as a home for students from more enfranchised backgrounds.

Yet co-op and Greek spaces also share certain institutional features within Stanford — features that increasingly expose them to pressure and outright attack from the administration. It is imperative that all students, regardless of the place they call home, see the assault on both for what it is: an overarching effort by Stanford to homogenize and more neatly regulate student life.

Though separated by ideology and target demographic, both are bound together by a shared streak of partial autonomy from the administration. Independence is baked into the history of Stanford co-ops, with many of them being established as explicit political alternatives to traditional campus culture. Co-ops continue to stand at the vanguard of Stanford activism, while the existence of house kitchens not directly managed by Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) enables residents to prepare house-wide meals for one another as an act of care. Shared cooking and cleaning obligations also reduce the room and board fees paid by residents.

Greek organizations similarly benefit from semi-autonomy from the University. For one, their ability to throw all-campus parties is contingent on the administration ignoring its own drugs and alcohol policy, since a strict interpretation of it would mean shutting down the Greek parties which clearly violate its no-drinking rules. Like co-ops, Greek organizations receive Stanford funding, enabling them to theoretically function as all-campus social spaces.

In recent years, though, that autonomy has steadily been stripped away from both kinds of housing. Stanford’s well-documented “War on Fun,” though far from linear, has chipped away at students’ sense of what all-campus social life can be. The administration’s assault on co-ops is, I believe, both less widely recognized and more pernicious. Enchanted Broccoli Forest (EBF) and Kairos face the loss of their co-op status altogether. The forced merging of Synergy and Terra threatens to turn two vibrant houses offering very different styles of community into an incongruous arranged marriage which will most likely leave all residents less satisfied. 

The past single-choice housing pre-assignment system where potential co-op residents could only apply to one house predictably tanked occupancy figures in recent years — figures which R&DE weaponized to justify the de-theming of three co-ops. This bit of byzantine administrative shenaniganry was particularly obtuse, since the type of person wanting to live in Columbae is likely happier living in a different co-op than a normal dorm.

Although changes to the pre-assignment process this year have, thankfully, ensured that applicants can rank multiple houses, several years of this pre-assignment process took their toll on all co-ops. Snuffing out these spaces of counter-culture and resistance, all while the national political environment becomes more and more hostile to marginalized students who make up a significant portion of the co-op community, should be viewed for what it is: a shameful and cowardly University policy of ignorance and outright cruelty which threatens to strip already-vulnerable populations of the places they have historically called home.

From the administrative standpoint, this effort to asphyxiate co-ops is transparently predictable. Why should Stanford give money to houses which regularly flout University policy and create spaces for headache-inducing stunts, all while being more difficult to regulate than a standard dorm and charging less in room and board fees from students? The problem is my description also applies to Greek orgs: spaces of independent community which not-so-secretly skirt Stanford rules. And for all their bluster, both institutions still represent a relatively small fraction of the student body — a generous estimate puts the percentage of Stanford undergraduates who are neither Greek nor co-op-affiliated at around three-quarters. So why do these spaces matter so much?

These spaces — co-ops especially — have an outsized impact on campus social fabric. Since their inception in the seventies, these houses have consistently spearheaded political organizing on campus. Discussions over issues as varied as queer rights, anti-apartheid protests and antiwar movements (Vietnam and Iraq alike) have been consistently supported by co-ops. Regardless of your political affiliation, a vibrant and robust culture of activism and student speech is critical to fostering the kind of open dialogue Stanford purportedly seeks to cultivate.

I ask you again to consider my picture of Columbae and SNu on Friday afternoon. Now imagine asking the fine brothers of SNu to pack up and move down the Row to live in Columbae, eat impossible meatloaf and lead antiwar teach-ins. Picture residents of Columbae trying to set up for Alcove.

If these images sound incredibly stupid to you — and they should! — you’ve arrived at my final point. “Campus social life” is not just about parties on the weekend or the frenzy of spring rush: Stanford thrives when students with specific interests are empowered to seek out spaces which affirm those interests for themselves — when SNu brothers can live in SNu and when Columbae residents can live in Columbae.

I’ve spent most of this piece laying out an analytical argument in favor of co-op life and its unexpected similarity to Greek life. But the single greatest argument in favor of these vastly different organizations is my own experience in Columbae: one that, in its own unique way, mirrors the claims of “sisterhood” and “brotherhood” promised to wide-eyed underclassmen on Bid Day. 

Most weeknights, I return home to find friends cooking for each other in our communal kitchen. More often than not, I stay up late because I want to keep laughing and talking and arguing with my housemates in the lounge. I leave Columbae in the morning with my fingertips burnt on oven-fresh bread, and I return to the sounds of music and merriment and the tangy smell of newly picked lemons.

I am grateful and proud to live in a house with such strong moral and political values, and to live alongside people with such compassionate, generous hearts. Columbae is a house that I, and many others, have made a home during my time at Stanford. Everyone on campus should feel a stake in preserving it — even if you might never dream of living there — because the erosion of spaces like this rarely stops at just one corner of campus.

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