Matt J. V. Bencke '94, president of Eta Sigma Chi, the largest fraternity at Harvard, says that fraternities cannot fulfill that social need on a campus-wide level.

"We're not here to serve the campus," he says. "We are a brotherhood. Providing for the social needs of the campus is not our goal."

Frat History

Despite the dramatic resurgence, fraternities at Harvard are not a new phenomenon. The campus was peppered with frats in the 19th and early 20th centuries, all of which were closed down in the 1930s when the University began to require that student groups be autonomous.

Some fraternities became final clubs--like the D.U., which stands for Delta Upsilon--and others folded. Many of the current fraternities are merely revivals of those that existed on campus previously.

Epps attributes the recent resurgence to an active move from chapters on other campuses to colonize--or initiate new chapters--at Harvard.

But David K. Easlick, the national representative of Delta Kappa Epsilon, says that fraternities do not actively seek out campuses to colonize.

"We don't go out and actively try to get anyone," he says.

Rather, national organizations seem eager to colonize at Harvard because of the nature of the students here. Still, the main reason the frats are forming, it seems, is student interest from within Harvard, not recruiting effort from without.

"When we found out that Harvard students were interested in establishing a chapter, we were eager to help them out," Easlick says.

When it comes to explaining the trend of fraternity revival, frat members--even those involved in the founding of their organizations--don't delve into Harvard history. They also do not speak in negative terms about trying to flee the social life here or avoiding the residential houses.

Instead, members say they are just looking for good times and a sense of community at a large school.

"Fraternities are an additional dimension to life at Harvard, offering guys a chance to get together and have a broader base of people as friends," says Thomas D. Caughey '92, a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon.

But somehow separate from the resurgence of fraternities with primarily social goals are two more well established frats--both with a well defined mandate emphasizing community service. These are Alpha Phi Alpha and Kappa Alpha Psi, fraternities composed entirely of Black members.

The Alphas, whose chapter covers Harvard, MIT and Tufts, were founded in 1906 at Cornell in response to Black men being excluded from all the other fraternities.