It's early February and things are busy in Fraternityland. Rush is ending, bids are going out, fall pledges are being initiated and pre-Thon canning is reaching a fever pitch . . . and I'm annoyed. A lot of good work being done by a lot of Penn Staters often seems to go unnoticed. Could an anti-Greek bias be at work here? Could it be found in a lot of places?

Let's face it. The public perception of fraternities and sororities generally sucks. That's wrong, and giving the situation some thought bears me out.

Are you insane Jim? We all know fraternities are sexist, elitist and anti-intellectual. "Just a training grounds for rapists and drunkards," the critics say, groups of barbaric brain-dead clones performing the occasional public service just to throw the righteous off their trail.

What a load of crap.

No, I'm not blind to the bad that goes on in the Greek system. Still, no fraternity is any more than what the individual brothers make it. They carry both the good and the bad into the brotherhood with them. The kind of behavior that most often makes it into the news; alchohol abuse, rape and hazing, are betrayals of the fraternity idea, not the embodiment of it. As far as I'm concerned membership in a fraternity or sorority is one of the finest educational experiences and opportunities for personal growth available in college, and it's time someone said so.

Let's start from the ground up. Take away the friendships, the tradition, the social environment and the contributions to the community and what you're left with is student-run housing.

Say 50 or 60 students enjoy each others' company and choose to live together. They prove to a bank that they can handle a mortgage. They buy or build a house. They arrange the meals, maintain the property, pay the taxes. They democratically create rules that define their individual responsibilities. Any such group of individuals would be applauded for their initiative in enhancing their educations. That's right -- enhancing their educations.

We come to a university, study and earn our degrees, but this narrow criteria is hardly enough to define an educated person. We need to interact with others, find role models, make mistakes, deal firsthand with ambition and apathy, and learn from the experiences, values and abilities of our peers. In a setting of friendship, trust and commitment to a team effort, qualities of potential greatness can be shared between people. Greek houses are one such setting.

We learn how to contribute the best of our abilities and combine them with the best talents of others. We learn to argue, debate and politic -- when to compromise and when to hang firm, even with people we care about -- and how to accomplish things in a group. We get to know each other closely enough to see admirable traits worth emulating, and bad qualities worth hopefully avoiding. All this fits my idea of a university education. It also fits my ideal of Fraternal Brotherhood.

Sounds pretty lofty, huh? Truthfully, while Brotherhood (or Sisterhood) is a classical high ideal its realization usually takes very mundane forms. Parties, intramurals and hours of conversation, argument and laughter is Brotherhood, but that's easy. Brotherhood is two people passionately arguing a topic in chapter but then sharing dinner that night as friends. When two pledges can't stand each other at first, but are forced together by their commitment to the house long enough to see individual qualities they can respect, or even like, that's Brotherhood again. Just showing up to mop the floor because you don't want to let your pledge brothers down is Brotherhood.

Simple things really. Just simple, normal, everyday stuff, and sometimes we even fall short of that, but at least we try in a small "act locally" kind of way. Still, the ideal and the intention is there, even if it's usually too small to attract notice.

That's why I think the bad image of the Greek system is understandable. This good stuff is so basic to being part of a Greek house that even the Greek community itself seems to take it for granted, and it is lost from view. All we end up noticing is the parties, and the mistakes, and the crimes of those who didn't live up to the ideal. If the Greek community does this can we blame the rest of the world for doing the same?

Maybe I should be more forgiving when I hear anti-Greek ridicule and public scorn. It's not like we're putting up much of a fight. The Greek community has been accepting it for years, even though we've always known better. Current Greek leadership seems too preoccupied with the exorcism of the bad to ever stand up and demand recognition of the good. That's a shame, because even a good idea like small groups of students getting together to at least try to make brotherhood work can be lost with no one to fan the flames of the ideal.

And it is a good idea. It really is.

I'm far enough beyond my active years to know that the best of your fraternity stays with you. I use my experience dealing with the best and the worst in my brothers every day. Most of my best friends are my fraternity brothers. I've visited their homes, helped them with their troubles, gone to their weddings, even played with their children. The ideal of Brotherhood is real and lives on. You see, when you know a friend deep down, having shared many of your years of becoming adults, you stick together.

Like brothers.