Being sicker than I have ever been has given me considerable time to do nothing but surf the internet. Anything else took too much brain power. Here are some of the gems I found. “Main School, when it was built, was the only school for the town serving grades K-10 (older students were sent to Babylon High School). The famed poet and writer Walt Whitman was a temporary teacher. By the mid-1950s, the building had been expanded, and became an elementary school. It was demolished in June 1982.” A high school friend copied and pasted this item from wikipedia onto her facebook page with a picture of the school.
The school was once the focal point of my hometown. Whoever added the sentence about Walt Whitman to the wikipedia post was no doubt proud of the town’s association with the poet, even if it places him squarely in the mid 1900s. Whitman taught in what would become the town during the 1836-37 school year. Main School did not exist in 1836 and neither did the school district. The Walt Whitman archives includes this information, “some of the unhappiest times of his life were these five years when he taught school in at least ten different Long Island towns, rooming in the homes of his students, teaching three-month terms to large and heterogeneous classes (some with over eighty students, ranging in age from five to fifteen, for up to nine hours a day), getting very little pay, and having to put up with some very unenlightened people.” I’m not sure the Walt Whitman connection to my former school district is a positive one.
The second instance of muddled facts involved a large midwestern university’s tweeting campaign for Panhellenic Pride Day. I admired their enthusiasm, but I cringed at their incorrect facts. For instance, this one makes no sense, “Both female senators elected to be in the supreme court are greek.” This one makes more sense, but it is wrong on several counts, “Both females elects to the U.S. Supreme Court are sorority women.” Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman Supreme Court Justice is not a sorority woman. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an Alpha Epsilon Phi; she is the only one of the four who is a sorority woman. Sonia Sotomayor was appointed in 2009 and Elana Kagan in 2010. I would imagine that some of the sorority women tweeting the incorrect information would have been in high school when these last two women were appointed and I would have hoped that they would have remembered these milestones. Another tweet “Since 1910, 40 of 47 Supreme Court Justices have been Greek, and both female Justices were in a sorority!” goes with that 2 females Justices misconception; I also have a feeling that there are more than 47 Supreme Court Justices who have been appointed since 1910. It’s unfortunate that the women did not double check their tweets; they just kept shooting themselves in the foot with their incorrect facts. And these selections I presented were just the tip of the iceberg. I truly felt sorry for their ignorance of history. (Edited 10/27/2020 – Amy Coney Barrett is an initiate of the Kappa Delta chapter at Rhodes College.)
And my favorite incorrect fact of the week comes from a list of “Famous People in Fraternity and Sorority Life.” I am also certain the author compiled the list from wikipedia and random chapter web-sites. Tommy Hilfinger, it is noted on this list, was a Delta Upsilon at Elmira Free Academy. Elmira Free Academy is a high school and I am certain Delta Upsilon has not had a chapter there. There were several other questionable affiliations on that list. To you proud collegians out there, my advice is to never take a wikipedia entry at face value. Never take a individual chapter’s lists of “Famous ABCs” at face value either. Check with the international organization’s website, and/or the lists put out by NIC and NPC and other reputable sources.
© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2014. All Rights Reserved.
