Fraternity system isn’t Greek to Awesome Dudes of Ole Miss

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, December 24, 2006

OXFORD, Miss. – The Ole Miss football team had taken a 7-0 lead over rival Mississippi State when a strange cheer erupted in a corner of the Rebels’ home stadium.

It was emanating from a small group just behind the marching band’s tuba section. A dreadlocked South African named Didi Mazibuko was leading it.

“Oggy Oggy Oggy!” Mazibuko yelled.

“Oi! Oi! Oi!” his friends responded.

“Oggy!”

“Oi!”

“Oggy!

“Oi!”

It was, to say the least, out of place at a Southeastern Conference football game. Other fans turned their heads toward the shouting and stared.

Who were these people, standing among the blue-blazered fraternity guys and their smartly dressed sorority dates? After all, this was an Ole Miss game – that famous, and sometimes notorious, celebration of Southern identity. This is where controversy raged over the banning of the Confederate battle flag in the late ’90s and where it simmers still whenever the band plays “Dixie.”

Oggy? Oi?

This was something new. In fact, it was the University of Mississippi’s newest fraternity – a motley gang of international students and domestic square pegs who, in America’s season of Borat, have cheekily christened themselves the Awesome Dudes of Alpha Delta.

The Awesome Dudes became an official student group at Ole Miss in September. Their goals were modest: to have a good time and to claim a piece of Ole Miss tradition – the ritualized sis-boom-pah of game day – as their own.

Their name was self-consciously dorky – a nod to a few members’ less-than-perfect English skills. It also was meant to honor and mock, if ever so gently, the insular, exotic and sometimes baffling Greek culture they encountered on campus.

Fraternities and sororities at Ole Miss date to the 19th century. They remain serious business here, with big, white columned houses, elaborate rules for rushing and pledging, and a history of turning out the state’s future leaders: Sen. Trent Lott was a Sigma Nu. His fellow Mississippian, Sen. Thad Cochran, is a former president of Pi Kappa Alpha.

“We don’t have anything like this in Europe,” said Florian Schnitzhofer, a founding Dude from Austria.

The Dudes have no frat house. Nor are they sanctioned by the Greek councils on campus. Membership is free, everyone is considered “president” and women are welcome: The official name, in fact, is “The Awesome Dude Fraternity/Sorority of Alpha Delta.”

Its mission, according to its Web site: “spreading the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial message of unity and love for all.”

Its philosophy: “We all party the same regardless of color or creed.”

There has been some grumbling about the concept of an alternative fraternity. After the student newspaper wrote a story on the Dudes, one reader called them “ridiculous.”

But others have been more welcoming. “All we’ll judge you on,” said South African Alexis Assimacopoulos, hoisting a Rebel-red party cup after the game, “is how well you party.”

The University of Mississippi opened in 1848 to educate the scions of the antebellum planter class. The legacy of exclusivity lives on in the predominantly white fraternity and sorority houses that occupy prime real estate on the pretty, tree-studded campus.

More than 3,600 of Ole Miss’ 14,000 undergraduates are members of fraternities and sororities. Membership provides entry into social networks built and sustained by generations of Southern elites. It also provides a social calendar centered on invitation-only parties and organized tailgating during football season.

The university was desegregated in 1962 with the enrollment of James Meredith, its first black student. Today, blacks and whites, with a few exceptions, tend to stick to separate Greek systems.

When Mazibuko, 22, arrived in August, he asked students about the separate clubs. They told him it had more to do with social preferences than with overt racism.

“They’d say, ‘Oh, we have cultural differences,’ “he said. “But come on – you’re all Americans. I mean, in South Africa we have 11 different languages. That’s differences.”

Mazibuko and fellow foreign students visited a number of frat houses and were greeted warmly. But they realized that it would be difficult to join, even if they were asked. The process of rushing a Greek house at Ole Miss stretches over a month, with mandatory meetings and dress codes. Some foreign students were here for only a semester – and few could afford the monthly fees, which start at about $400.

So the Dudes were born after a late-night drinking session. By November, they had a Web site, a plan to donate to charities and more than 80 members – an enviable size for a legitimate Ole Miss fraternity.

Two in five of them are Americans. They are students like Mark Freeman, a 20-year-old freshman who fought in Iraq before starting college. After the military, he wasn’t about to subject himself to the rigors of pledging a traditional frat.

Two in five are also women – self-proclaimed “Dudettes.” Jessica Beck, a freshman from Pontotoc, Miss., is studying German and Russian, and she likes that she can practice with native speakers. Joining a traditional sorority, she said, “takes too much time.”

Without the benefit of a house, a core group of Dudes gathers most days at the Paul B. Johnson Commons cafeteria among the lower-classmen on university meal plans. Here they hold court, comparing notes on Mississippi life between trips to class.

South African Ruan Boshoff, 23, thought radio programming would be “more jazzy” in the birthplace of the blues. Schnitzhofer, the Austrian, marveled that so many different kinds of food could survive deep-frying.

Carlos Aportela and Gerardo Fonseca, 18-year-olds from Mexico, arrived fall semester to find tensions running high over illegal immigration. They found safe harbor with the Dudes.

“No offense,” Aportela said. “But a lot of people from here don’t like us.”

Assimacopoulos of South Africa was surprised that his roommate – a Mississippi resident and avowed creationist – was doing just fine in an undergraduate biology class. Jamie Wellen, 21, of London learned that when a Mississippian calls him a “Brit,” it’s best not to call him “Yank” in return.

“That doesn’t go over very well,” he said.

The Dudes also have learned that at Ole Miss, everything in autumn revolves around football. Many didn’t know the rules before they got here, while others had a head start from PlayStation and American TV. But by late season, most had a pretty good grasp of the game.

Late last month, on the Saturday of the Mississippi State game, the Dudes began drinking around 11 a.m. – two hours before kickoff. They weren’t alone: Their base was a tent they had set up at the Grove, the grassy open area in the middle of campus. On game days, it is transformed into a huge outdoor cocktail party for thousands of students and alumni.

As per tradition, the Ole Miss football team marched through the Grove on their way to the stadium. The crowd cheered ecstatically, reaching out to low-five the players’ outstretched palms.

Mazibuko rushed toward the procession with a dozen fellow Dudes.

“Go Rebels!” he roared.

A few beers later, they filed into the bleachers behind the tubas. It was a glorious day for football, and the Rebels did not squander it. When the team pulled ahead 19-10 in the fourth quarter, Mornah Dekuwmini, a 25-year-old from Ghana, did a little dance on the bleachers.

This time, he and the Dudes belted out a more familiar cheer. They had spent the early weeks of the season memorizing it in their dorm rooms:

Hotty Toddy, God almighty,

Who the hell are we? Hey!

Flim fam, bim bam

Ole Miss, By Damn!

The Rebels went on to win 20-17. The Awesome Dudes of Alpha Delta spilled back onto the Grove among the rest of the revelers and gathered around their cooler of beer.

A few feet away, the members of the all-white Alpha Tau Omega fraternity were celebrating in a tent festooned with the state flag, which incorporates the old Confederate banner in the upper left corner. “Heritage not hate,” one of the members said.

ATO Brandon Lockhart, a fifth-year senior, said Ole Miss frats take a lot of unfair criticism for being racist and elitist. All of these guys are children of the ’80s, he said. It’s not like it was.

He glanced across the pathway at the new frat in town, that veritable United Nations huddled around the cooler. Lockhart delivered a live-and-let-live verdict: “Sweet.”