Stewards: The Best Secret Society GU Can Offer’

October 27, 2000

According to the Georgetown Office of Student Program’s Student Organization Standards, Georgetown considers secret societies “inconsistent with accepted values at the university.” Secret societies, as defined by this document, are “groups that do not disclose their purpose, membership or activities or whose purpose, membership or activities are discriminatory.”

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Maybe Georgetown should rethink this policy.

I have derived, courtesy of several anonymous sources, an abridged and completely unofficial Cliff’s Notes version of Georgetown’s regrettable excuse for a secret society (and as shoddy and incomplete as this explanation is, it is probably still way more than you ever wanted or needed to know).

The Stewards, get this, were founded in 1982. My parents have a car that is older than that. Due to creative and artistic differences (ooh, Merlot or a nice Cabernet?), there was an organizational split somewhere in the early ’90s. The group factioned into the First Stewards and the Second Stewards. Although, of course, the First Stewards denied the legitimacy of the Second Stewards and considered themselves not the First Stewards but the only Stewards. Then the First Stewards (or the only Stewards) died out – suddenly leaving the Second Stewards as, by virtue of sheer persistence, the only Stewards. Oh, but there’s more. At some point after the early ’90s – we’re a little light on the dates here – someone with too little to do decided that he wanted to resurrect the old original Stewards. So the current Georgetown Secret Society tally stands at two: the Second Stewards and the Third Stewards (although, of course, the Third Stewards consider themselves the clear inheritors of the legacy of the Firsts and therefore entitled to the name).

Hmmmm. If that made less than perfect sense, I wouldn’t really worry about it.

The Stewards claims to be a fraternal organization with the purpose of protecting the interests of the Georgetown community through anonymous service. “Service activities,” as defined by the Stewards, are rumored to have included painting the giant Hoya Saxa eyesore at the Canal Road entrance to Parking Lot C, occasionally littering the hallways of freshmen dorms with mysterious Georgetown historical fact sheets, hiding Easter eggs containing fortune-cookie slips of pro-GU propaganda all over campus and being generally wary of the social scourge that is woman.

So basically, the Stewards have fixed things nicely for themselves – any anonymous benevolent act that takes place on campus can inadvertently be attributed to them, even if they were sitting at home at the time, making copies, playing Risk or planning panty raids. Someone should start having fun with this – do something mysterious and creepily obscure, and chances are it is going to get blamed on the Stewards.

Service works are done in secret, but someone always seems to know just who is responsible for these mysterious acts of benevolence. They’re always lurking around the edges, leaving hints of their presence: a two-key insignia in the corner of their printed materials, a plaque at the base of the clock in Red Square. ake up your minds.

The Stewards suck. We should be embarrassed that this fractured, insipid boys club is the best that our campus has to offer. We’re going to need some administrative intervention here, some broad-based reforms to clean up whatever is left of our privileged honor.

For starters, we’re going to have to do something about the name. A “Steward” – that’s what you call a guy who gets you a Coke and a throw pillow on an airplane. And this “Second Stewards” and “Third Stewards” stuff has got to go. Yale calls one of their secret societies Skull and Bones; Wesleyan has the Mystical Seven, complete with a weird boarded-up, seven-sided building. We need something obscure and vaguely ominous – how about the Inquisitors?

A secret society has to find ways of being conspicuous. Skull and Bones has a big, expensive, useless limestone building on a busy corner in New Haven – no signs out, but big hideous sphinxes flank the entrance.

I know several people who have been “tapped” for the Stewards but declined to join. Declined? What kind of secret society do you refuse? Something is seriously amiss.

The confused lineage of the group isn’t helping anything either. How can we have factionalized elitism? You’re weakening your own platform here, boys. What the hell is the problem? Can’t we all just get along – agree that capitalism rules and women are scary and inherently unknowable but occasionally useful, go out and get hammered on single malt scotch and plan our slow takeover of the world one GU student leader at a time?

It is possible there is some other secret society at work on this campus, one that actually is secret. But if they exist, they’re pretty ineffectual. A “secret society” has to strike a delicate balance between mystery and complete, total anonymity – at least register as a passing blip of cultural fascination on the campus radar. If they’re out there, it’s about time they leaked us some information of their existence.

Georgetown has elements of elitism – part of the territory that comes with the rock-bottom acceptance rates. There are a lot of well-dressed people strutting around this campus looking self-important and distracted – let’s give them something to do. That elitism should be nurtured, given room to blossom into the full potentiality of its exclusionary narcissism. If we’re going to have elitism, it might as well be functional elitism, that is, elitism with some sort of dramatic cache, elitism the administration can harness and manipulate.

If there ever was a time that Georgetown needed a functional secret society to do a little behind the scenes work in the name of good, old-fashioned Jesuit ideals it is now, as we face a spate of potentially pernicious challenges from the neighborhood. Georgetown neighbors would love a souped-up elitist student society; that’s a vision of an academic institution that goes with their BMWs and $2 million townhouses.

Ramble On appears every other Friday in The Hoya.