October 4, 1999
Professor shares a laugh with 'Doonesbury' cartoonist
It's a fair bet that nobody got as big a kick out of Garry Trudeau's recent "Doonesbury" strips as sociology's Dane Archer.
The strips, which can be viewed on the Web at dke.org/doonesbury.html, called attention to a controversy that rocked the campus of Yale University in 1967, when an exposé in the student newspaper revealed a particularly heinous hazing practice taking place at the local chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity. Under the leadership of George W. Bush Jr., who was president of the fraternity, members branded the backsides of initiates with hot irons, scarring pledges with small deltas, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet.
Archer, as coeditor of the Yale Daily News' weekly magazine at the time, ran a lengthy article about the practice with a front-page photo of an initiate's rear. ("Forgive me for that," he quips today. "I was young.") Trudeau, who was a Yale student at the time, reproduced the photo in his cartoon strip on September 21.
For seven days, Trudeau featured his character Roland Hedley, "chief portal correspondent" for yap.com, pursuing the Texas governor to find out whether Bush had "suffered what he was dishing out."
"I've often wondered if news of the branding would get out," said Archer, a professor of sociology. "Garry Trudeau and I are probably the only two people who remember where that photo originated. Trudeau was just getting started in cartooning, and we published some of his first strips in the paper. He was our cartoonist."
After the paper published the results of its investigation, Archer recalls the university undertaking its own probe of the fraternity's practices and subsequently closing the fraternity. Yale University officials could only confirm that the fraternity is currently open.
"Obviously, Garry Trudeau remembers the incident and thinks, as I do, that the whole thing, which took place in 1967, raises a question of character," Archer said of the presumptive Republican candidate for president, whose father was also a DKE member.
