Dartmouth College’s fraternity culture is often featured at College Insurrection.

The following candid account is excerpted from a new Dartmouth memoir called “Three For Ship” by from Crispus Knight, who graduated from the school after an academic expulsion.

I make no excuses, nor can I adequately explain what happened. The truth of the matter is that I failed out of college. I ask myself how and why this happened over and over. The question still keeps me up at night. A young man who scored in the 98th percentile on his college entrance examination boards with no Kaplan classes or even serious prep work beyond a few home administered practice tests. A student enrolled in all honors and AP classes who finished with near a 100% weighted average. A national merit scholar and AP artist who had never been drunk or done drugs of any sort right up through his senior year of high school. This is your college flunk-out protagonist.

While my experience was not at all typical of students at Dartmouth, the lifestyle I describe is common enough on campus. Not everyone was a Ship Professional [someone obsessed with a certain type of beer pong]…

The hardcore drinking and games that went along with it that eventually did me in were an inevitable conclusion given Dartmouth’s isolation, history, and almost complete lack of other social outlets. With the existence of the CFS [Coed, Fraternity, and Sorority] houses there was a well-developed delivery system in place that could supply an unlimited amount of beer to the campus in a setting perfectly conducive to social interaction.

With Beer Pong we had a highly accessible, campus wide game that was competitive, social and athletic but which invariably lent itself naturally to binge drinking. Then there was the pride of our drinking tradition—a sense that we all had to faithfully carry this torch to earn the distinction of becoming a “real Dartmouth student”—an accession to adulthood by way of a specific brand of debauchery we called “raging”. These factors combined in such a way that Dartmouth without Greek organizations and excessive drinking seems unfathomable. We were smart kids, smart kids forced to learn to love to drink. And the vast majority went on to successful lives. Were they the ones who let me down? No, at various points my friends as well as the organization had all tried to help me. But a clown continues to paint his own face, even when all the other freaks think his act has gotten out of hand.