I woke up this morning to a newscaster announcing that Stanley "Tookie" Williams had been executed by lethal injection in California. It made me feel profoundly sad. What purpose was served by killing a man who had turned his life around and was helping other people? Just read the letter from a recovering addict on the home page of his website.

"The other day I sat down after I watched your movie Redemption and thought about all the things that I've done in my life and counted how many years that I should be in prison. ...Before I watched the movie I was making plans to start living my old life again. I wanted all the money and girls and respect (or fear) of others — but after I watched the movie and started to do some research on you, I found that we are not all that different."

Whoever we are, Tookie was one of us. And we killed him.

Then I turned to the New York Times and read a story about Colgate University's attempts to control its fraternities. The news peg was that a lawsuit that alleged that the university had coerced a fraternity into selling its house to the college had been dismissed.

Colgate embarked on a mission to control its rambunctious fraternities after an 18-year-old freshman, Katie Almeter, and three other young people were killed when a fellow student drunkenly plowed his car into a tree in 2000. The driver was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) who had been drinking at a frat party. DKE is the only fraternity on campus that has refused to sell its house back to the college, and it is one of three fraternities that has filed lawsuits to force Colgate to reverse its decision.

Katie's dad, Bob, has embarked on a mission to change campus culture. It is a mission very similar to ours, but we are ever so fortunate that our daughter is able to join us in executing it.

My father was a DKE at Colgate. He edited the DKE quarterly alumni magazine for several years when I was growing up. Every three months, he'd either commandeer the kitchen table or set up a bridge table somewhere in our apartment in the Bronx, and use scissors and a glue pot to throw together the next issue in a deadline flurry. The table always looked like a tossed salad of paper and photographs, and we knew to stay out of Pop's hair when he was doing the magazine. It was not so much a labor of love as a labor for some pin money — and what self-respecting journalist does anything if it's not for money and not on deadline (this website excluded [g]). I remember being amazed when a slick, glossy magazine, printed by the George Banta Co., emerged out of all that cutting and pasting a few weeks later.

Defenders of the fraternities say that they offer much more than the stereotypes suggest. One outraged Colgate alumnus told the Times that "fraternities do many more good works than they get credit for and provide immense social benefits, including lifelong friendships."

I'm sure this is true. My father seemed to have an inordinate amount of DKEs he called friends, including former President Gerald Ford. DKE's mission statement reads:

"The objects of Delta Kappa Epsilon are the cultivation of general literature and social culture, the advancement and encouragement of intellectual excellence, the promotion of honorable friendship and useful citizenship, the maintenance of gentlemanly dignity, self-respect, and morality in all circumstances, and the union of stout hearts and kindred interests to secure to merit its due reward."

But in the end, the essence of DKE that sticks most vividly in my mind is a drinking ditty that I learned at a very young age. It became a staple in the repertoire of songs we sang on long car trips, right up there with "I Had a Hammer" (an inexplicably progressive song, now that I think of it), "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall," and the memorable "George Washington Bridge," whose lyrics, in their entirety, are "George Washington Bridge."

The DKE song I remember starts off:

So merrily sing we all to DKE

I always got the impression that "social culture" trumped "the cultivation of general literature" in the DKE that my father loved.