The North American Interfraternity Conference NIC , which oversees 66 fraternities, reported a 50 percent increase in membership from to Which raises another concern.
The NIC also took the notable step of banning hard alcohol at fraternity houses and their events effective September , except when it is served by a licensed third-party vendor. Scholarship was a thing that they desired among the members and they were successful in no small degree. Booze was plentiful enough at our house during the s, and the hazing was intense.
We studied hard and partied hard. I never heard about any sexual assaults taking place at our house, thank God, but the standard debauchery applied: fights, base sexual language, problematic humor.
Get it? There was also a pimps-and-prostitutes theme party—fun then, but not too cool in hindsight. How might my fraternity brothers have responded to such a complaint? I look back at one troubling incident in which a woman accused an older member of pushing her down some stairs. The details were disputed and a few of the younger guys, myself included, accompanied the brother to a Greek disciplinary hearing on campus.
Such is the power of the group. The conformity research is nuts. In the s, Yale psychologist Solomon Asch would bring a student volunteer into a room with seven other subjects who were secretly part of the experiment. The group was shown one card with a line printed on it and a second card containing three numbered lines. The participants were then asked which of the three numbered lines came closest in length to the line on the first card.
When the phony participants, by design, converged on an obviously wrong answer, the student volunteer would more often than not choose the wrong one as well. Asch was stunned by this unexpected result, Robbins writes.
Susan Collins of Maine not only voted for Kavanaugh but also parroted the offensive suggestion that Christine Blasey Ford had been sexually assaulted by someone she mistook for him. It might also explain why I worried that writing this piece would be a betrayal.
I admitted as much to Robbins. Robbins makes the case that fraternities are not monolithic and that, done right, they can be healthy spaces. Spence, the Cal student who left his house, is not convinced.
The house expelled the brother. Sometimes, less is more. The fraternity should limit the mandatory functions and focus on quality instead of quantity out of respect to the brothers busy schedules. It always amazed me how fraternities allow some brothers to become thousand in debt to the fraternity. More times than not, the fraternity will never see this money. Fraternities spend gobs of money in forced-fun events at the beginning of every semester. Some of the best fraternity brothers I know never made it to graduation.
They were great brothers, but their time with the fraternity is too short. It was such a waste. Modern college is a lot of smoke and mirrors. Professors are pushing their social agendas. Most classes are a complete waste of time. Essentially you are there to get piece of paper that says The 1 secret to fraternity recruitment really has nothing to do with recruitment — it is much bigger than that.
Whatever value they might offer along those lines is more than compensated for by the surplus of stupid and mean behavior they produce not as an aberrant exception but as part of their reason for being.
I went to a college with a marginal frat culture and almost no sororities. Greek life there was mild compared to the University of Oklahoma or Dartmouth , but the frats still struck me as bad places where guys who could have turned out all right tended to go rotten. There was the frat for athletes who preferred to mix only with people who were impressed by athletes. There was the frat for guys who aspired to be rich jerks. There was the frat for guys who assuaged the sorrow of not being good enough athletes to be in the frat for athletes by semi-covertly watching each other have sex with unwitting, and occasionally unconscious, women.
The persistence of fraternities was one of the reasons that being in college sometimes made me feel like an anthropologist parting the bushes for a glimpse at the bizarre rituals of a lost tribe.
It was there that I first saw the stunting effect that frats tend to have on a college career.
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