Epic Bad Behavior

EARLIER THIS year came a flurry of new horror stories about the abuses of human dignity that are, apparently, common in many of America’s college fraternities. First came the video from the University of Oklahoma in which a busload of “true gentlemen” of Sigma Alpha Epsilon are seen and heard spewing racist bile. Shortly thereafter the revelation that the Kappa Delta Rho chapter at Penn State had maintained a private Facebook page featuring nude photos of unconscious young women became national news.

The old saying “Once a frat boy, never a man” may be just another sweeping stereotype. But the evidence is mounting that many of the nation’s fraternity houses are the breeding ground for an exclusive culture of entitlement and impunity that their mostly white, upper-class members carry into their future roles in the elite circles of business and government.

It should be noted that when we talk about “fraternities,” we are really just talking about the historically all-white social organizations with Greek-letter names. Historically black fraternities have their own problems, especially with hazing, but they have experienced nothing like the epic bad behavior found among their paler brethren.

The recent fraternity scandals are no anomaly. At least since the release of the ultimate frat movie, Animal House, way back in 1978, there have been occasional flurries of alarm about fraternity-related sexual assault, alcohol poisoning, or hazing-related injuries or deaths.

Three years ago, there was the Rolling Stone story “Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy,” which featured Dartmouth SAE member Andrew Lohse’s revelations of decadence, depravity, and outright cruelty in that organization, whose alumni include former Secretary of the Treasury and Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. Lohse’s journey back from the frat inferno began with an op-ed for the Dartmouth campus paper, in which he wrote (appetite-spoiler alert): “I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges ... to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen, and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood ... among other abuses.”

Mostly because of the prominence of its alumni, Dartmouth has long been ground zero for national concern about fraternity abuses. Animal House itself was based on screenwriter Chris Miller’s experiences as a Dartmouth member of Alpha Delta Phi. In recent years the school administration has gone through repeated rounds of hand-wringing and soul-searching over the problem. The concern became especially pronounced last year when all the bad publicity about fraternity abuses contributed to a 14 percent drop in the number of applicants to the school—the “metric” by which elite college administrators live or die.

But Dartmouth is only the tip of the iceberg. In “The Dark Power of Fraternities,” a 14,000-word cover story in the March 2014 Atlantic, based on a yearlong investigation, Caitlin Flanagan detailed the havoc fraternities wreak (at least 60 frat-related deaths since 2005 and hundreds of injuries and assaults) and the umbrella of protection they enjoy from their host universities. Fraternities, according to Flanagan, have become the tail that wags the dog in U.S. universities. Schools are captive to them, in no small part because frat alums are big donors and so wield outsized influence. Fraternities and sororities also provide the housing for one of every eight students at four-year schools, infrastructure that cash-strapped schools would find hard to replace. And, while the admissions offices may never admit it, fraternities are central to the sex-and-booze-saturated, late-adolescent-playground atmosphere that attracts students to “the college experience.”

Some schools, mostly small, Northeastern liberal arts colleges, have abolished fraternities and lived to tell the tale. If U.S. higher education is going to fulfill its historic promise as an equalizer of opportunity, more will need to follow suit.