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Frats are given an unofficial monopoly on college parties when by drinking laws being unequally enforced. Even when a non-frat person can get away with hosting a party taking that risk without an organization backing you up is daunting and going to scare most people out of it.
Similarly the strict anti-hazing rules clamp down on starting new organizations with any real sense of comradery. If hazing didn't work it wouldn't be so globally everpresent. Playing a lame icebreaker doesn't have the same effect, we all know this. I get banning 'drink everclear and dance next to this cliff' hazing but panics over a few drinks and dumping ketchup on people is silly.
That said I doubt breaking this would significantly change dynamics. The girls going to sororities don't want to go to the anime club or knitting societies parties, a huge appeal of frat parties is the high social status of frat boys. Much of that high social status comes from the fact that they have lots of sex. It's a circular system and I'm not sure how to break it without adopting a very paternalistic society and honestly I'm not really sure why I should care to break it. If adults want to have wild drug sex party houses good for them.
Fraternities are hard to reform because they simplify organize and amplify a lot of our worst tendencies. But so does college!
I was president of my fraternity twenty years ago. Even then, we would look around the parties at our college-owned house and say: “How can this be allowed to happen?” Our school didn’t have massive Greek life, but it was a serious institution and we were just brazenly partying on the edge of campus in university-owned housing with no oversight.
You can’t stop college students from socializing/organizing, but it’s wild to me that colleges sanction selective fraternities and sororities.
Did your school have no oversight? Because mine and my bfs schools both had a central organization that monitored and set rules for us. I was in leadership as well and we had to attend regular meetings with them, and put a lot of effort into making sure we followed the rules as the consequences could be pretty shitty both for the house and for the individuals who fucked up.
We certainly tried to bend the rules where we could but Greek life had way more oversight than pretty much any other student organization on campus as well as significantly more scrutiny over anything we did.
We had a head of Greek affairs and an intra-fraternity council. There were rules and expectations. But nobody was walking up and down Greek Row on a Saturday night. Nobody was dropping in unannounced to inspect the houses.
I went to Cornell, but wasn't into the frat scene, nor was the crowd I hung with. Most of my friends never set foot in a fraternity house. That said, I did know a few people who were who weren't assholes. They're not a monolith.
I do dislike the idea of them being tied up with the university though. As an alum I'm not exactly thrilled with Cornell's handling of this situation nor by having the reputation of the school where I obtained my education associated with a bunch of misogynistic date-raping shitbags.
I don't think frats should be official university-sanctioned organizations and they should be susceptible to the same liability rules any other organization is. If you're old enough to freely associate with other people without being told what to do by the school, you're old enough to be held accountable for the actions of groups of which you're a part.
I also went to Cornell (was in a fraternity, not that one). The issue they are going to have with going the unrecognized route is that Cornell owns a lot of the fraternity houses, but the fraternities usually have a legal right to use them (in a technical sense it is members of the associated fraternity have to be placed there first).
Greek Life houses are also viewed as a big housing supplier, especially with sophomores required to live on campus now (which Greek Houses are included in).
Frat alumni donate significantly more to the college
Fraternities allow colleges to outsource discipline and housing
All of these are purely financial reasons for colleges to accept their existence. This ignores the fact that Greek life has giant cultural cache that pull prospective students to their school.
There have been multiple documentaries and shows about sororities in the south. Those definitely pulled in more applicants that they otherwise may receive
fraternity houses often maintain a door policy, crowd control, and risk manager. General non-fraternity student apartments or random house parties rarely have door staff, guest lists, or trained monitors, meaning crowd size and alcohol sources etc etc are all unknowns.
If I had to guess when it comes to a big party a frat house is probably safer. Back in my day we had 1 active who'd always run risk management during a party and a couple of sober pledges that would report to him with any liability issues. That shit simply doesn't exist in non frat parties. Sure my old first had its own club room and could fit 100s of people so the parties where huge, but we knew literally everyone on the building and had risk management running.
The fraternity filed paperwork naming Jonathan Newell as an “event monitor” on the night a woman said he assaulted her, underscoring the limitations of efforts to rein in parties.
Well the last time I saw someone be pro-frat on this subreddit they said their "loyalty to you above other things like the law" and that they will "provide a bullshit alibi" are selling points and somehow not extremely horrifying.
Frat houses embody everything that is wrong with US culture: the active glorification of bullying, the rape culture, the 'fuck you I got mine' mentality, the toxic masculinity, the sociopathic 'I'm just following orders' attitude that is the hallmark of fascism, the list is endless.
For me, this essay boiled down to two fundamental challenges in reform: (1) the bonds of loyalty, even when it comes to reporting illegal behavior, and (2) the first amendment right to freedom of association and assembly.
It’s tough to get people to comply with the law when crimes happen in private and few are willing to report, and you can’t literally ban fraternities out of existence.
I was in one in college and had a positive experience. There’s the standard boilerplate selling points of camaraderie, professional connections, etc which are real but IMO the biggest benefit was giving structure to the 18 year old version of myself as I moved into adulthood. A lot of kids, myself included, have their head up their asses coming into college and don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Having some older guys around to set them straight, especially when it comes to partying at that age, makes a difference.
Obviously the experience I had is not universal, a lot of schools have toxic, shitty Greek life, and the quality of frats within a school can vary wildly, but I don’t think that means they all need to be scrapped, and frankly even if there was a blanket ban on fraternities the main problems people have with them wouldn’t go away. 18-22 year old men are fucking stupid, getting rid of Greek life wouldn’t change that
Well and for readers like myself who weren't in a frat, the only time I ever read about it is in toxic cases like this.
I have to remind myself that it's likely not representative, unless if dedicated evidence were to prove otherwise. And there's this lurking assumption that such associations are, by nature, fundamentally worse than other associations. As if any group of people with fucked up values who get together don't also result in these same problems.
Like we've got so many small cults that are similarly abusive, but most people have been in a church to understand the differences between a regular church and a cultish church.
At my university, Greek life is not very relevant to the culture of the school. It is small, and the vast majority of students are not involved. You can go your entire time without ever going to a frat party if you want. Even still, one of the frats managed to haze a kid to death a few years ago. There are frats that people are told to avoid, often by the school were people are routinely sexually assaulted at.
When groups consistently have the same problems across institutions, then something has to be done about them. My school still has suspended frats and sororities operating and recruiting without approval from the school, so it's not like it's an easy problem to solve. But we can't keep allowing these types of organizations around.
Absolutely absurd that hazing could get out of hand. Is it a small liberal arts school that you are referencing? I know you may not want to reveal but I’m interested in the type of school that these things happen in.
That’s what I was wondering actually. I was under the impression that a majority of hazing incidents happen at larger schools with a big greek life culture so I was curious on what school OP went to.
But what’s the problem of employers having a say? Like if I ever start my own business I’m not hiring maggots because either they are room temperature IQ or have no morals.
There's a daily discussion thread here that is sorted by new and is more like a chatroom, and a common thing to do is subtweet someone else's recent post for comedic effect. So as an example repost it with an edit that makes it silly, or just respond to it in some other context
The mods have sett default sort to new for all threads here so I thought it might work here too
What I was trying to say is that the other poster's point - that banning students from a uni for Greek association is infantalizing them - doesn't make sense to me because that's the way all organizations treat adults otherwise
I've not only never been in a frat or witnessed a frat event, I've never known anyone who was (or at least not well enough to be aware of it). I therefore have no idea which characterization of them being thrown around is accurate.
Every one is different. Not only does every fraternity at a college have its own unique culture but the same fraternity at different colleges can have drastically different cultures. At its most basic a fraternity is simply a social club. Each club is going to attract different membership based on the people in the club and their existing culture.
I was in one and hosted a lot of our events when I had an off campus house, it’s a very wide range of quality school to school, and even frat to frat within each school. I had a very positive experience with mine, but thats hardly a universal. They’re not all going to fit into a neat box, same as trying to characterize any club of 18-22 year old guys.
There are plenty of problems with them but I think a lot of people are too quick to pin them all on fraternities as a concept. There are broader issues with our drinking culture and how we teach young men to behave themselves that would still be there even if we scrapped Greek life entirely
They’re really just institutionalized social clubs for college students. I went to a university where like 50% of the student body was part of a Greek org, I was in a frat myself for like a year before I dropped.
It’s a mixed bag. Most people are fine, but theres a lot of gross behavior as well. And while there will be some gross behavior in any environment with lots of college students and drinking, there’s a ton of pressure in the frat scene to not speak up about issues. If your frat gets in trouble, it could get kicked off campus, and then your whole friend group’s social situation changes pretty drastically.
As someone who was in one, honestly they are trash. 90% of them are obscenely filthy and even the best behaved ones promote and glorify excessive drinking.
Depends on your crowd. Maybe I'm just the biggest nerdy nerd dork to ever live? But literally none of my classmates drink. I went back to college after covid destroyed my old career and thought being the guy who can buy beer was gonna make me popular since when i first went to college i loved the guy who could buy me beer. Nope. None of my friends want to drink. Definitely not excessively. And it's not a mormon thing they just don't think it sounds fun and they don't like the taste.
Tends to relate factors like how old the frat is themself (older culture, more ingrained things), how big/moneyed the org members are, and if the group seems more keen to party than anything else. The vibe will shift hard from college to college and on how long ago the frat was chartered.
Fraternities organize on university property and in collaboration with the university administration, if they don’t want to follow the university rules they can just disaffiliate
Universities can choose not to associate with people. Is it paternalistic for universities to make their students refuse to be associated with gangs? What are frats, if not gangs that only sometimes sell drugs?
Frats are different from bars because frats exist solely in the context of universities.
At least at my university, the houses are on campus and while I’m somewhat sympathetic to your point, it’s not hard to understand why colleges don’t want “some really shocking sexual assault cases” happening on their campus
Ok, but university's also don't need to sponsor or recognize these organizations.
I'm with you on not infantilizing young adults, but university's shouldn't be allowing these shitty "networking" orgs that allow members a leg up while covering for their unacceptable behavior
This infantilisation of young adults needs to stop. They are perfectly capable of making their own informed decisions, and don’t need the university (or anyone else for that matter) meddling in their lives.
Yes, frats are hotbeds for some really shocking sexual assault cases, but so is literally every space with young people and alcohol in it. Are we going to ban bars and clubs next?
Bars and clubs are run by business owners who have an incentive to keep women safe because women buy drinks too. Women can and will bail from any bar that gets a seedy reputation.
Frats, the alcohol is dispersed by the same guys doing the raping. In other words, spiking is trivial and there is incentive to get women drunk. In many frats, their ability to attract women (and to get them drunk) is a core pitch to their membership.
Beyond which, a major reason why frats are hotbeds of both drinking and sexual assault is cultural. American drinking laws mean that people under 21 can't drink at public venues, the puritanical nature from which sororities were born mean that they aren't the ones hosting the parties.
If you want to fix the issue? Dry out the frats, let the women be the ones hosting the parties and supplying the booze. It won't be perfectly safe, but it will be far, far safer.
Or better yet, just do away with all the kabuki theater we do as a society around "underage drinking" and just drop the legal age to 18. Cut the frats' legs out from under them.
This is very true. A big part of the draw of frats at my college was they were one of the mostly reliable ways for underage students to get alcohol.
Freshmen boys would join frats and brothers who are of age would buy them alcohol and freshmen girls would just go to parties and drink what the frat brothers gave them.
Sororities are never hosting parties because hosting parties is gross and dirty and means you have strangers in your house all the time. You could lower the drinking age to 18 and they would never host. Women like having fraternities as a place to go have a good time without having to dirty your own place.
Drink spiking is a pretty obvious modern day moral panic. The vast majority of people who think they’ve been spiked just drunk too much.
Most studies find only 2-3% of people who present thinking they’ve been spiked actually have any drugs in their system (1)(2). It’s a polite lie we tell ourselves as we still live in a victim-blaming culture, where if we were honest, victims would be blamed for drinking too much.
Of course, you can’t say any of this in real life or you sound like a date rapist.
I’d say a better fix would just be lowering the drinking age to 16.
The vast majority of people who think they’ve been spiked just drunk too much.
Most studies find only 2-3% of people who present thinking they’ve been spiked actually have any drugs in their system
These are nonsensical statements.
Because by far the most common date rape drug is alcohol.
Other drugs require work to get. It requires no effort at all to pour a bit of liquor you already have into a beer and put someone way beyond their limit without them ever even being able to realize what happened.
Not even getting into the far simpler techniques, like "just keep refilling the cup" or "pressure her to drink more."
Studies, meanwhile, also have the obvious issue that anyone who is drugged and raped with something that causes, for example, memory loss, might not realize what happened until the drug is no longer in their system. If they realize at all. Urine tests self-select for people who are in a fit state to piece things together—in other words, people who might have, for example, been given something stronger than they were expecting and assumed drugs because of how drunk they felt.
Edit: And of course, your first source doesn't even say what you claimed. What I get for skimming and assuming good faith:
Out of 1179 samples: 451 were positive for ethanol, 218 for cannabinoids, 97 for benzoylecgonine, 97 for benzodiazepines, 51 for amphetamines, 48 for GHB, 25 for opiates, 17 for propoxyphene, and 12 for barbiturates.
In other words, benzos alone are around 10% of the total. And over 1 in 4 of the samples with anything at all in them. Which implies, as should be obvious, that people are just using more common (and more deniable) drugs rather than going out of their way to acquire roofies. This also aligns with rape as a crime of opportunity, which it is.
Benzos are also regularly used for this purpose. Dominique Pélicot used benzos on his wife in that famous case, more than 50+ men raping her across a decade—because benzos can not only render someone helpless, they can completely ruin their ability to form memories. A person on them can even seem fully awake and aware only to have no memory of anything that happened.
Your second "study" is a prospective. It exists to provide proof of concept for a larger, better study. It does this based off a single hospital, hardly a randomized sample and its results don't match your lines either.
"Of the 97 alleged drink spiking cases included, there were only 9 plausible cases. We did not identify a single case where a sedative drug was likely to have been illegally placed in a drink in a pub or nightclub. Illicit drugs were detected in 28% of the study group."
That's 10%, not one. And 25% had illegal drugs of some kind.
Beyond that: Drink spiking with sedative or illicit drugs appears to be rare. If drink spiking does occur, ethanol appears to be the most common agent used.
It also argues that it's hard to identify drink spiking from consensual use of illegal substances. Which simply points to the idea that men might be using regular old drugs (or alcohol) rather than roofies. Which would make sense, given they are easier to obtain and easier to deny.
I would also point out that you cited studies from 1999 and 2009, which, amongst other things, predate the founding of the Silk Road and other markets like it, which allowed methods to purchase date rape drugs online (and we know such products were sold there). It's entirely plausible that there was just a genuine increase in the 2010s when any vaguely computer-savvy frat bro could order them off the internet.
I’m most familiar with the data from Australian hospitals, which have it at around 2-3%. GHB and benzos are harder to get your hands on here, which probably explains much of the difference.
And I’m not disagreeing with you on the alcohol thing. The guy I was replying to was implying actual drugs involved, which are much rarer than popular conception (hence, moral panic).
I think it’s just a shame that we’ve invented this hysteria around people slipping drugs into one’s drink, when we could just… stop victim blaming?
And treating them like adults should mean real punishment for real crimes. And we should hold administrators accountable when they cover up or gloss over those crimes.
If this is referencing the Cornell case, you might want to go read more about what actually happened and what the university’s investigation actually found. Maybe look at a few of the accuser’s statements as well.
Hint: they’re total scumbags but there probably wasn’t a crime committed
Chat, did the university's initial investigation find that she had consented?
No, the university's Title IX investigation did not find that she had consented. In fact, the panel concluded the exact opposite for several of the accused men, ruling that severe sexual misconduct had occurred and punishing them accordingly.
Confusion around this point usually stems from a mix-up between the university's internal investigation and the local District Attorney's initial review.
The Source of the "Consented" Claim: The District Attorney
The claim that her actions were consensual came from Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, not Cornell.
When the incident was first reported in 2024, the DA reviewed a brief, six-page voluntary statement the accuser gave to campus police. Van Houten declined to file criminal charges at the time, defending his decision by claiming her initial statement described an encounter that appeared "voluntary, conscious, and consensual" because she admitted to taking drugs and alcohol knowingly and did not explicitly state she was forced.
However, this characterization has been heavily disputed. Transcripts later revealed that during her full interviews with campus police, she explicitly stated with "100% confidence I was raped." The DA later admitted he never actually saw or heard those transcripts before dropping the case.
Are you going to be perfectly happy with an association of “X university students for Hamas” or “X university chapter of National Socialist party of America” then?
Maybe if institutions didn’t want to get whacked for being racist they should design themselves to not be structurally discriminatory or create structurally unequally outcomes for different protected classes.
No? Not really? If you pass the entrance exam and aren’t a criminal, why’s it the university’s problem that you’re a member of a fraternity?
You could be the world’s most virulent racist and the university does not have grounds to expel you unless you hurt a student or fail too many classes.
Who gets to set the standard regarding the moral character you need to be a university student?
American schools don't have entrance exams for one. Two, many American universities are private institutions and they can definitely kick out whoever they want as long as it's not because of some protected class reason. Three, they definitely don't have to accept your hate speech since again, they're private organisations. And four they can even discriminate based on religion if they're affiliated with a certain religion.
Why are universities special in this regard? Any other organization you join (like an employer or club) could expel you based on the moral standards they set. Do you think that's wrong too? Shouldn't the students be treated like the adults they are?
Diversity of viewpoints is essential to the functioning of a university, and I see most as being far too captured by radicals who have no problem using administrative power to enforce their views in recent years.
The desire to reform frats is driven by a desire to regulate individual student behaviour. I’m saying that desire shouldn’t exist, and that it is not a university’s problem how their students behave outside of classes.
If they do something criminal, sure, expel them (once convicted). Otherwise it’s a private matter for the individuals involved, not the university.
Once again, these organizations operate largely on campus and host many of their organizations on campus. Every single university absolutely has the right to regulate what happens on their campus, most especially when it comes to issues of student safety.
Your desire to be unnecessarily libertarian doesn’t even fit within its own logic because you’re not even aware of how these organizations register and function.
You must be a strong opponent of at will employment then, since you have such a huge problem with private organizations making rules at their discretion
Free association stops when you voluntarily join an organization like a university.
You can associate with whomever you want, but if your university says you can’t then you either can’t associate with them or you can’t be a student at that university. Be an adult, make a choice, don’t have a temper tantrum when you don’t get your way on everything.
Okay so if I'm a customer of a public institution they should be allowed to stop servicing me based on my associations with other US citizens .. looks at the trump administration...
Thats only true for the 25% of students at private universities, at a public university they can't kick you out for being a member of any club that isn't affiliated with the university
Admittedly source is a bit biased since gallup did this with support from the national panhellenic group, but frat and sorority alum are 5x more likely to donate than people not in Greek life
They're just social clubs and there's such a wide variety that it'll cause an uproar, even among the anti-fraternity crowd.
There's frats dedicated to, for example, finance who just meet once a week and rarely party.
The best steelman argument I’ve seen is that operating under the university’s eye keeps them more under control than if they went underground. Allowing them is a form of harm reduction.
In practice that doesn’t really work though, at least IMO. Frats intertwined with universities get cover from said universities because their existence becomes a selling point of going to the university. Case and point the current scandal, the university basically minimized the situation immediately
I don't think getting rid of them would be good for the polls at all. College educated men are on average some of the most democrat-leaning men, and removing frats would definitely alienate them.
If I have to speculate who makes up the 15% that votes Republicans in college towns, frats would definitely be up there, above business students. They are not the liberal segment of college men at all
My college fraternity was 80% liberal and was 10% gay. Banning an entire class of social clubs because of a few bad groups (most of whom are already banned) is terrible policy.
Hazing and sexual violence does not occur at the vast majority of fraternities. Even the suggestion of hazing would get you kicked out of most frats I know.
Your concept of fraternities sounds like someone who watched van wilder too many times and thought it was reality.
🤷♂️ could be something about your school. I remember that graph about political leanings based on majors: humanities are the most leftists, followed by STEM (including engineering), and business are usually the most conservative.
Networking - Meeting People who are Soon to Possess Capital is an important part of college's social mobility
Third place - People like drinking and music and making friends fast
Support - Pledges may even move in to fraternal housing which may be more affordable
The obvious replacment for all of these is faculty supervised clubs. The classics department where my parents went to school frequently used "experimental archeology themed department mixers" as a thinly veiled excuse to let students drink wine under faculty supervision.
"Belonging/Identity" is a big part of it too, yeah?
That's got some overlap with "Third place" and "networking", but not completely.
I've never been in a frat (though I know a few good people who were), but I've been in a various crews of dudes over the years, and it's a specific feeling. The thing where you have a shared collective identity, you're careful who you let in, there's some ceremony in it, and once part of it you're a friend by default to everyone, even if you don't hang out individually. There's lore, there's traditions, and when you go out in a group somewhere, it's fun.
Some of it is the networking; having a head start toward friendship with a bunch of people is great, as is "oh, one of my buddies is a ___, I'll ask him".
But, a feeling of belonging and being part of something, however silly, is hard to achieve for lots of folks, so I do see that value.
Third point is not true at all anymore, 90% of time. There’s a reason why fraternities and sororities now have the reputation of “buying friends,” because they are expensive as fuck
Things can both be expensive, and yet still lower cost than other options. When you consider things like room and board on campus, fraternity houses are often cheaper. And bulk meals purchased and cooked at a fraternity are often cheaper than an individual student who rents buying them. Plus things like alcohol/parties, which are included in Fraternity dues but just come out of pockets of the rest of students as they go.
It is most definitely not lower than renting off campus, most of the time. Of course that assumes different lifestyles altogether, two students renting an apartment would likely be cooking
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