When I went off to the University of Georgia as a dewy-eyed freshman in 1968, I assumed I would join a fraternity. Everybody else did. UGA was the biggest fraternity school in the country and it was understood that you had to be a frat if you wanted to be somebody. By the end of my first semester, I had seen enough to know I would never go Greek.
Two events have brought these memories back to me in recent weeks. The first was my 18-year-old niece, who recently left her small town and sheltered home to go to a large Southern university, where she was drawn to the Greek scene like a moth to the flame. (She was actually able to go out for rush the same week she hit campus! In my youth, we had to wait a semester to rush.)
The second event was viewing the movie Borat, with its drunk frat boys from the University of South Carolina, proudly mouthing their racist and sexist bullshit.
It seems that almost any time bad news comes from an American college campus — violence, vandalism, alcohol abuse, racist or sexist behavior — it involves Greeks. Already in this academic year, Greeks from Clemson University have been charged with vandalism and a pledge was so badly beaten in a hazing incident at USC that he had to be hospitalized.
Here’s a little exercise. Go to Google and type in “college fraternity crime.” You will get 867,000 hits. Change “crime” to “alcohol abuse”: 469,000 hits. Try “discipline”: 543,000 hits. “Anti-intellectual”: 12,400 hits. And, of course, “rape”: 458,000 hits.
Sexual assault is an epidemic on American college campuses and the Greek culture is at the center of it.
According to a 1998 study in the Journal of College Student Development, “One population that has received attention in the research literature on sexual violence is college fraternity men. Qualitative assessments of fraternities suggest that some fraternity members reinforce attitudes among themselves that help perpetuate sexual coercion against women….”
The article cited another study which “found that fraternity members committed 55 percent of the gang rapes reported between 1980 and 1990 on college campuses. Fraternity members have also been shown to have more traditional attitudes toward women and to believe more strongly in rape myths when compared to men who live in coeducational housing….
“Others have shown that men who are in fraternities are more sexually coercive than other men…. [Researchers] suggest that a combination of more traditional sex roles and the fraternal socialization process contribute to this higher level of rape myth belief.”
A sign of progress among frats is that an increasing number of them now have some kind of educational or “awareness-raising” programs concerning women and sexual violence. But this just begs the question: Are there any other social or fraternal organizations which feel the need to pay outsiders to remind them not to rape women?
Hand-in-hand with sexual violence is the issue of alcohol abuse. The overwhelming majority of sexual assaults on campus involve use of alcohol by the victim, the attacker or both. Furthermore, every year at least one undergraduate in America manages to kill himself through alcohol poisoning. Many others are hospitalized.
In 1993, Henry Wechsler of Harvard School of Public Health conducted his famous College Alcohol Study. Wechsler estimated that 44 percent of college students are binge drinkers — defined as the consumption of five or more (four for women) drinks in one sitting.
Wechsler’s data were especially damning for Greeks. He estimated that four of five fraternity members are binge drinkers. Moreover, he found that both fraternity and sorority members are more likely to suffer the extreme consequences of serious drinking. Dozens of reports since Wechsler’s have repeated these and similar findings, blaming the fraternity culture itself as the breeding ground of binge drinking.
Add to this the general atmosphere of anti-intellectualism which imbues the Greek system and you have a perennial problem that seems to undermine the very foundation of higher education.
In curtailing their fraternities, in 1992, the board of trustees and administration of Dartmouth College, declared fraternities to be “antithetical to the mission of the college.” Middlebury College closed its fraternities, citing the report from its Task Force on Social Life: “As society has changed fraternities have not, and therefore, have become an anachronism.” Colby College also abolished fraternities, citing a variety of reasons: fraternities were “anti-intellectual,” encouraged narrow social and academic experiences for their members, had restrictive membership policies, practiced hazing, discriminated on the basis of sex, and were hampering the recruiting efforts of the admissions office.
Based on Borat and what I have seen on campuses in recent years, little has changed since my undergraduate days. People will continue to be hurt and have their educations disrupted by these antisocial, anachronistic organizations. I hope my niece is not one of them.
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