The word "fraternity" is so often associated with scandal, with binge drinking, or with new-member hazing. And I have heard it all. In fact I bought into some of that rhetoric for most of my life.
But is this public perception of fraternities wrong? How could so many people have a skewed perception of a phenomenon present on almost every college campus?
We ought to reevaluate how we perceive Greek life. I don't intend to deny that there are definitely problematic aspects to some fraternities; I'm not going to justify binge-drinking, nor will I justify any fraternities that haze their members. Instead, I will argue that fraternities, as a whole, ought to remain institutionalized because the alternative is much worse.
Most concerns with fraternities are societally-based. The most salient anxieties about fraternities are the harms that the aforementioned inflict upon society and college campuses. Whether this is sexual assault, or binge-drinking, or the pledging process (which I've heard described as a "cycle of abuse"), this belief is particularly damning. And with a new story coming out every few months about some form of sexual assault perpetrated by members of a fraternity, these beliefs are becoming increasingly dogmatic.
These views become more solidified when media outlets like The Guardian post a survey-styled study that concludes that men in fraternities are more likely to commit sexual assault. Let's disregard that the study was only conducted at one university and was only indicative of their college campus, and that another study found that fraternity members were less likely than non-Greek students to display hyper-masculinity and hold aggressive attitudes toward women. For a moment, let's assume that the conclusion The Guardian arrived at is a correct one. What do we do then?
The debate to this point has been mostly whether or not fraternities are actually, on the whole, responsible for this sexual misconduct and abuse-form of hazing. This is a different kind of article.
I ask you to put aside whatever preconceived notions you hold about Greek life and ask yourself two questions about fraternities, assuming the above is correct:
1. If a university bans fraternities as a whole, will the alternative (banning fraternities) yield more positive results?
2. Can we truly separate campus culture from fraternity culture?
In order: let's imagine what will happen if all universities ban fraternities on their college campuses. Disregard the backlash the university will receive in response, but rather look towards the response by the fraternities.Even if college administration legally prohibits Greek life, a group of rebellious college students will nonetheless secretly create Greek organizations. Fraternities represent catharsis (Read: partying), you'll find that fraternities are resilient.
Members of Greek organizations will simply go underground in the exact same way they went underground at Brandeis. And this is far from preferable to school-sponsored fraternity activity, because that can at least be somewhat monitored and regulated. If an incident of alcohol poisoning occurs at a frat party, the individuals in the fraternity will not be able to call the EMT service on campus. Instead, they will be forced to call 911, which they will be less incentivized to do. Why? Because the house is being rented by a few college students off-campus, and calling authorities to your unofficial fraternity house will not look good on the landlord, and you are likely to lose your lease.
Brothers of that house can also face underage drinking and negligence charges. An on-campus fraternity is going to be able to call the medical services at the university itself. On-campus fraternity members will also be more likely to report those who have consumed alcohol past their limits because they may be required, many times both by the university and the fraternity, to take courses to raise their consciousness on the importance of intervening when one has had too much to drink.
Fraternities will become far more opaque when not under the eyeful scrutiny of the university. If there is at least some university regulation, and the fraternity is located on-campus rather than off of it, their activities become far more apparent to the university, and the university is able to regulate the fraternity and definitively modify what it wishes to modify.
Onto the second question; at what point can we make the distinction between culture on a college campus and the culture inside a fraternity? It appears quite obvious that "frat culture" is a reflection of campus culture. This holds true for any organization, yet many don't make that same distinction for Greek life. A club (and its members) for mental health activism is going to be much different a university where communal self-care is emphasized than a university where individualism is valued above the aforementioned self-care.
In that same vein, if one attends a huge "party school", they will find many of the problems associated with the university will be found in the fraternity itself. Moving these fraternities off-campus is ignoring the actualproblem. As Martin Schwartz and Carol Nogrady of University of Minnesota Duluth described in Violence Against Women, anti-fraternity efforts largely ignore the actual problem, and sexual and alcohol education on college campuses as a whole must be prioritized.
Fraternities are not the source of the problem in some universities, they are a symptom of it. There needs to be widespread reform to intervene and prevent all forms of sexual assault and exploitation on college campuses.
The problems people oft-times find with fraternities, therefore, are problems that must be addressed at the university level. The fraternities are not the problem - lack of education about alcohol and about sexual assault is.
Once you look at fraternities through the lens of the two questions I have posed, I urge you to reevaluate the way you look at fraternities.
