Brotherhood Hits the Roofie 3
Meanwhile, apologists for the fraternity systems are doing their best to impeach the original report (follow the link).
I was once a college student. Granted that that was a long, long time ago, the charges depicted in the original article were consistent with everything I knew and observed about fraternities at my school and, during a year of grad work, at Mr. Jefferson’s University. I doubt that much has changed since then. Men are still pigs, and most fraternities are still sties.
Animal House may have been a comedy, but in comedy there is truth. The US college fraternity system, like Crabby Appleton, is rotten to the core, as are its apologists and defenders.
December 4, 2014 at 9:42 pm
I was in a fraternity at Va Tech, albeit a long time ago. Even back in those days there were stories and rumors about UVA. Those stories involved more than just fraternities at UVA. It appears the administration there turned a blind eye to many things on that campus.
Va Tech was and is a far more conservative university than that other university in Virginia. I never saw or heard anything about that type of behavior on the Tech campus and I’m certain I would have. I was well connected in the inter-fraternity council. The biggest offense was probably under-aged drinking and that wasn’t isolated to fraternites.
During my early working life, I was chapter adviser for my fraternity at two other universities. I never saw or heard of that behavior by fraternities at those schools, either.
UVA has a reputation that is probably well-earned and well-deserved. I’m sure the problem exists elsewhere, but we should not be tarred with the same brush.
December 5, 2014 at 11:36 pm
I also went to a college that was much more socially conservative than Mr. Jefferson’s University, and, frankly, the frats got away with everything. There was a hierarchy: The Lambda Chis were on top (as it were), and they got the cheerleaders. The Sigma Nus were the football frat; they had wild parties but were basically harmless. The KAs were Animal House without the intellectualism. The Sigma Chis were normal human beings.
The existence of exceptions does not disprove the rule. However positive your own experience may have been (and I know it was positive), it does not impeach my point. The “Greek” system is a broken legacy of privilege that serves primarily to insulate its participants from responsibility for their own actions at far too many institutions of higher Budweiser. It may not have been so in your experience, but I submit that your experience is atypical.
As an aside, I find it amusing when fraternities conduct token “service projects” to prove that they exist for some other reason than Par-Tay!
I got nothing against Par-Tay! BTDT and had a lot of fun. but I did not try to dress it up in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.
December 6, 2014 at 12:56 pm
We did service projects and I won’t argue that our motives were totally pure. We were trying to combat the negative stereotype of fraternities in the community, we got points from the Inter-Fraternity Council in the IFC’s ranking system, and we were trying to look good in the eyes of the University because they still were not totally sold on the idea of fraternities on campus. We also did it for the same reason everyone else does “volunteer work” – it made us feel good.
All that aside, I doubt seriously if the people who received blood from our blood drives, food from our food drives, or whose children got toys at Christmas gave a darn what our motives were. If those folks were left to rely on the “good works” of the student body at large, they would have been out of luck. The average student wasn’t involved in such service projects.