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Why colleges tolerate fraternities - Video học tiếng Anh
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Why colleges tolerate fraternities
Why colleges tolerate fraternities
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0:00
“Toga Toga Toga!”
0:02
Let’s be honest.
0:04
Aren’t fraternities overrated?
0:05
“TOGA!
0:06
TOGA!”
0:08
"Toga! Toga! Toga!"
0:10
So, let’s take a look at the fraternities that really fit the word “frats.”
0:14
We’ll leave out the explicitly ethnic, religious, and academic fraternities, and we’ll try
0:19
to remember that every fraternity at every college is different.
0:24
Still, you know the stereotype.
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It’s the type of place that chants “Nerds!
0:29
Nerds!
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Nerds!”...like, a lot cooler than that.
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“Nerds!
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Nerds!
0:35
Nerds!
0:36
Nerds!”
0:38
“Where are they?”
0:39
“I think they’re talking about us.”
0:42
Even when we just look at the goofy, party side of frats, there are real negatives.
0:48
Studies have shown that frats correlate with increased binge drinking and an average .25
0:54
drop in GPA.
0:55
It’s only once you look into the long history of fraternities that you understand why Greek
1:00
life became a part of college life.
1:03
And why it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon.
1:11
Here’s Benjamin Franklin opening a Masonic lodge.
1:17
Fraternal organizations in the United States, like the Freemasons, are actually key to understanding
1:23
college fraternities.
1:27
You know that eye on his apron kinda looks like a mystical belly button?
1:34
Early fraternity histories point to Phi Beta Kappa as the first fraternity, founded at
1:40
William & Mary in Virginia.
1:42
It was an honor society, and early fraternities were similarly academic.
1:48
By 1825, three purely social fraternities at Union College in Schenectady formed.
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The college system had begun.
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The next year, a man named William Morgan was murdered.
2:05
Morgan died mysteriously after threatening to expose Masonic secrets.
2:12
This led to an entire political party — the anti-Masonic party — revolting against the
2:18
Masons in America.
2:20
It’s less about the mysterious murder than the climate.
2:24
Secret societies were a big deal, and people were kind of afraid of them.
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That included adult fraternities like the Masons, but also secret societies in colleges.
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Colleges preferred open celebrations of school, like this bucolic, only slightly violent,
2:43
class day from the 1850s.
2:45
This 1900s issue of a Sigma Nu journal shows consequences of anti-fraternity sentiment:
2:52
Laws that banned fraternities or forced them to operate in secret.
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Even successful fraternities had to find strategies to fight this.
3:01
Delta Upsilon started as an anti-secret fraternity – a frat without secret rituals, for this
3:08
reason.
3:09
It seemed like frats were on the way out.
3:13
So what changed?
3:17
This chart and this flagpole are equally important to understand how frats took over schools.
3:24
Look at that jump from 63,000 students in 1870 to 600,000 in 1920.
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It’s massive.
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This jump in enrollment created a lot of problems — and fraternities helped colleges solve
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them.
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Like that kid on the flagpole.
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College “flag rush” - where freshmen and sophomores battled over a flag -
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was popular for everybody, not just frat kids.
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Look at those ripped clothes.
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Students were injured and even killed during the scramble.
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The point is, college students are idiotic.
4:02
Full stop.
4:03
And colleges started to see Greek life as a tool to maintain order.
4:09
First, fraternities provided housing for that rapidly swelling student population.
4:15
Fraternities also provided infrastructure for disciplining a horde of students.
4:21
“Well well well.”
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You see scenes like these and wonder why Deans keep fraternities around.
4:27
But the administration actually brought them back.
4:30
As former frat members aged into leadership roles, they realized that fraternities gave
4:35
them somebody to yell at.
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“Greg, what is the worst fraternity on this campus?”
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Fraternities are distributed discipline.
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Deans could yell at Greek leaders, who could yell at upperclassmen, who could yell at underclassmen,
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instead of having to discipline that giant section of the bar chart all by themselves.
4:59
And the big reason for keeping frats around?
5:02
Administrators realized that frats led to money after college.
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Alumni donations from fraternity and sorority members are higher than from other students.
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Students loved the university through their fraternities — and the university had a
5:20
lot of reasons to stay chained to them.
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That same paper that showed that fraternities increase binge drinking?
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It also showed that they increase alumni income because of the networking opportunities.
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That’s without even mentioning the lifelong friendships that Greek members form.
5:43
But the downsides of fraternities can be a lot worse than what we see in the movies.
5:48
It’s easy to marvel at 100 year old hazing, but as Caitlin Flanagan wrote in The Atlantic,
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all that binge drinking and hazing can have life-threatening consequences.
5:59
She notes disproportionate injuries in fraternity housing, high alcohol use, and alleged sexual
6:07
assault, along with a lasting legacy of racial discrimination.
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Whether fraternities are overrated depends how you view them and how you view college
6:20
students.
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We’re all asking the same questions as those administrators in the 1800s.
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And we have to figure out if their solutions are still the right ones today.
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How you view students, and maybe even all people, changes your answer.
6:36
Do frats help control the problems in college life?
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Or do they create them?
6:51
You might have noticed that we used the word fraternities a lot more than sororities, and
6:55
part of that is historical — for much of their duration, sororities were actually called women’s
7:02
fraternities.
