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Why colleges tolerate fraternities
Why colleges tolerate fraternities
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“Toga Toga Toga!”
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Let’s be honest.
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Aren’t fraternities overrated?
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“TOGA!
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TOGA!”
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"Toga! Toga! Toga!"
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So, let’s take a look at the fraternities that really fit the word “frats.”
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We’ll leave out the explicitly ethnic, religious, and academic fraternities, and we’ll try
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to remember that every fraternity at every college is different.
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Still, you know the stereotype.
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It’s the type of place that chants “Nerds!
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Nerds!
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Nerds!”...like, a lot cooler than that.
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“Nerds!
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Nerds!
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Nerds!
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Nerds!”
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“Where are they?”
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“I think they’re talking about us.”
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Even when we just look at the goofy, party side of frats, there are real negatives.
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Studies have shown that frats correlate with increased binge drinking and an average .25
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drop in GPA.
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It’s only once you look into the long history of fraternities that you understand why Greek
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life became a part of college life.
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And why it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon.
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Here’s Benjamin Franklin opening a Masonic lodge.
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Fraternal organizations in the United States, like the Freemasons, are actually key to understanding
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college fraternities.
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You know that eye on his apron kinda looks like a mystical belly button?
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Early fraternity histories point to Phi Beta Kappa as the first fraternity, founded at
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William & Mary in Virginia.
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It was an honor society, and early fraternities were similarly academic.
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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.
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Morgan died mysteriously after threatening to expose Masonic secrets.
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This led to an entire political party — the anti-Masonic party — revolting against the
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Masons in America.
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It’s less about the mysterious murder than the climate.
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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,
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class day from the 1850s.
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This 1900s issue of a Sigma Nu journal shows consequences of anti-fraternity sentiment:
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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.
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Delta Upsilon started as an anti-secret fraternity – a frat without secret rituals, for this
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reason.
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It seemed like frats were on the way out.
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So what changed?
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This chart and this flagpole are equally important to understand how frats took over schools.
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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.
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Full stop.
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And colleges started to see Greek life as a tool to maintain order.
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First, fraternities provided housing for that rapidly swelling student population.
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Fraternities also provided infrastructure for disciplining a horde of students.
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“Well well well.”
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You see scenes like these and wonder why Deans keep fraternities around.
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But the administration actually brought them back.
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As former frat members aged into leadership roles, they realized that fraternities gave
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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.
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And the big reason for keeping frats around?
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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
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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.
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But the downsides of fraternities can be a lot worse than what we see in the movies.
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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.
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She notes disproportionate injuries in fraternity housing, high alcohol use, and alleged sexual
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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
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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.
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Do frats help control the problems in college life?
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Or do they create them?
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You might have noticed that we used the word fraternities a lot more than sororities, and
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part of that is historical — for much of their duration, sororities were actually called women’s
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fraternities.
