Furor over ‘Greek life’ of college fraternities
Print Edition
Fraternities have long been a fixture of American college life, but revelations about sexual assault and racism are casting a pall over hard-partying “Greek life” on campus.
Some are going so far as to question the future of fraternities, an institution that dates back to the earliest days of the United States.
“This is the biggest outcry I have seen in the past 50 years,” said Laura Hamilton, a sociology professor at the University of California at Merced.
In recent weeks, several fraternity chapters have been suspended or dissolved at a pace the Chronicle of Higher Education newspaper has described as “an unusually rapid clip.”
Video of racist chants by members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter at the University of Oklahoma touched off a national furor with their reference to lynching and use of the N-word.
The chapter was promptly shuttered and two students expelled.
The Penn State chapter of Kappa Delta Rho has been suspended for a year as police investigate a private Facebook page featuring images of naked and unconscious women who attended its parties.
And the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity at the University of Michigan has been suspended after its members were involved in vandalizing a ski resort, causing massive damage to 44 rooms at an estimated cost of more than US$400,000.
Booze-infused frat parties and hazing rituals that morph into sexual assault, accidents and even death have turned up regularly in US news media over the years.
Claims of a gang rape at the University of Virginia, reported in Rolling Stone magazine, were later discredited. The incident, however, fueled a nationwide debate about sexual assault on American campuses.
With their own, often historic premises, fraternities “generally have a monopoly on alcohol consumption for those under 21,” Hamilton, who studies the sociology of university life, pointed out.
Over the years, the fraternities have “reinvented themselves as fun sort of party houses,” with no policing of what goes on within their doors, according to Hamilton.
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