Of Frats and Men

Subsequent reporting by the Washington Post, followed by investigations by the Columbia School of Journalism and the Charlottesville Police Department, revealed that not a single detail of Jackie’s rape story as reported by Erdely could be independently verified, including the party where the assault was supposed to have occurred. “Drew,” the Phi Psi brother who had supposedly lured Jackie into the frat house that fateful night, had apparently been invented by Jackie well before the alleged rape in an effort to make a male classmate jealous.

Lining Rugby Road and its feeder streets were the rest of the 40-odd fraternity and sorority houses, interspersed with a handful of university-owned buildings. Beyond them, Rugby Road turned into a suburban thoroughfare, winding through the dogwood clumps and daffodil beds of one of Charlottesville’s oldest and most affluent neighborhoods. Some of the Greek chapter houses, built during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a style that copied the red-brick walls and white-columned porches of Thomas Jefferson’s idiosyncratic architecture for the original campus, had once belonged to the most affluent residents. Now, they were distinctly the worse for wear after well over a century of Greek ownership, haphazard landscaping, and sloppy-student housekeeping. Like many other UVA-affiliated structures, they were mildly defaced with the graffiti tags “Z” and “I.M.P.,” symbols of two secret societies that are even more esoteric than the Greek houses themselves. Nonetheless, the dense, barn-colored brickwork and double-story porches lent them a grandeur that seemed indestructible.

The three-story Zeta house was one of the smaller of these faded mansions, housing only about 30 of the sorority chapter’s hundred or so members, but it, too, boasted the red brick and white-painted porch columns that echoed the columns on the façade of the Rotunda, Jefferson’s signature piece of campus architecture. Two fraternity houses, St. Elmo Hall and Phi Gamma Delta, flanked one side of Zeta; on the other side was another sorority house (Delta Gamma), two fraternities (St. Anthony Hall and Sigma Alpha Epsilon), and a third sorority (Alpha Chi Omega). The first thing I noticed about the sorority houses was the front lawns. They looked .  .  . different from the lawns fronting the fraternities. The yard décor of the latter mostly consisted of stray beer cans and glistening patches of bare brown earth. The front yards of Zeta and the other two sorority houses boasted clipped green lawns, blooming azalea bushes, nursery flowers in pots, and carefully sited outdoor furniture. The two side-by-side sets of sex-segregated Greek houses presented a vivid, even exaggerated tableau of fundamental differences between human males and human females that one would have a hard time ascribing merely to gender conditioning.

From the ‘top’ to the ‘gross’

Inside the Zeta house was further evidence of what it meant to live distinctly on the distaff side of the Greek-life sex divide. The Zeta interior looked like nothing so much as a women’s dormitory on a sedate college campus during the first half of the 20th century: spic-and-span tidy, for one thing. (Zeta employs a full-time cleaning staff—​in contrast to many fraternity houses, where the pledges do the janitorial work with predictable outcomes.) The Zeta house was also cozy and cheerful, with sofas, cushions, curtains, and pictures on the walls​—​and it boasted an actual dining room, where instead of having to patronize the mobbed food courts of today’s typical university dining halls, Zeta members could eat in intimacy meals cooked on the premises by their chapter’s own chef. Living at the Zeta house—​in contrast to official student housing or off-campus apartments—​was a privilege reserved for third-year members of the sorority. Minneman, who had technically graduated early, during the first semester of her fourth year, and was taking graduate-level courses toward a master’s degree in public policy, was living on “the Lawn,” twin colonnaded rows of fireplace-graced rooms flanking the Rotunda, designed by Jefferson himself, that are a perk for the highest-achieving students. Yet she ate lunch several times a week at the Zeta house, just to drink in the homey atmosphere and to be with the women she called her “sisters.”

“It’s a group to go back to,” Minneman explained as her reason for going through Greek rush​—​and choosing Zeta—​during the spring semester of her freshman year. “There are 16,000 undergraduates here at UVA, and we have huge classes, sometimes with 500 people. So you’re a small person in a huge group of people. But now, I have a huge network of 100-plus women that I can relate to.”

A group photo of some of those women, lined up in rows on the front steps of the Zeta house, adorned the mantel in Minneman’s room on the Lawn, which we visited after our tour of Zeta. It was a sisterhood of the non-edgy: attractive young women sporting pastel dresses, enthusiastic smiles, and lovingly brushed blowouts. The atmosphere of wholesomeness was by design. The National Panhellenic Conference, an umbrella group representing 26 sororities, forbids the possession of alcohol inside sorority houses (and it’s a rule that is strictly enforced at UVA, according to Minneman), except at a limited range of social events where the drinks must be supplied by an outside vendor who can check IDs. Sorority women have complained to the press about the double standard that requires them to travel to men’s houses in order to drink more freely, but the rule has certainly prevented sororities from experiencing the sex-and-booze-related scandals that have plagued fraternities. 

The Greek social scene, as Minneman explained it, was a complex socioeconomic hierarchy, and Zeta occupied a rung somewhat below UVA’s “top”​—​that is, rich girls’​—​sororities such as Kappa Kappa Gamma and Kappa Alpha Theta, which reportedly tend to recruit their members from expensive East Coast boarding schools. Minneman herself had gone to a public high school in Lakeville, Minnesota, and she had attended UVA as a Jefferson Scholar, part of a selective program that awards merit-based scholarships to the academically talented. The parking lot of the Kappa Alpha Theta house backed onto the Zeta parking lot, and on moving-in days, the Zeta girls could look down from their windows at the BMWs and Range Rovers of the Thetas and their parents. “There was one girl who arrived in a limousine, and she had a staff of servants carrying her stuff into the house for her,” Minneman said.

If the sorority lifestyle that I glimpsed at UVA seemed redolent of some atavistic version of college life before tattoos, side shaves, irony, and co-ed dorms​—​so did the fraternity scene, in a diametrically different way that partly reflected the fact that the taboo against drinking that prevailed at the women’s houses did not exist at most of the men’s. Fraternity houses are notorious across the country as the one certain place where underage students of both sexes can find alcohol, because there are always brothers over the legal drinking age of 21 who can supply it, and there is always a welcome mat out for female companionship. Fraternities outnumber sororities about two-to-one at UVA (as they do on many campuses), and it was fraternity culture with its ready booze, not sorority culture, which is officially quasi-dry, that had drawn the baleful attention of Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Erdely.

As with the sororities, Minneman explained, there were “top” fraternities at UVA reputedly boasting “Deerfield” demographics (prep school plus money): St. A, Delta Kappa Epsilon (“Deke”), Zeta Psi. There was the “nice guy” fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, which had banned hazing and restricted alcohol use in its house under a “Men of Principle” program the nationwide fraternity adopted in 1998 (it’s a program that has admittedly been more honored in the breach at some chapters). And there were the “gross” fraternities where alcohol use seemed to be a day-and-night affair. At St. Elmo, next door to the Zeta sorority house, “in the middle of the day you can see guys sitting on the roof drinking beer,” Minneman said.

Zeta Psi, which also had a “gross” reputation, had twice lost its official status in recent years. It was suspended in 2002 after several members wore blackface to a Halloween party, and again in 2011, after a pledge nearly died of sodium poisoning in a hazing ritual that included chugging at least a pint of soy sauce. Reinstated in 2013, the Zetes proceeded to outrage progressives on and off campus with a “Bombs Over Baghdad” theme party this past February. Some Iraqi students at UVA circulated a petition demanding that the chapter apologize. The unrepentant Zetes countered that they had titled their party after a rap classic recorded by Outkast in 2000, several years before the Iraq war. Jia Tolentino, a UVA graduate writing for the feminist website Jezebel, devoted a j’accuse article to the “country-club-from-hell” Zetes for desecrating the memory of “perhaps the approximately 150,000 civilians who have died as a result of the Iraq invasion.”

‘Nerds versus jocks’

Right after the publication of “A Rape on Campus” last November, University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan suspended all Greek social activities through the end of the semester. The sanction meant little, practically speaking, since exams occupied most of the month of December, followed by a break for the Christmas holidays. Yet the suspension rankled the fraternities and sororities, which complained that they had been subjected to a collective punishment based on the alleged sins of one house. Meanwhile, professors writing on a history department listserv called for the outright abolition of UVA’s entire Greek system. Neeti Nair, an associate professor of history specializing in Hindu-Muslim relations in India, circulated an online petition to that effect. “The suspension of all Greek activity would be a minimum. The abolition of the Greek system would be preferable,” wrote Brad Reed, a scholar of Chinese history. 

“I believed the Rolling Stone story was true simply because it was so outrageous,” said John Edwin Mason, a professor of African history who had participated in the listserv but didn’t join the calls for abolishing fraternities. “Rolling Stone had a reputation for solid journalism, and I thought their lawyers must have been all over that story, not to mention layers of editors,” Mason said. “Had I known what I know now, I would have been more skeptical.” Mason attributed some of the faculty piling-on against fraternities in the wake of Erdely’s story to a “nerds versus jocks” culture war that seems to be universal in academia.

Activists spraypainted a wall abutting the Phi Psi house with such slogans as “Suspend Us” and “UVA Center for Rape Studies.” They heaved bottles and chunks of cinder block through the house’s first-floor windows, leading the brothers who lived there to vacate the premises. An anonymous letter to various news media signed “The students who vandalized the Phi Psi house” declared: “UVA will not be the same after this​—​we will not allow it.” On the night of November 22, 2014, several hundred students and faculty members chanted and waved signs: “Fratboys Rape.” “UVA Stop Hiding Rape.” “She Trusted You to Do the Right Thing.” A prominent philosophy professor, John D. Arras (who died in March), wrote an open letter to Sullivan, published in the student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, declaring, “I’m sick of the twisted, misogynist, privileged, moronic culture maintained by our Greek system,” which he described as “alcohol-sodden, elitist, and anti-intellectual​—​i.e., a system that really should have no place at a university with pretensions to seriousness, let alone greatness.” The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, representing the liberal-arts contingent, passed a resolution calling for extending the Greek ban through the end of the 2014-2015 academic year, which would have effectively canceled spring-semester rush. 

“We’d get five or six emails every day during the first one or two weeks after the [Rolling Stone] article appeared calling for UVA to abolish fraternities,” said Russell Bogue, a third-year student and Beta brother who had been an opinion editor at the Cavalier Daily that fall. “One of them said in all-caps, ‘FRATS. POWER. RAPE.’ One of them said that UVA should hire 27 bulldozers and raze Rugby Road to the ground and then salt the earth.”According to Bogue, the Cavalier staff, sharing the shock and shame that Erdely’s story had generated among undergraduates, engaged in a kind of embarrassed self-bowdlerizing during those early weeks that refused to admit the possibility that Erdely had gotten it wrong. “We got a letter saying that the Rolling Stone story was absurd,” Bogue said. “But we didn’t publish it. There was a huge amount of peer censorship. There was no toleration of dissent​—​so no one speaks out, and you look poorly on someone who did dissent. They want to hear that you’re also morally outraged.”

In January the university announced a sweeping new policy designed to oversee the consumption of alcohol inside Greek houses as a condition for allowing them to resume their social functions. The new rules, which UVA styled a “Fraternity Operating Agreement,” require beer to be served in cans instead of from the kegs that have seemingly been part of fraternity culture since time immemorial, and for all parties to be registered with the university well in advance. “Sober monitors” must be present at all fraternity parties; one of their jobs is to pour any wine that is served. Like the earlier ban on social events, the “agreement,” which the frats were obliged to sign or else lose their official status, infuriated their members, who pointed out that not only were they subjected to a blanket punishment, but that the party for which they were being punished had from all evidence been purely imaginary. “We’re living with it, but it’s really unfair. They’ve singled us out with a policy that doesn’t apply to any other campus organizations,” a young man who identified himself as a frat member told me as I was crossing the campus. 

Several national sororities forbade members of their UVA chapters to attend fraternity parties on Boys’ Bid Night, a rush event in which young women typically go from house to house meeting the new brothers and sharing drinks. About 2,000 UVA women signed a protest petition complaining that they ought to be allowed to choose for themselves which social events to attend.

And in March UVA announced a tough new “yes means yes” policy on sexual assault that seemed to define as punishable “sexual contact” any intentional touching of someone else without first obtaining that person’s consent.

Teresa Sullivan declined my request for an interview. “It’s been a tough year at UVA,” university spokesman Anthony P. de Bruyn said. (A second-year student, Hannah Graham, had been brutally murdered in the fall of 2014.) Yet a heavily attended campus speech during my April visit where Sullivan provided the introduction offered a clue about her thinking and that of other UVA administrators. 

The speaker was Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan and coauthor of a 2013 book, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, a study of class tensions in a freshman women’s dorm. In her take-no-prisoners speech, however, Armstrong seemed to have decided that fraternity houses and fraternity parties had been the major source of her book-subjects’ problems. Armstrong described Greek social structures as hotbeds of racism, elitism, out-of-control drinking (leading to what she called “party rape,” where no one can remember what happened), and ill treatment of women in general (who nonetheless, as Armstrong conceded, flock to fraternity events clad in their cocktail dresses). For example, Armstrong said, “at fraternity houses, the women’s bathroom is always really, really filthy.” She continued: “These are large parties, the attendees are socially similar and highly concerned with status, there’s alcohol everywhere, and the parties are either male-controlled or out of control.” Even the party themes​—​“Playboy Mansion” or “boss and secretary”—are “male-dominant,” Armstrong maintained. “They tried to get women to come to their parties in as little clothes as possible.”

Declaring that “education is not enough” and “the time has come for a public-health approach,” Armstrong urged colleges to take drastic steps to “reform” fraternities (if not get rid of them entirely): make their houses go dry, ban students from living there, and more or less force undergraduates to socialize with classmates of different races and classes. Looking pointedly at Sullivan, Armstrong said, “I would love to see the presidents of all the universities systematically get together to push back against the system over the next 20 years.”

Sullivan’s response that day, while not exactly endorsing Armstrong’s proposals, was not a ringing endorsement of the Greek presence on campus, either. “Public and private institutions are different,” she said, choosing her words with care. “At Amherst you can say, ‘You’ll be shut down unless you do this.’ Here, we don’t own their houses. They’re off-ground. And we’re a public university, so there’s a right to free association that doesn’t exist at private colleges.”

It is difficult to reconcile the Death Star portrait of Greek houses that Armstrong painted (although she was certainly correct about frat-house restrooms) with the impressions I gained on the UVA campus talking to such poised Greek achievers as Minneman, Bogue, and several others. Their reputation for juicing and partying notwithstanding, members of fraternities and sororities pull ahead of their non-Greek classmates in nearly every category. Although mean Greek grade-point averages, at least among men, are only marginally higher than those of non-Greeks—​2.91 compared with 2.89, according to the North-American Interfraternity Conference, which represents 74 fraternities in the United States and Canada​—​the four-year graduation rates of Greek men and women are nearly 5 percentage points higher than those of non-Greeks, according to a 2014 study from the University of Tennessee. Furthermore, members of fraternities and sororities are more likely than nonmembers to participate in student government and other extracurricular activities, according to the report. Nearly all Greek houses have “adopted” charitable causes, and fraternities and sororities raise about $7 million a year for various charities. They also donate generously to their alma maters. Gifts from fraternity and sorority alumni account for 50 percent of all alumni donations—​a fact that irritates fraternity foes, who argue that the gift-giving makes colleges hesitant to crack down on out-of-control Greek activities.

Another 2014 study jointly conducted by Gallup and Purdue University found that college graduates who had belonged to fraternities and sororities tended to feel more engaged and happier with their jobs and to have stronger relationships with family and friends than their non-Greek counterparts. They were also in better physical health, the study found. Behind these glowing numbers is undoubtedly an element of self-selection: Greek societies tend to attract and recruit “joiners” who are socially adept​—​the same kinds of people who typically do well in business, politics, and family life after graduation.

Still, attacks on fraternities—​and, to a lesser extent, sororities​—​long predated the rise of the progressive warriors who set the mood in Charlottesville for months after Sabrina Erdely’s story appeared. And it’s not hard to see why, as the well-reported frat excesses at UVA and elsewhere encapsulate every irritant that political liberals​—​and even many conservatives​—​might find objectionable about the Greek system: licentious partying, reckless hazing, execrable taste, and, perhaps most significantly, an insistent nose-thumbing at the pieties of political correctness. Greek houses represent a rival source of social authority for students that is beyond the control of the administrators who believe that it is their job, not that of bands of undergraduates, to set the tone of campus culture. 

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Frats

Fraternities had their origins during the late 18th and early 19th centuries as debating and social societies on American college campuses, which were then all-male. The very first Greek-letter fraternity was Phi Beta Kappa​—​now strictly an academic honor society—​founded in 1776 at the College of William and Mary as the successor to a 1750 entity called the Flat Hat Club, to which Thomas Jefferson had belonged as a student there. The first strictly social fraternity, Kappa Alpha, began at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1825, setting a template for organizations based on notions of brotherhood, ritual, tradition, and secrecy.

Sororities came later, during the 1850s, and they began to flourish only during the latter half of the 19th century as co-education became the undergraduate norm in America, especially at the brand-new state land-grant universities. Then as now, sororities tried to monitor closely the academic and personal lives of their members, offering havens from the impersonal nature of large institutions, support systems for women determined to prove that they could excel alongside men, and an opportunity to find mates among the high-status young men who tended to populate fraternities. The college-nostalgia standard “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,” written in 1911 by two undergraduates at Albion College in Michigan, celebrated a co-ed who was the “sweetest” of all the girls on campus. To this day, “pinning” ceremonies, during which a brother gives his fraternity pin to his sorority girlfriend, are an important part of Greek life. Pinning seems to represent a Princeton Mom’s dream of snagging a husband on campus before graduation​—​because significant numbers of pinned undergraduate couples reportedly go on to get married.

Fraternities like to boast that every president except two after 1825 belonged to a fraternity. This is probably an exaggeration, but at least 20 presidents, from Jefferson on down, have been either collegiate or honorary members of Greek-letter societies (that list includes Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, although not Barack Obama). Various first ladies, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Barbara and Laura Bush, have had sorority affiliations. In the 113th Congress, which ended in 2014, 24 percent of House members and 39 percent of senators had Greek affiliations in college, according to the North-American Interfraternity Conference. Some 31 percent of Supreme Court justices have belonged to fraternities, and of the CEOs heading the top 10 Fortune 500 companies in 2014, five were fraternity men.

Even during the heyday of Greek life, college administrators regarded the exclusivity and secret-society status of fraternities as implicit threats. Harvard had abolished fraternities during the 1850s, although their social niche was quickly filled by equally exclusive and equally secretive “final clubs” operating off campus. In 1876 the president of Purdue began requiring all applicants to sign a pledge that they would not join any Greek-letter or other secret organizations. The rule fell, in 1882, after a Purdue applicant who was already a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity successfully sued the university to gain admission. Stanford banned sororities in 1944, acting on complaints from female students that only one in five young women who rushed were admitted into the handful of women’s houses on the Stanford Row. 

During the first half of the twentieth century, a supposed golden age of Greek-letter life, fraternity chapters across the country were nonetheless regularly banned or suspended from campuses for drinking and hazing accidents. Dangerous hazing practices certainly weren’t limited to fraternities, but because initiation and the ritual humiliation of pledges was​—​and is​—​a central rite of passage at many Greek houses, hazing fatalities became associated with frats. Hank Nuwer’s Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing (1990) described a not-infrequent initiation mishap of the 1940s and 1950s: pledges killed by passing cars after being dropped off at night on country roads far from campus. A Phi Beta Pi pledge at St. Louis University died in 1945 after other fraternity members coated his naked body with flammable substances and passed an electric current through him. In 1959 a Kappa Sigma pledge at the University of Southern California choked to death on a slab of liver force-fed him by his brothers. 

In 1962, Williams College, an elite private liberal-arts institution in Massachusetts that was then all-male, took the radical​—​and highly controversial​—​step of completely abolishing a fraternity system that had been in place since 1833, replacing the 15 Greek houses on the campus with a college-operated dormitory and dining system. A lengthy report issued by Williams’s board of trustees listed a number of reasons for the ban. Chief among them was the sense of social isolation and second-class status felt by the small minority of students who were excluded from the fraternities that accounted for 94 percent of the student body and 44 percent of student housing. The report cited other reasons as well: perceived demoralizing social stratification among the fraternities themselves, the high cost of dues and other Greek-related expenses, the fact that fraternity social events such as rush week and initiation crowded out academics, and a lack of college control over “public and private conduct and the use of alcohol.” 

Unmentioned in the report​—​but undoubtedly on the minds of the trustees​—​was the fact that the oldest and most prestigious fraternities at Williams and elsewhere, associated with boarding-school exclusivity, had only recently started admitting Jewish members, and almost none of them admitted blacks, at a time when racial integration was becoming an important cause on campuses. Explicitly Jewish fraternities such as Sigma Alpha Mu (“Sammy”) and Zeta Beta Tau (“ZBT”) had come into existence at the turn of the 20th century in reaction to this exclusion, and although they, like the WASP houses, now admit members of all faiths, they retain their Jewish identity. Similarly, African Americans set up their own Greek system, the “divine nine,” as it is still called (five fraternities, four sororities). Racial segregation or near-segregation persists in Greek houses​—​a fact much commented upon by fraternity opponents​—​but one that seems also to be owed to the preferences of black, Latino, and other minority students themselves. “Greek life provides a space on campus for students of color,” a young African-American woman commented at Armstrong’s UVA lecture. Russell Bogue told me that the UVA’s Betas “would love to have some black pledges” but the students the chapter had tried to recruit had chosen to affiliate with black houses instead.

The phasing out of fraternities was the most divisive event that had ever occurred at Williams, with many angry alumni cutting off donations. Yet the general feeling was that Greek life was on its way out anyway, an anachronism in a postwar age when college admissions were becoming increasingly meritocratic and student bodies drawn

from a wider swath of the population than the affluent upper- and upper-middle-class youth who could afford to indulge tastes for partying, social snobbery, and esoteric rituals.

During the radicalized 1960s and 1970s, Greek life did go out of style, especially at elite private colleges and universities where anti-Vietnam war activism and progressive egalitarianism set the cultural tone. Fraternity membership dropped precipitously during the hippie decades (sororities weren’t so badly hit), with some chapters closing entirely amid mounting debt and dwindling numbers and others giving up their houses. College administrators did little to halt the trend and were sometimes accused by fraternity advocates of using Greek-house debt as a mere excuse to shut down the houses. Administrators at Yale began requiring all undergraduates to purchase a full meal plan, which made Greek-house dining rooms redundant, and by 1973 the last of Yale’s fraternities had folded.

Starting in the 1980s, as radical campus culture abated, at least among undergraduates, and many states, under threat of loss of federal highway funding, boosted their drinking ages from 18 to 21, Greek life began to make a comeback. At Stanford, whose row once boasted 36 Greek-letter houses, there are now only 9, representing 6 fraternities and 3 sororities (the latter were allowed to return in 1977 after mounting a challenge under Title IX, the federal antidiscrimination-in-education law)​—​but there are also 17 “unhoused” fraternities and sororities engaged in a long-running struggle with administrators to allow them to occupy campus facilities. Yale has also seen the return of 13 fraternities, plus 5 sororities. At Harvard, which established a residential “house” system during the 1930s that was supposed to combat social stratification, at least 6 fraternities and 4 sororities have emerged in recent years, even though the school deems them “discriminatory” and has refused to grant them official recognition.

These revivals are part of a national trend. According to the North-American Interfraternity Conference, the number of frat members has been rising by 4 percent a year for the past decade, up to more than 370,000 undergraduate members in about 6,100 chapters on 800 campuses currently. The National Panhellenic Conference reports a similar decade-long increase in sorority members: up to 140,000 undergraduates nationally in 3,200 chapters. 

At the same time, however, Williams set a powerful example for administrators and trustees at other private institutions in the Northeast, who perceived Greek houses as loci of retrograde elitism that undermined the democratic and diversity-respecting campus culture high-minded college bureaucrats were seeking to implement. Amherst abolished on-campus fraternities in 1984. Colby College in Maine quickly followed suit. Middlebury College in Vermont got rid of its fraternities more gradually, terminating fraternity dining in 1979, requiring chapters to admit women in 1990 (which effectively divorced them from their national organizations), and in 1991, ending their residential status by requiring all first-year students to live in one of five co-ed “living-learning communities.” Some Middlebury fraternities survived as purely social houses, others dissolved, and the Deke chapter trashed its house in protest against the new rules, got kicked off campus, and then went defiantly underground. Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, ordered its fraternities to admit women in 2012, effectively neutralizing their identity. 

In 1969 Rutgers anthropologist Lionel Tiger published his bestselling Men in Groups. In that book, still in print, Tiger coined the now-commonplace term “male bonding” and essentially invented the field of evolutionary psychology (it wasn’t called that back then), by comparing male humans to other male primates and noting similarities in behavior that could be attributed to a common evolutionary trajectory. Tiger’s book was denounced by many feminists because it explored biological and psychological differences between the sexes whose very existence feminists denied, and it also argued, feminists believed, that men were innately superior to women. Tiger contended that the primeval male social arrangement was the hominid hunting pack. His theory presupposed that human males were naturally violent and aggressive (necessary traits when most food consisted of prey on the run), and that their social arrangements were marked by a struggle for dominance. But there was a concomitant male need for social cooperation within the pack, which meant that men needed to form intense relationships with each other, just as men and women needed to form intense relationships for reproductive and family-raising purposes. Hence the development of the tightly woven, rigidly hierarchical all-male social structures that characterized military, political, occupational, business, and religious life from Paleolithic times until the women’s movement of the 20th-century West.

Women were excluded from the primeval hunting pack because childbearing and child-nurturing interfered with the crucial-to-survival-business of pursuing and killing animals​—​and also because their presence would inevitably instigate sexual competition among men that would undermine the pack’s cohesion, Tiger argued.

In a chapter devoted to male secret societies, Tiger discussed fraternities in unflattering terms (the Canadian-born Tiger had not belonged to one as an undergraduate at McGill). He described fraternities’ often gruesome and humiliating initiation ceremonies as “part of a male-male ‘courtship’ pattern tied to a tendency for males to seek status among other males, to form groups with them, and to value highly the corporate ‘presentation-of-self’ to the community at large.” In other words, the pledges proved their courage and loyalty to the group by enduring the ritual sadism without complaint, and the fraternities in turn proved their high status and exclusivity by making the ceremonies as brutal and demanding as possible. Many initiation practices, at least as Tiger observed them more than four decades ago, involved quasi-homoerotic elements, such as actual or simulated branding of the buttocks. (Tiger noted, however, that the indignities paled by comparison to military boot-camp ordeals that sometimes resulted in recruits’ deaths, and to the excruciating and often bloody puberty rituals of a range of non-Western societies.) Sorority initiation ordeals were relatively tame, Tiger observed, typically requiring pledges to wear silly costumes, memorize lists of information, and perform tedious or annoying chores for their older sisters. (The National Panhellenic Conference now bans hazing​—​as does the black-Greek National Pan-Hellenic Council​—​which is illegal anyway in 44 states, but forms of it continue covertly in many houses.)

“Men have this urge, this need to dominate,” Tiger, now age 78 and retired from Rutgers, said in a telephone interview. Despite its violent connotations, he pointed out, male aggressiveness has a positive social function: “It performs a central role in protecting the group. Men protect women, and women protect children. The fact is that the sexes are really different, and you want them to be different.” In Men in Groups, Tiger observed an additional aspect of fraternities and other esoteric organizations: “One general characteristic of secret societies, I have noted, is that they excite the hostility of established authority,” he wrote. “[W]here secret societies are not openly sanctioned​—​particularly by the dominants of the communities involved​—​the combination of secrecy and bonding appears to be an unambiguous inducement to hostility.”

FEMINIST HOSTILITY

The hostility they inspire has aroused admiration, sometimes outright, sometimes grudging, for fraternities’ antinomian ethos, even among ideological liberals. In a rave four-star review of National Lampoon’s Animal House, film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1978: “Bluto [famously played by John Belushi] and his brothers are engaged in a holding action against civilization. They are in favor of beer, women, song, motorcycles, Playboy centerfolds, and making rude noises. They are opposed to studying, serious thought, the Dean, the regulations governing fraternities, and, most especially, the disgusting behavior of the Omegas​—​a house so respectable it has even given an ROTC commander to the world.” The brothers of Animal House were politically incorrect avant la lettre, and their insouciant nose-thumbing at long-faced campus administrators has been credited​—​probably excessively​—​for initiating the revival of student interest in Greek life during the 1980s. The movie also, as might be expected, contributed to a widespread public perception that Greek life consisted solely of class-cutting and toga parties. 

At the same time, the professors and college administrators who were already hostile toward fraternities got a new set of allies: campus feminists who saw a direct link between Greek life and the kind of supposedly widespread sexual assault of women on campuses that eventually caught the attention of the Obama Education Department. It was at this juncture, as UVA’s scorched-earth reaction to the Rolling Stone story illustrates, that the war against fraternities began in deadly earnest. In 1990 Peggy Reeves Sanday, an anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, published Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus. The book centered around a young woman whom Sanday called “Laurel,” who had gone to a party at the Alpha Tau Omega house at the University of Pennsylvania during the spring of 1983 and had serial sex with five or six of the brothers in an upstairs bedroom. She had been drinking heavily and had taken LSD before the party, and witnesses described her as dancing provocatively and also acting disoriented. The next day, after some ATO members were overheard bragging about their sexual escapades with Laurel, a friend concluded she had been raped​—​unable to consent to the sex because she was incapacitated​—​and Laurel eventually alerted the campus Women’s Center and other administrators. Penn temporarily suspended the fraternity apparently on grounds that it had violated a university ban on students’ acting “immaturely.” Laurel never went to the police, and no criminal complaint was ever filed.

Sanday’s book made observations about the social dynamics of male Greek houses similar to those of Lionel Tiger, including an extensive description of humiliating initiation practices that focused on buttocks and genitalia. Instead of Tiger’s evolutionary approach, however, Sanday adopted the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan, a French postmodernist neo-Freudian and the man responsible for making the word “phallocentric” a commonplace of trendy academic discourse. Sanday argued, mostly on the basis of anecdotes told to her, that “pulling the train”—​men having sex sequentially with the same female​—​was a commonplace occurrence on college campuses, especially at fraternity houses where bottomless quantities of liquor flowed and hookups, often with “little sisters” (a frat-house euphemism for groupies) and sometimes right in front of other brothers, occurred with astonishing frequency. She contended that such episodes of communal sex, which she called “gang rape,” were essential to “fraternal bonding,” as drunk and conflicted young men tried to expunge their homoerotic feelings. “The woman plays the role of ritual scapegoat who receives the brunt of collective male sexual aggression that would otherwise turn a group of privileged heterosexual males into despised homosexuals,” Sanday wrote. Her book, homing in on gang rape and fraternity initiations, was just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the story about “Jackie” that Sabrina Erdely told in Rolling Stone, in which the supposed gang rape was the fraternity initiation. 

A 2004 book, Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, by journalist Alexandra Robbins, who had passed herself off as a sorority sister at an undisclosed Texas campus so that she could report on female Greek life from the inside, was a more readable but equally censorious bookend to Fraternity Gang Rape. As Sanday had done with fraternities, Robbins faulted sororities for covertly encouraging illegal and excessive alcohol and drug use despite official policies (Robbins described “pre-gaming” for parties with vodka shots as a near-universal practice in sorority houses). She also indicted the sisterhoods for focusing ruthlessly on looks, especially the looks of their prospective pledges (Robbins claimed there was an “eating disorder epidemic”); for tolerating high levels of casual racism; for obsessive preoccupation with male attention and competition for boyfriends; and for relentless wealth-based social snobbery. A female reader of Robbins’s book might observe that what she was actually chronicling were the pet sins and foibles​—​superficiality, cliquishness, status-jostling, and throat-knifing competitiveness just underneath the sisterly hugs​—​of all “women in groups” at their worst, not just sororities, but Robbins was having none of this. “What if sororities focused their energies on something more than mixers and Greek Week floats?” she queried. 

Sanday’s Fraternity Gang Rape, updated in 2007, contributed to a growing tendency, encouraged by campus women’s centers, progressive politicians, and feminists in academia and the media, of conflating drunken sex regretted the next morning (almost invariably by the female partner) with violent rape. Colleges that celebrated annual “Sex Weeks,” “healthy” commitment-free hookups, and young men and young women living cheek by jowl in coed dorms suddenly found themselves dealing with claims put forth by feminists that astonishing percentages of college women were assault victims, typically when incapacitated by alcohol. A widely cited 2007 study funded by the Justice Department concluded that one in five female students endured sexual assault during her undergraduate years. (That figure was contradicted by an in-house Justice Department report in 2014 finding that the actual rate was more like 6.1 assaults per 1,000 female students, lower than the rate for non-college women, but the “one in five” figure remains in common currency among liberals, even cited recently by Obama himself.) The 2007 study also asserted that fraternity men—​along with college men who had participated in aggressive sports in high school​—​were far more likely than their non-Greek and nonathletic counterparts to engage in “sexual assault and sexual aggression.”

Furthermore, there have been just enough documented incidents over the years of actual rape inside fraternity houses to lend credence to allegations of a pervasive frat-house rape culture. In 1984, for example, Liz Seccuro, then a 17-year-old UVA freshman and a virgin, was raped inside the Phi Psi house by at least one fellow student after passing out at a party, possibly from a date-rape drug slipped into a drink. Twenty-one years later, in 2005, Nevada real estate agent William Beebe wrote a letter to Seccuro apologizing for the assault as part of his Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program. Beebe, then a UVA student, had been living in the Phi Psi house in 1984. Seccuro alerted law enforcement, Beebe pleaded guilty to sexual battery in 2006, and he served a brief prison term. Seccuro became an antirape activist and in 2011 published a book, Crash into Me: A Survivor’s Search for Justice, about her ordeal and its aftermath. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal focusing on Seccuro’s book, Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan, who had enrolled at UVA in 1982, two years before the rape, described herself as so freaked out by a visit to Rugby Road on the fourth day of the fall semester that she promptly dropped out of UVA: “At once august and moldering, [the frat houses] seemed sinister, to stand for male power at its most malevolent and institutionally condoned.”

Flanagan summed up fraternity culture, which she called on college administrators to “shutter,” in lurid Sanday-esque terms: “The Greek system is dedicated to quelling young men’s anxiety about submitting themselves to four years of sissy-pants book learning by providing them with a variety of he-man activities: drinking, drugging, ESPN watching and the sexual mistreatment of women.” She followed this indictment with a 15,000-word cover story for the Atlantic in February 2014, ominously titled “The Dark Power of Fraternities.” There was plenty of tut-tutting at testosterone-ish Greek mores, but very little of it actually dealt with sexual assault. Most of the incidents Flanagan described​—​largely taken from the case files of Douglas Fierberg, a flamboyant Washington, D.C., trial lawyer whose lavishly produced website announces that he specializes in representing “victims of school violence”​—​involved the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic consequences of combining too many Big Red Cups with too little frat-house basic maintenance: falls from upper-story windows, collapsing decks, and so forth.

Indeed, in all her 15,000 words, Flanagan discussed in detail only one sexual assault that could be characterized as fraternity-related: the violent rape of a Wesleyan University freshman (and eventual client of Fierberg’s) known only as “Jane Doe” in an upstairs room at the Beta House while attending a Halloween party in 2010. The assailant, John O’Neill, was neither a member nor a student, but a mother’s-basement-dwelling former high school buddy of a Beta brother who had wandered into the party. Jane Doe promptly reported the incident to a Wesleyan dean, then went to the police at the dean’s urging. O’Neill was arrested, pleaded guilty to several assault charges, and went to prison. In 2012 Jane Doe sued Wesleyan and the fraternity for $10 million (that was how Fierberg got involved), alleging that Wesleyan had violated Title IX by refusing to issue warnings or take action that could have prevented the crime. She claimed that the Beta chapter at Wesleyan had a reputation as a “rape factory.” (Wesleyan settled that lawsuit for an undisclosed amount in 2013.) Even Flanagan had to concede that the Beta brothers had been in no way responsible for O’Neill’s crime and had acted exemplarily in its aftermath, cooperating fully with law enforcement to track him down. Yet she could not resist a sarcastic aside that the Beta chapter had “followed the standard playbook” when it expressed sympathy for victims and reiterated a no-tolerance policy regarding sexual assault.

The 2010 assault at the Beta house was a chapter in a long skirmish between liberal Wesleyan administrators determined to bring the college in line with the anti-Greek ethos that prevailed at other elite New England liberal-arts institutions, and the members and alumni of Beta itself. In 2005 the then-president of Wesleyan, Douglas Bennet, had ordered all Wesleyan-affiliated fraternities to allow female students to reside in their houses (they didn’t have to make them members) or lose their status as “program housing” (Wesleyan requires nearly all its undergraduates to live in either dorms or university-approved dwellings). Beta, whose house was not actually on the campus, was the only holdout​—​which meant the college and its campus police force had no oversight over activities inside the house. A standoff lasting several years followed as Bennet and Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan’s president since 2007, tried to cajole and then threaten Beta back into the “program housing” fold. After the Jane Doe incident, Roth issued an edict barring Wesleyan students from so much as visiting organizations not officially recognized by Wesleyan. This led to “Free Beta” rallies and a protest from the campus-free-speech organization FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). Eventually there was a truce, with Beta agreeing to return to program housing and to accept Wesleyan oversight. 

Yet in September 2014, Wesleyan once again banned its students from the Beta house, after an apparently intoxicated (allegedly from drinks served by Beta) female sophomore attending a Beta party fell out of a third-story window and was severely injured. Beta’s national organization suspended the Wesleyan chapter, which was already on probation. On September 22, Wesleyan’s trustees voted to give the school’s fraternities a three-year deadline to become co-ed or shut down.

The rolling debacle at Wesleyan was the kind of perfect storm that lent credence to calls by the liberal media, especially after Erdely’s Rolling Stone story, to close down fraternities lock, stock, and barrel. Yet while study after study shows that fraternity men and sorority women drink more heavily than their non-Greek counterparts—their off-campus houses and apartments are the chief venues at which college students under age 21 get access to alcohol—the National Institutes of Health has pointed out that underage binge drinking and beer-pong culture are problems that extend far beyond the Greek system. Similarly, hazing is by no means limited to frat houses, and indeed one of the most egregious recent hazing fatalities involved the beating death of a drum major by other members of the Florida A&M band during an initiation ritual that got out of hand in 2011. And certainly the putative campus “rape culture” decried by feminist activists is by no means a Greek phenomenon. The much-publicized alleged rape in her dorm room that prompted Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz to carry a mattress around campus in protest had nothing to do with fraternities. 

‘The Lout versus the emo hipster’

Most reported incidents of Greek-house misconduct don’t involve anything remotely resembling rape​—​and they are statistically rare in a nationwide undergraduate Greek population of 750,000​—​but they do involve enough vandalism, poor taste, out-and-out racism, and occasional tragedy to make it understandable why a Greek-hostile press has pounced on them with glee. In May, for example, Penn State kicked the Kappa Delta Rho fraternity off campus for three years after discovering it had maintained a Facebook page featuring photographs of nude, unconscious women. In March the University of Oklahoma closed the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house and summarily evicted its members after a video surfaced online in which SAE members chanted anti-black language and vowed never to admit African Americans into their fraternity. Clemson University threw the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity off campus for five years following a pledge’s fatal fall from a bridge during an alleged September 2014 hazing mishap. Universities investigated or suspended at least 80 fraternities in all during the 2014-2015 academic year, 30 of them during March 2015 alone, according to the Huffington Post.

Some of those summary punishments have raised questions about overkill, particularly in instances where the worst the fraternity members have done is engage in highly offensive speech. The SAE incident at Oklahoma is an example. In an op-ed in USA Today, Robert Shibley, executive director of FIRE, pointed out that the University of Oklahoma is a public institution, meaning that First Amendment protections against censorship came into play. “Instead of government crackdowns on a viewpoint, it is far better to let the marketplace of ideas determine the social consequences for racist speech,” Shibley wrote.

During the fall of 2010 Deke pledges at Yale enraged campus feminists when they were obliged, as part of hazing, to march past a dorm that housed freshman women, chanting “No means yes, and yes means anal!” It is unlikely that the chant actually caused any of the women to fear harm​—​and Yale also has a longstanding guarantee of free expression for its students​—​but Yale College’s then-dean, Mary Miller, first called for permanent banishment of the Dekes, then, in 2011, settled on a five-year suspension. A feminist magazine had described the 18-year-old pledges as “a moving gang of men, chanting in deep, throaty voices for sexual assault.”

Deep, throaty voices. That’s a description of men, period. “Certainly there’s plenty of excessive drinking and misogyny in fraternity houses,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor and director of the National Marriage Institute at UVA. “These are expressions of maleness in its worst manifestation: drinking, promiscuity, and risky behaviors. But there’s a flip side: There’s a real sense of fraternity, of male friendship and camaraderie that can’t be found elsewhere on campuses. So there are pockets of fraternity life that have some kind of redeeming value.” Wilcox continued: “What we don’t have is a publicly articulated notion of gentlemanly behavior, the old GQ model. We’ve lost that, and instead we have the lout versus the emo hipster as our only models of manhood. Our culture has forgotten the pro-social masculine ideal.”

In January, as the Rolling Stone story was unraveling, Kenneth G. Elzinga, a longtime economics professor at UVA who had never previously gotten involved in campus politics, was so appalled by what he considered to have been a “scandalous” rush to judgment against Phi Kappa Psi by his fellow faculty members that he invited the entire new Phi Psi pledge class of 18 men to his home. He also wrote a letter to the brothers of Phi Psi and their president, Stephen Scipione. “I encourage you to be the kind of men who express maturity and good judgment now that the story has been shown to be a tissue of lies,” Elzinga wrote. “What would it look like if Phi Kappa Psi were known, not only at UVA but elsewhere, as a band of brothers whose reputation in alcohol and drug use, and whose reputation in how women were treated by the brothers, whose conduct in manifold ways, as individuals and collectively, was held up and admired?”

“My wife said they were one of the nicest group of boys we have ever had over here,” Elzinga told me as we sat in his office.

That was on a Thursday. The next day, Friday, I walked past the Phi Psi house on its promontory overlooking the Madison Bowl. The insulting graffiti had been scrubbed away when the brothers moved back in, but I couldn’t help noticing the weeds sprouting from the bases of the four Jeffersonian columns towering over the front porch. Glass shards and pop tops flecked the dirt path in front of the house. Black trash sacks bulged in clusters on two of its sides. A window propped open by a two-by-four displayed a hanging pair of khaki trousers and a shirt. On the porch between the columns: several large plastic cups and an empty green bottle with the label “André.” It was another tableau.

Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.