It only impacts you if you let it. This is a big wide country, there are thousands of different colleges, towns, companies, clubs…you name it. You can vote with your feet and money. Instead of being a victim, teach your kids that they have options.
Like the Michigan ski resorts and the other customers “let” the fraternity members and sorority members do $400,000 of damage to two ski resorts?
Did they forget to do their due diligence? Would you rent out your home to a group of college students? Car companies charge much higher rate to anyone younger than 25, many hotels do not rent out rooms to kids under certain age, and many beach front home owners do not rent out properties to college students. I wonder why. College students do stupid things is not limited to Greek life members.
Oh, yeah, I forgot, boys will be boys, and if some fraternity members do almost half a million dollars in damage to hotels it’s the hotels’ fault for renting to fraternity members.
So if those boys didn’t belong to a fraternity, then they would have behaved perfectly?
Yes, the hotel should have known whom they were renting it to and figured out risk and reward. Not every college age group would behave badly, but you need to understand the risk and charge accordingly. I assume that’s why hotels have insurance coverage.
I am not here to defend Greek life or think it is the best organization in the world, but it is just hard for me to believe that every evil, aggressive thing college students do is all due to Greek life. I have this mental picture of perfect Johnny walking through a fraternity entry way to all of sudden become this devil Dan.
I understand the argument to get rid of all Greek and other social organization. I don’t agree, but I do understand the position of those who think getting rid of the social group will eliminate the bad behavior.
I don’t understand why people want to get rid of the national organizations but keep the local chapters. The economic advantage alone shows why the national groups is needed. Say all the sororities at Alabama had to be local groups only. Who would contract with the university to build the houses? (most new ones cost about $5M). Who would organize a new house if the current number of houses (all switched from national organizations to local ones) are not enough to server the growing student body? No alums in the area, no history, everything has to be developed from scratch. Okay, the new groups won’t have houses and the students will just remain in the dorms. What dorms? Thousands of students currently live in Greek housing. The school could buy out the houses from the national organization and retrofit them to dorms, but at what cost? Will the students want to live in a house style dorm without suites, without private bathrooms, with a limited kitchen?
National organizations provide an economy of scale. A new chapter can be started and use the same structure, same colors, same symbols. In come the workers from national, gather some local alums, do training, set up the whole thing. The national knows how to set up the accounts, how much to charge, where to get the all important insurance. A national organization most often will have alums in the area to serve as advisers. Local organizations usually rely on parents or faculty to be the advisers. What if no one wants to do it? Will non-local students be left out?
I don’t think local fraternity or sorority groups are better run, cheaper, or safer than national ones.
One of the problems today is that everyone believes what they read in the press and on the Internet. Suffice to say there are a lot of details missing as well as very incorrect in the press in the lesser Michigan damage case the University itself called non malicious. That’s why it’s so hard for me to believe either side of press and Internet reports being quoted in this thread. Anyone can be a journalist these days and we can all find so-called facts to back our sides up. I’m pretty sure this is a debate no one is going to win, at least none of us here. Truce?
“Whether individual greek groups really are part of the larger organization, in any meaningful way, is an ongoing point of contention between us.”
Yes, because I inhabit a subculture in which it’s just a college social club and not much more - where no one much cares in the adult world whether you were an AChiO or a Kappa or a DG because it’s all pretty much the same thing at the end of the day, and it’s nothing more than a “oh, that’s interesting, small world” if you meet someone in the same house. And if your daughter joins the same house, great and cool, but NBD if she doesn’t.
You’ve described a very different subculture where what you are has a great impact on the social circles you’ll inhabit as an adult, whether or not you’ll pass muster with the Junior League, where it’s of great import that your daughters / nieces / etc. carry on the tradition, where the “right frat” has implications for whether you’ll get elected to local office, where there are (perceived to be) very systematic differences between the kinds of women who are TriDelts and the kinds of women who are Pi Phis. Where it’s a much bigger social signifier.
These are 2 very, very different worlds. We aren’t talking about the same thing. That’s why we go at cross purposes.
“Like the Michigan ski resorts and the other customers “let” the fraternity members and sorority members do $400,000 of damage to two ski resorts?”
No one is excusing vandalism either. Please. The students who do that are a bunch of losers, and the book should be thrown at them. But I (and “good” Greeks) don’t bear responsibility for them, any more than you would bear responsibility, CF, if the Biking Club of Denver (or wherever) vandalized some place. You keep wanting there to be tighter ties than there really are.
PG: In post #321 are links to articles about SAE, which describe a culture of racism and hazing. In the film Hunting Ground, SAE is described as a rape culture fraternity. I am positive all SAEs aren’t like this. But their overall fraternity culture does seem to be like this. The good guys, the true gentlemen, haven’t impacted that negative culture significantly. The events that just hit the news aren’t aberrations. Based on those articles, they are a norm.
I begin to wonder if your experiences of greek life at Northwestern aren’t reflective of greek life as a whole. In a recent post you described southern greek life as different than what you experienced. I believe what I am describing is a more universal description than what you are describing. Even if you want to say southern groups are different (and we just discount the descriptions of greek life at Indiana in Paying for the Party and the descriptions of SAE at Dartmouth in the linked articles) it will surprise me if those different groups don’t make up the majority of greek membership. Perhaps someone (CF?) knows the answer to that question.
I understand you are extrapolating from your experiences and I am extrapolating from mine. If I am correct that my experience is more reflective of greek life, how should National respond to all this? Should National be closing all chapters that exhibit these behaviors? How many chapters would remain? Would they be enough to sustain greek life?
I don’t know, alh. I actually just expressed those sentiments on a different thread. And I’m not trying to be Pollyanna - there have been chapters suspended for hazing and other bad things. I actually never knew any SAEs so have no experience one way or the other. It’s such a firmly entrenched system there (all the sororities are single letter chapters, all but one on campus prior to 1900) that it seems almost archetypal to me. But maybe I’m wrong.
Should nationals sanction or close all chapters that exhibit such behaviors? Sure. I have zero problem with that. I had no problem with SAE national pulling OU’s charter.
The devil as always is in the details. Obviously here there was a video in living color. How can / should nationals monitor the behaviors of 100 individuals x 100 chapters, hundreds and thousands of miles away from national HQ? I’d like to hear a REAL proposal on how to accomplish that, not a generic “well, they just should.” Let’s assume we have a “good” national. Are they supposed to hire alums to chaperone all events? Seriously interested in a real proposal.
As my family’s Greek experience in general was very positive, I would be more inclined to be persuaded of the “systemic” badness of fraternities if there were some hard numbers proving this.
BoolaHI repeats the “one death per year for 45 years” stat, but is this number significant? There are 350,000 men in fraternities. This article suggests that it is not; rather that 1 per 350,000 is very low as compared to the death rate of the overall college population (which also appears to be very low compared to non-college-students of the same age). https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/11/07/student-deaths-less-common-estimates-suggest-study-finds
And I have repeated this over and over, that there is no hard data proving that fraternity men have raped more than non-fraternity men.
Hmmn, maybe you want to take a stab on why then are Frats the 6th most difficult organization/activity to insure in the US, ahead of the transportation of toxic waste. Seems profoundly odd, that an optional social organization, that has an attendant relationship with higher education. would have a similar amount of insurance liability and exposure that we usually assign for say, nuclear waste…??
Btw, my son’s house was put on probation (by the U, not the national) because there was a fire (accidental, no foul play or alcohol involved), the firemen came, and as they were checking the house they came across some kid who had some pot paraphernalia out in the open. im perfectly fine w that. I’m perfectly fine with efforts to keep houses in line. They’re much harder on houses than they were in my day and I’m ok with that.
Boolahi,
Can you please provide a link the list you are referring to? I am not an insurance expert, so I cannot opine as to why it is more expensive. Perhaps because there are fewer purchasers to spread the costs, perhaps because the damage awards are higher, perhaps because the consumer will pay it; I really don’t know, but I am interested to see the list. I pay way more for insuring my car, which is valued at a fraction of what I paid for my house. It will cost hundreds of thousands more dollars to rebuild my burned-down house than my totalled car, but the insurance is higher for the car probably because lives are involved in collisions more than house fires. This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t drive a car.
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/02/the-dark-power-of-fraternities/357580/
http://www.rmfeducation.org/blog/rmf-insurance-who-insured
http://cmssites.theginsystem.com/uploads/fipg/userfiles/FIPG_MANUAL.pdf
Okay, so you don’t have a list, just a number of articles and publications for me to read.