The university both of my children attended/are attending banned all Greek Life after a hazing death years ago. The only ones allowed are academic fraternies such as Psi Chi. Students still form bonds and have a sense of community, 2 things I keep hearing from the pro fraternity side. In fact there is more mixing of socio-economic classes, proven by the comparison with the other college in town, which still has Greek life
I think hazing is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, and one where the selectivity and secrecy issues traditionally associated with Greek organizations (as well as military, athletic, and other groups) ARE relevant to the conversation. But that’s separate from the “rape culture” and binge drinking that were the main focus of the original article and called out in the thread title.
I agree with @EllieMom about these things in general. As someone who supports the Greek system, I think there is a lot of room for improvement. There are going to be problems with ANY all-male groupings, but I feel that allowing such grouping is highly beneficial.
A Florida State fraternity member recently took some type of drug called “Flaka” and committed a pretty terrible, violent crime. The only involvement of the Greek system was that the guy was a member of a fraternity. But all of the news stories emphasized that he was a “fraternity member.” Plenty of non-affiliated students commit terrible crimes, but the press never notes that fact when they commit crimes.
There was a time when faculty where much more involved in fraternity life, and this was a good thing. Today they are less likely to get involved because of the change in the drinking age and the rise of political correctness. Not having this involvement is a change for the worse.
What I don’t understand is why universities don’t enforce the LAW, which states that persons under 21 years old are not to drink? Yes these frats (and sororities too) are often obnoxious to the extreme, and sometimes engage in criminal behaviors…but all of that would be dramatically reduced if the alcohol was removed from the parties. It would be like taking away their fuel source, literally. And again, its the LAW…I feel the university has a moral and legal responsibility to uphold this very important law, especially when the lives of their students are at stake.
One of the unintended consequences of raising the drinking age from 18 to 21 is that since most undergrads are now under 21, they cannot legally drink at bars. You can get drunk at bars, of course, but it is expensive, and there are regulations such as dram shop laws. Bartenders and staff don’t want to be legally or morally responsible for drunk drivers, for example.
And the raising of legal drinking age to 21 also outsourced a lot of that campus drinking to off-campus, whether in frats or apartments or other places where few or no adults are present.
The Amethyst Initiative was launched in 2008, by a group of U.S. college presidents and chancellors calling for the reconsideration of U.S. legal drinking age. 24 years after the 1984 law, they reported that ‘a culture of dangerous, clandestine “binge-drinking”—often conducted off-campus—has developed.’ This initiative is currently supported by 136 college presidents.
Colleges could enforce the drinking laws with respect to all students. Have surprise inspections on a regular basis in dorm rooms. Randomly knock on doors in dorms on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights (make up something like complaints of loud noises or RA heard what sounded like drunken activity in the room). Discipline all kids (eventually kicking out multiple time offenders) caught underage with alcohol (more than 1/2 the kids in undergrad are not legally permitted to drink). How many college presidents do you think want to be the first to take such steps?
Reality is many/most college kids will drink. Whether its in their dorm, at a Greek party, in an apartment or bar. And in the vast majority of cases nothing serious or long lasting ever happens. Act stupid/crazy, have some fun and wake up with a headache the next day. Vast majority go on to graduate and become productive members of society.
If kids engage in criminal activity (beyond drinking underage) (including rape), they should be punished. That includes kids in the Greek system (and chapters if there are patterns that develop). And education of the risks involved (including drunk driving and binge drinking)
When we raised the drinking age from 18 to 21, we didn’t delay kids interest in drinking for three years. In many cases, we just pushed the drinking underground on college campuses. Away from any type of supervision which can help head off problems before they occur. Not so sure that was a good idea. At least it should be reconsidered/reevaluated.
@saillakeerie I think you are taking for granted drinking in our culture and accepting it as an inevitable fact of life. There are large numbers of families and people who do not drink at all, or very infrequently. I don’t think it has to be just assumed and accepted that everyone will drink, especially when underage, and that the universities should just look the other way and allow it. The fact is that kids are DYING on campuses from drinking; and assaults and other problems are directly associated with alcohol. Yes enforcing the law is a nuisance that administrators apparently want to avoid, however if they would enforce it, many of these problems would decrease dramatically. At Richmond, for example, almost 100% of the students live on campus and many do not have cars. Leaving campus specifically to drink would not be impossible, but it would make it a lot more difficult and only the truly determined drinkers would go to that effort, leaving the more sober minded kids free from the pressure to drink at campus parties.
On another note, are we going to be equally tolerant of underage students smoking pot, now that it’s being legalized? Should university administrators just look the other way and let the dorms be smoky weed zones? Personally, I don’t drink or smoke anything, and I try to model sobriety to my kids. It’s a little disappointing to me that college is widely considered to be a place where drinking (and smoking) are inevitable.
@chris17mom @saillakeerie Given the fact that college kids are going to drink, increased enforcement of the type you are suggesting can make the problem much worse.
In the olden days fraternities would have lots of kegs of beer. You generally had to stand in line to get a beer, and while it was certainly possible to get “tipsy” or even drunk, it was difficult to get dangerously drunk. When fraternities (or others) are told they can’t provide alcohol, students respond by bringing hard liquor, which is more easily transported. Drinks are filled by sight, and it’s quite easy to accidentally fill a large cup mostly with liquor, so that one cup is equal to five or six drinks.
Crack down on that type of drinking enough and students will “pre-game,” by having five or six shots right before they go out. Add to that even a little more alcohol and you get a bunch of lousy-drunk people.
Our laws should encourage students to drink openly, socially, and responsibly. How great it would be for colleges to have on-campus pubs where students were limited to say three beers a night; they would be a great place to visit and socialize, but no one would get dangerously drunk.
Why don’t PARENTS enforce the LAW prohibiting people under 21 from drinking alcohol? High schools have been fighting a mostly losing battle against the parents of their students who either sponsor parties where students are served alcohol or look the other way while their snowflakes procure their own booze. Every year before prom season the principals of all our local high schools hold meetings pleading for parents to prohibit drinking and beach trips and every year parents ignore them. Our state legislature was about to pass a law greatly strengthening the penalties for parents supporting underage drinking in their homes and it was watered down at the last minute. Why would the universities or anyone else be able to to enforce the law?
In my opinion, the parents are massive hypocrites when they howl about underage drinking every time something terrible occurs as a result and blame the schools or the greek system. The advocates for lowering the drinking age to 18 always claim that doing so would solve the binge drinking problem even though all the evidence contradicts that notion. As long as adults wink and nod at their kids’ underage drinking, these problems will continue.
Yawn.
@Joblue I don’t allow my teenagers to drink in my home or outside of my home, and I don’t drink either, so they are not witnessing that behavior in my home. But my teenage son is now at college in another state thousands of miles away from me so I can no longer personally enforce my rules or the law in real time. It would be nice if the university would uphold the law and not allow underage students to drink. I don’t think it’s hypocritical to expect that. I do think it’s hypocritical for universities and publications (Huffpost, etc.) to write long judgmental treatises on fraternity culture, toxic masculinity, and sexual assaults, while ignoring the giant elephant in front of us, which is the enormous amount of illegal alcohol consumption that dramatically increases all of those problems.
‘It would be nice if the university would uphold the law and not allow underage students to drink.’ Are any colleges willfully allowing students to drink? Many are outlawing any alcohol on campus, even for students over the age of 21/
‘Yes enforcing the law is a nuisance that administrators apparently want to avoid, however if they would enforce it, many of these problems would decrease dramatically. At Richmond, for example, almost 100% of the students live on campus and many do not have cars. Leaving campus specifically to drink would not be impossible, but it would make it a lot more difficult and only the truly determined drinkers would go to that effort…’ Are you proposing building a 20 foot high fence around the campus to keep the students captive? (A lot of parents and townsfolks might like that…)
Yes, college students are dying from alcohol, often because of the bingeing of alcohol consumed off-campus. Lowering the drinking age would not mean anybody HAS to drink, just as at age 18 you CAN smoke and send nude selfies. (And where I live in NC, the age of consent for sex is 16, even if the other party is 40 or 50 years old. That doesn’t mean parents give their high school juniors the green light).
Earl above says ‘Our laws should encourage students to drink openly, socially, and responsibly.’ I agree totally. That does not mean anyone HAS to drink, but it would mean alcohol consumption would be less likely underground, off-campus, unsupervised.
But drinking does contribute to violence, sexual assault, and death, which are huge problems on campuses. Not sure how we are going to allow alcohol and still solve those problems. I guess it comes down to people who believe alcohol use is inevitable and we should be looking at how best to manage it to keep kids safe, vs. people who believe that alcohol use should be discouraged on campuses, which would make campuses safer for everyone, but would not really help individuals who choose to drink off campus. I fall into the latter category. I think it’s outrageous that universities look the other way while enormous amounts of alcohol are consumed by students of all ages, with the predictable alcohol-related deaths and sexual assaults resulting.
@chris17mom There are 2 approaches to the drinking issue, which you delineate very well. I tend to agree on the side of managing alcohol use for the students who drink. I am not 100% sure I am right, so may shift one day. Drunkenness does indeed contribute to violence, sexual assault and death. I just believe we should consider changing the law, to make students safer.
Do colleges look the other way? I don’t know. It is not in the best interest for the institution to see press reports and social media buzz about the latest incident, on-campus or off-campus. I will admit that when an assault is alleged, the college will often do everything it can to minimize the damage, to consider its own reputation much more than the student victim. Cynical as that sounds.
@chris17mom I don’t think I am taking for granted drinking in our culture and accepting it as an inevitable fact of life. I am just accepting reality that drinking is part of our culture (not for everyone but a sizeable portion of it) thus making it inevitable. Go to a wedding, out to a restaurant, sporting event, work events, amusement parks, etc. and you will likely see people drinking. Watch TV or listen to the radio and you will hear ads for alcohol. It is a part of our culture. You can argue it shouldn’t be and that is your right. But prohibition failed for the nation. Raising the drinking age from 18 to 21 was essentially prohibition for 18-20 year olds. I think there is evidence to say that has failed as well. And big problem is (unless they changed the law) no state would ever try an experiment to see if a lower drinking age could actually be better (because to do so would result in significant loss of federal highway funding which pretty much no state could withstand).
You make it sound like campuses are full of drunks 7 days a week going on crime sprees. But that isn’t the reality of campus life to my knowledge. Are there kids who have problems? Sure. How do we deal with those kids? Same way we deal with people over 21 years of old who commit crimes (drunk or sober): prosecute them. Colleges have the added hammer of being able to suspend or expel kids as necessary.
Combine ignoring the reality of alcohol as part of our culture (again for a sizeable portion of the population – and I say this as someone who rarely drinks, pretty much never as any alcohol in my house and has never served (nor would I serve) alcohol to anyone underage) with a raised drinking age and you push drinking in college underground. Away from supervision which intervene before problems develop. Often times pushing kids off campus (in many cases driving which is never a good thing with a night of drinking though Uber helps with that). Encourages kids to binge drink hard alcohol in their dorm or apartment before going out with friends.
What would happen if they could drink at 18 in a bar with bartenders and security monitoring how much they drank and cutting them off if they had to much? Would that make the problems you note worse or better?
In terms of pot, from what I understand, there is already a blind eye turned in many instances. Doesn’t mean dorms become “smoky weed zones.” Like alcohol, some kids will never try. Some kids will try and not have problems. Other kids will try and have problems. Dealing with those kids (through education and intervention) makes more than going crazy trying to enforce laws which many kids will ignore anyway with little/no negative consequences.
@saillakeerie You make really good points. I can see that alcohol is all around us in society and I do think it causes some huge problems (one look at drunk driving death statistics will confirm that), but I agree that prohibition is not an option for obvious reasons. As adults we have to be able to manage our alcohol use so that it is not a problem in our lives, and many people cannot do that at all, sometimes with disastrous results. Ideally young adults would also be able to manage their drinking, but it seems that the combination of youth and peer pressure lead to even more problems with alcohol than most adults have.
Your points about lowering the age to 18 and attempting to teach young adults to manage the issue rather than just bingeing later on or drinking secretly in unsafe situations do make sense. I would not oppose any changes that would actually make young people safer. On the other hand, I’d like to see a lot more serious discussion and education about the problems with alcohol and a lot less glamorizing of it in media and advertising. (Imagine if we were glamorizing and advertising heroin like that…we all know it ruins lives, why promote it?)
My son actually describes his college experience this way! And he is complaining about it. He’s also at a school with a lot of partying, and he’s in a frat, so I guess the drinking is to be expected, but he feels that it is excessive and unsafe and that there is a lot of pressure to participate in it.
I’d be curious to see a comparison of crime statistics on dry campuses that do not allow alcohol at all vs. campuses that do allow it. If I had my way I’d lean towards banning alcohol on campuses, but I can see that your suggestions might be more practical, since alcohol is obviously not going away any time soon.
@PetulaClark I agree with you 100%. I’m all for making kids safer even if it means changing the law. What bugs me is the hypocrisy you mention on the part of the universities when something goes wrong. They obviously have this huge problem on their hands of kids drinking excessively and then hurting themselves and each other, but the schools won’t deal with the biggest contributor to the problem which is the alcohol consumption itself. Instead they blame things like “toxic masculinity” which to me sounds like a politically correct cop-out. How toxic would those same blustering frat boys really be in a sober environment? Probably just annoying rather than dangerous.
@chris17mom While I disagree with some of your points, you are correct that the universities often turn a blind eye to drinking until something bad happens. And then they are like the Captain Renault in Casablanca who professed “shock” over the fact that there was gambling in his fair city.
One (partial) solution to all of this is to have more adult and/or semi-adult involvement in Greek life by encouraging graduate students to remain active (or join) and to encourage a return to hands-on faculty advisors of yesteryear, whose involvement isn’t to prevent drinking, but to prevent idiocy.
@EarlVanDorn That is really a great idea. I just would like to see the problem openly discussed and real solutions put in place, rather than blame being thrown everywhere else. To me the primary problem is out-of-control drinking by people who “can’t handle their liquor,” so to speak. Everything else (vandalism, death, sexual assault) is a symptom of the primary problem. (In the case of sexual assault that issue is more complex, since there are a small number of sober rapists on campuses. But the majority of these assaults probably would not happen if people were managing their drinking differently.) Any discussion of these problems without addressing the primary cause is hypocritical and evasive in my opinion.
And yes, after reading the posts by you and others, I would totally support any of the measures mentioned to lessen the negative impact of problem drinking by young adults. My first choice would be that students not drink, but it’s not up to me to decide what other people do, and if they can be taught to drink in a safer manner that would be a huge improvement over the current situation.
Seems like choosing a party-heavy school and then joining a fraternity there is typically a way to get into the type of college environment with the heaviest alcohol drinking.
Haha, you are so right! He feels kind of surrounded and pressured by it. But he is making his own choices (not to drink), and he said some of the other guys are actually joining him now and staying sober too. So it’s a frat-boy-gone-good story! 