To a degree, yes. But well-established chapters generally have alumni donors too. I suppose those count as participants depending on how you look at it.
I rest my case.
Actually, i think that the police issue is an interesting comparison to make.
You are right that we shouldn’t dismiss every member of a group just because a few members or sub-groups do dumb shit. But sometimes, and i think that both the police and the fraternity cases are instructive here, the dumb shit happens often enough that it becomes a pattern, and suggests a problem that is no longer simply about a few dumbasses, but reflects some broader set of institutional or structural problems with the organizations.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t good cops and good police departments and good fraternity members and good fraternities out there. It could well be the case that these people still constitute the majority. But while we should make every effort to judge each individual and each case on its own merits, the increasing weight of evidence regarding racial discrepancies in policing understandably leads some people to develop a somewhat jaundiced view of the profession as a whole, and the increasing weight of evidence regarding violent or racist or misogynist fraternities understandably colors people’s view of the whole institution.
While it should not change our evaluation of individual cases, it can change our basic assumptions, and our overall views. As the stepson of a cop, and as someone whose mother worked for the police in a civilian capacity, i used to have a predisposition to view police as inherently trustworthy. In any given situation, whether a street encounter or a court case, i would automatically assume that the officer was acting in good faith, and was telling the truth.
The evidence of police malfeasance and incompetence in the United States means that this is no longer my default view. I am happy to wait until the evidence is in, and to make an evaluation based on the individual case, but i no longer start from the basic assumption that the cop is right and the person who has been arrested is wrong, and i no longer start from the basic assumption that the officer is going to present the evidence honestly.
I don’t know whether you consider that a reasonable or an unreasonable approach to the issue, but i can guarantee that many people have had their views shaped in similar ways by news stories about police misconduct, and by news stories about fraternity problems too.
I put myself through college at a place that regularly hosted events like this. As for Greek events, we didn’t host fraternity events because they were almost always no-shows (yes, really - they just plain old didn’t show up) and as for sorority breakfasts, those girls would fill their plates, go to the bathroom :eek:, fill their plates, go to the bathroom :dubious:, etc. until all the food was gone. It didn’t matter what sorority it was; this was always what happened.
When my dad was in college in the late 1950s, he heard that if he worked as a dishwasher at a sorority house, he could get free meals, and then one of his classmates said he’d done that for a few days, until one of the girls spat on him! :mad: Even before that, even though they knew he was a classmate, they treated him like something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe.
The net cost of living in my fraternity was no different from the dorms, given that I supported our dorm parties as well.
My fraternity brothers were not all rich (though some were loaded), not all white (we were more “diverse” than the campus at large), etc. Yes - we drank, and some guys did drugs - same as the rest of the student body.
Our house GPA was in the high 3s as I recall, and the only person on academic probation was me (I dropped out to start a company).
Yes - put a bunch of college aged guys together and they are going to act like college aged guys. That has nothing to do with fraternities, and everything to do with the general behavior of 18-22 year old males. My platoon acted the same way, and the Sea Patrol had their work cut out for them when our fleet hit Subic Bay.
My sister considered joining a sorority; our parents told her that if she did that, she would be paying for it herself, and did not pursue it further when she found out how much it cost. They told her the same thing about a Spring Break trip.
My brother went to a grand total of one frat party when he was in college; IDK how he wound up there, because he DID NOT run in those circles at all. He quickly became bored and went into the cellar for some unknown reason, and found their deep freeze. He stuck a food-service-sized package of sausages under his coat and sneaked out the back door. :o 
After a few days, he was tired of that thing taking up space in his freezer, so he called a soup kitchen to ask if they took frozen food items; they said they did, so he took it to them.
As for money - when my funds got tight, it was my fraternity that took care of me. I was able to cover half of my room and board by taking on various house maintenance tasks for example.
How people behave in frats and sororities also depends on the college. I got my degree at a big state university, and I had some classmates who started out at smaller private colleges and had joined Greek organizations there. When they met their “brothers” or “sisters” at the bigger college, they knew immediately that they would not fit in and did not join after they transferred.
I also know a lady who spent a year as a sorority housemother at a state school. It was not a “party” sorority by any stretch of the imagination; its membership was limited to women who had participated in 4-H and she said it was more of a family atmosphere. This was about 15 years ago (her marriage, which was long-term and childless, had ended unexpectedly and she felt lost at the time) and she still considers them “my girls” and has gone to numerous weddings and other celebrations and bought tons of baby gifts for them and keeps in touch with them. Some of them have even opened their homes to her whenever she traveled, which she’s doing more of now that she’s retired. It was just what she needed to recover and get her bearings once again.
There are some pharmacy fraternities and sororities, and I did belong to Kappa Epsilon, mainly because one of my friends was the head of it at our school. :rolleyes: It was a very informal organization, and had been founded prior to WW II to support women in the field. They also had Rho Chi (top 10% of the class) and Kappa Psi (basically a party organization), and other majors have similar organizations.
@nearwildheaven, why didn’t your brother eat the sausages?
If he ever told me, I don’t remember the answer.
Heh. Everyone I knew in school usually said “I went to college in New Jersey…” until pressed on which one. When my brother and I were both “in college in NJ”, Mom went back to school at Brown and was Magna and Phi Beta Kappa. She was the hardest working of all of us. 
I haven’t heard that many stories about that games the frats play, but I’d be scared to eat anything from there. Well, cookies anyway.
My guess would be that 1) He didn’t have room in his freezer, and 2) he would get tired of that sausage after a while, depending on how much of it there was.
The “bad rap” is deserved.
Fraternities and sororities are organizations for the privileged, by the privileged, and made up of the privileged who exist as elitist cliques with a sole mission to perpetuate said privilege, while actively denying any privilege to “outsiders”. Spoiled, selfish brats who think that tossing (what is to them) chump change at charity amounts to any more than a baby’s fart in the Mall of America.
To use the sentence I do to describe a decent human being’s daily actions: the day I see frat boys or sorority girls ‘sharing friendship with the pariah and prosperity with the poor’, will likely be the day a blizzard hits Nairobi.
Granted that there may be exceptions my impression when I was in college was that both the men’s and women’s fraternities (the latter were not called sororities for some historical reason) were basically for rich kids to party at. And a student on a full scholarship should not have enough spare cash to waste on it. That was my reaction when I read the column in my paper.
No, but if 85% of the charities and law enforcement agencies I encountered acted like that then I wouldn’t be inclined to assume each new one was part of the blessed 15%.
The implication I get from the last few posts is that the writers object to the very existence of fraternities and sororities. What they favor instead I don’t know, but if I were attending a four-year college I would eschew fraternities altogether, solely because I have little social inclination, and I am a teetotaler.
Wow. I guess that proves how bad an influence frats are. One party with them, and he turns to a life of crime.
You know, Sigma Alpha Epsilon seems to come off as the worst of the worst, concluding from various posts here. I’d sure like to know about SAE grads, or those of similar fraternities/sororities, who did NOT turn out as wastrels!
My daughter is a 25 year old nurse. When she was in college we discussed sororities. She opted instead for THON, a student run philanthropy that helps children and families affected by childhood cancers. She is in so many ways a better person than I am.
(Me,I stayed away in my time because I was not into the whole “social scene” thing.)
But yes, you are right, there does seem to be a widespread hostility to their very existence. May I quote this same thread:
That the privileged gather in closed groups to enjoy and perpetuate their privilege is one of those statements so obvious it tells us little, except that the person making it may consider “privilege” to be an evil per se. But really if it were just the privileged getting together for drinks and smokes and future mutual job references it would be unremarkable.
IMO the hostility to Greek Houses is increased by it being seen as a way for the future Respectable Pillars of Society and Business to give themselves a “safe space” in which to indulge their “ignorant young asshole” phase with impunity while we plebeians have to risk an arrest record.
Yeah, Sig Ep does have quite the rap sheet. Heck, go back in time far enough and you can and toss in Confederate associations!
OTOH, to be fair, not too long ago as discussed on this thread a sorority introduced many of us to the delightful phrase “c*nt punt” as a motivational threat, so you can’t say they are not educational in some manner 
