I think the big difference was that alcohol was more accessible in frats. A lot of college students are under age; they couldn’t go in to a bar or a store to buy alcohol unless they went through the trouble of getting a fake ID.
But in a frat, you had older members who were able to buy alcohol legally and everyone in the house had access to it. As long as it was not officially a public venue, there was a general willingness to look the other way.
I was on the football team in college and a lot of the football players were in a single frat so the rest of us got free access to that frat for parties and studying. I went to an engineers school so the library of old homework and tests was incredibly useful. The parties were big and typically the football team would import girls from other school to the parties in some cases they were paid, especially during recruiting season, but most of the time it was free beer and gas money.
I didn’t have to do the hazing but several of my friends did. It didn’t seem terrible but it’s possible they just didn’t tell me about the worst of it. In general, I know several people who were made better people by rushing and would recommend it if you can afford it and don’t get the same benefit for free.
OTOH in many places the laws concerning alcohol used to much less strictly enforced than they are today.
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And we can all thank the good Lord for the moderating affect of admitting women into formerly all-male colleges.
Overall, it was great - I lived in a quite nice house where we had our own private cook and could pretty much do whatever we wanted, for less than the cost of dorm/cafeteria living.
I was in college 1988-1992 - there was LOTS of drinking, being underage was NEVER an issue, enforcement by college administration was pretty much nonexistent (I don’t know what authority they would have - my chapter was decades old and we literally owned our own house, on private property just outside campus)…there was basically a party at one house or another every Thu/Fri/Sat night throughout the school year you were welcome to attend.
I personally never saw anything that I’d consider “out of control”, though obviously situations vary widely and I have no doubt such things happen, perhaps frequently.
We had a walk-in closet full of old exams, homework, etc. for use as we saw fit, as well as a library of books (so you wouldn’t have to buy them.)
Our pledge period was long, and more about service and integration into house life - pledges cleaned the house, served meals (if they were on the house food plan), etc. - the challenges were mostly fun (a scavenger hunt in nearby NYC, etc.)…there was what I would call “moderate” hazing before initiation - nothing extreme or too humiliating, though again, situations vary widely.
But as I recall, there was an extended period when the police monitored places that sold alcohol (bars, restaurants, stores, etc) but didn’t pay much attention to places where alcohol was being consumed as long as it wasn’t being sold. The basic idea was that once the sale was made, it was out of official hands. So a frat was a place where you could drink alcohol without having to go through the prior difficulty of buying it.
Law enforcement policies have changed and I think nowadays as much responsibility is being placed on the server as is placed on the seller.
I went to college during the late 80s. We drink alcohol and did minor drugs but I shied away from the fraternities because of the reputation of excessive partying and irresponsible behavior. I guess it was good that I didn’t go to college a half-decade sooner.
This is cheating only to the extent it’s a resource other students in the class have no access to, but a more important example of that kind of cheating is the fact greek life itself is a huge social network most people don’t have access to.
Even liquor stores and bars didn’t always card you in those days. The store across the street from the university I went to would sell to you if your voice had changed, it almost seemed.
FTR this was in SoCal, late 1970s.
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I recall the liquor store near my campus overcharged anyone looking young. If you complained, then you were carded and either the price was adjusted properly or you were shown the door.
I was in a fraternity in college in the early 90s. The answer to the OP’s question is largely “depends”. Fraternity culture can vary significantly between different houses and even within the same fraternity across different schools.
Generally, yes, there is a consistent theme of a bunch of dudes hanging out drinking and throwing big parties and trying to get laid.
Also, yes, we had what was called a “files room” of people’s class notes from prior semesters.
Fraternities at my college were more or less the “30 dudes living in a mansion” type you see in the movies. Although some of the newer ones looked more like a Motel 6. The typical layout for most houses consists of bedrooms (typically singles, doubles and triples), a large common living room (often with pool table and large TV), large dining room that can accommodate the whole house with an industrial-style kitchen. Houses were typically staffed with a cook whose salary was paid for through fraternity house dues in lieu of a campus meal plan.
Fraternity houses also had a large “party room”, which was basically a big concrete room with a bar, some sound equipment, party lights and a drain in the floor. When parties weren’t happening, often the party room was converted into a sort of lounge, sometimes with Beruit (A.K.A “beer pong”) tables.
My fraternity didn’t really “haze” beyond some minor excessive drinking (which they were doing anyway). But like all houses, we did have 8 weeks of “pledging” where the new members are required to be at certain places at certain times, learn about the history of the fraternity and perform what basically amounts to house chores. Sometimes we fuck with them by telling them to get all their homework done by Friday so we can kick their ass all weekend at the house, but then we surprise them with a road trip to Penn State or wherever. I do know that some other houses were a bit more asshole-ish about pledging. Pretty sure a lot of the more extreme stuff is mostly urban legend.
We did party a fair amount. They were usually open to pretty much anyone and alcohol was given away for free (to get around various state liquor restrictions). Parties typically consisted of the following type:
Weekend house parties - Legal parties that ran from 9pm to 2am on Friday or Saturday night and had to be registered with the school. Beer only. Typically held in the party room or other large common area where the fraternity could go through the motions of pretending to check ids and whatnot. Roughly equivalent to the “toga party” scene in Animal House.
Cocktail parties - Legal parties than ran 7pm-9pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Basically what it sounds like. Everyone gets dressed up like Yuppie jerkoffs from a Bret Easton Ellis novel and gets hammered on screwdrivers, sex on the beaches, tequila, Jell-O shots, Mad Dog and/or Boones wine.
Hotel parties - Illegal parties held on Thursday nights. Held in the individual brother’s rooms (as if on the floor of a hotel) so as not to be visible from the street. Typically smaller scale but could get pretty packed (you don’t want a line of people in front of the house drawing attention). As they weren’t allowed anyway, you could pretty much serve whatever you wanted (including weed). Some guys might be doing drugs in one room. Others playing “Asshole” or some other beer game in another. Sometimes we might also extend the party to the party room to play Beirut or dice games at the bar.
Monday Night Football - Not so much a formal “party” as the fraternity hanging out with a bunch of friends drinking and watching football (again, often incorporating the Beirut tables and bar games). Also a popular “rush” event.
And of course there were variations of parties like “toga”, “80s”, “70s”, St Patrick’s Day, Halloween, etc.
Even if we weren’t throwing parties, there was often a low level of “partying” such as groups of guys drinking and watching tv, “pre-gaming” before they go out somewhere else, beer games, hanging out with girls, whatever. One time I had to explain to a visiting friend from Villanova that this was not the “party” we were throwing, it was just “everyone hanging out until the party starts in a few hours”.
FWIW, we didn’t spend every moment in the fraternity house. Every house doesn’t throw parties every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. So it was quite common for fraternities to visit each other’s houses. And of course, some got along better than others. Off campus parties were also popular, as were several local bars. Occasionally we would visit other colleges in the area, but it was usually more common for them to show up at our school.
Occasionally you had fights or minor “chest puffing” what with all the alcohol mixed in with rival fraternities, GDIs, drunken townies, drunken freshmen, drunken local high school kids and other “randoms” looking to get drunk for free at your house.
As for girls, one of the main advantages of being in a fraternity is that girls tend to like to go to fraternity parties. And living in the fraternity, it makes it convenient to go back to your room to hook up, rather than trek across campus. Fraternities also tended to “brother/sister” up with one or more sororities. Throwing joint (as in “partnership”, not “marijuana”) parties, generally hanging out and whatnot.
That’s more or less the gist of it.
Pike here, married to a Tri-Delt for the last 39 years.
msmith537 covered it pretty well. Most of the effort was partying on the weekends followed by hassling the pledges to clean up the house. I never saw any drugs at the parties, just alcohol. Pledges had to work as bartenders, and drink charges were just enough to cover the cost.
Hazing was limited mainly to comical or slightly embarrassing stuff. The pledges were given a list of things to accomplish, mostly goofy and silly. Frequently it was a situation you had to interpret somehow (ie. #39. A picture of Pullin giving Debbie X from Pi-Phi’s a lube-job*). You were free to interpret this any way you liked.
Underage drinking was common and liquor stores looked the other way when pledges showed up to buy as pickup load of booze. The campus police did the same as long as their was no real trouble.
*This is an actual requirement, for some reason I remember it. FWIW, I worked part time as a mechanic and we got “Debbie” to stand on a partially raised lift in one of the bays, while I held a (very clean) grease gun to her ear. Goofy I know, but we were kids.
I didn’t belong to a fraternity, but I ate at one for most of my time in college and ended up knowing more about its history in some respects than some of the brothers.
Things were different back then. The drinking age was still 18, which meant that binge drinking wasn’t a thing (why binge if you can go to the college Rathskeller and get a beer any time you wanted?). There weren’t as many parties, and there was a sense of decorum (everyone was required to wear suits and ties to dinner once a week).
During rush season, there were parties, but, again, there was next to no bingeing and the pledge parties were more like adult cocktail parties than what they are now. Again, this is a function of the lower drinking age: there were school events like wine and cheese parties and you aspired to drink responsibly. The only time I really got drunk (it helped that I can’t stand beer) was when a professor had a vodka party for his Russian politics class, where we were taught to drink it like a Russian.
Hazing was basically minor things like doing chores around the fraternity house or counting the number of spikes on the fence surrounding the college, or reciting the Greek alphabet while holding a match and before it burned you finger (a friend kept cracking up whenever he got to “pi rho.”).
Women usually didn’t take part. This was before the pill was common, so they were wary of casual sex and hookups were unknown. Also the college had just gone co-ed when I entered, so the parties were still geared for men only.
I don’t think there’s an implication that the frats are obtaining exams or notes by any means unavailable to other people.
we have a local school, ECU, that banned 3 frats just this year for breaking various rules.
Also UT Knoxville even now bans all alcohol on campus so the frats just hold their parties off campus , not at frat houses.
Wasnt in one but I know alot of people use them to make job connections. When they graduate they have have an instant list of contacts at various companies. No, Its not a guaranteed job but it doesnt hurt to have some connections.
Also one young man told me at his frat almost everyone was going into some sort of business career.
My wifes old sorority sends out a yearly newsletter for alumni which tells who is working for what company and about local mixers.
I was in a fraternity 1988-1991, including living in the house for two years.
MSM covered it pretty well a few posts up. There was a fair amount of alcohol, and some drinking to excess, although administrators started cracking down in my last year. No other drugs, at least in my house. There was another house that the stoners seemed to gravitate to.
Hazing was pretty nominal, a scavenger hunt and some joking.
More than the parties. I have fond memories of the casual camaderie, the running jokes, the late night arguments. We also did some cool volunteer stuff, like cleaning a park in Chicago, and some road trips…
I had a lot of friends outside of the fraternity, but the only people I am still in touch with are the brothers.
