At my college there was one frat house in particular that from the outside looked like a stately mansion, the sort of place where you might expect a gilded age robber baron to live. I thought it was gorgeous.
Then one day, I had to meet someone who lived there for a project I was working on. When I went inside, I was surprised to see what a dump it was - ragged carpet with weird stains on it, worn-out furniture, clutter everywhere, the overpowering stench of stale beer and cigarette smoke.
As a general rule I found that, at least during my time in college, the negatives far outweighed the positives, but one could occasionally find a positive and there were always a few individual social fraternities that actually encouraged and enforced more responsible behavior. These were, alas, a tiny minority of the whole.
Many of them, yes. Some of them do raise a substantial amount of money.
A reminder that Phi Mu Alpha isn’t a social fraternity; it’s a professional one, albeit an extremely social one. In practice it means that it sits outside the Greek/PanHel system of social fraternities and sororities and usually does its own thing. Which, I say speaking as a Sinfonian, was pretty fun and mostly harmless. (Chapters with houses are pretty rare though. Mine didn’t have one, but then we were perpetually in the music building anyway.)
Also: there was no hazing that I was aware of. Which was nice.
Holy shit. I think mine were $40 / year. But that was a long, long time ago.
I think it really depends on the university. My chapter had a rented frat house, a typical student rental house for the area with about 8 or 10 brothers living in the house. We visited one chapter at Case Western in Cleveland and they were housed in a University owned facility identical to the other residences. At the chapter at SUNY Buffalo, the house was a rental on the verge of condemnation.
Not only might there be annual dues, residential fees (essentially rent and utilities), and insurance premiums, the recreational expenditures might far exceed them. For example, many of the sororities require members to purchase a lot of fairly expensive clothes for specific events.
Additionally fraternities and sororities might have a lot of “mandatory” activities to maintain membership status.
Also a member of a sorority that is paired with a specific fraternity might find herself “required” to assist in socializing with members of the fraternity. That might range from being required to participate in joint events with that fraternity, or it can even be more demanding, for example being required to engage in specific kinds of interactions with specific individuals (and in the worst cases, of course, be pressured into sexual situations).
And of course there is is famous sorority-defining incident from 2013:
And of course we should remember that the whole social fraternity movement has its origins in white supremacy at backlash against racial integration.
So, in my view, the whole system is tainted in many ways, both historical and contemporary.
I went to a large (huge?) state university with a relatively small fraternity/sorority population - around 11% these days, and I think it was even smaller back then.
My may problems are what you describe- the whole system seems like it perpetuates a certain worldview/aesthetic/set of gender roles/societal norms that I feel have been outdated since maybe 1955. And a lot of that is pretty toxic, especially the selection process/elitist mentality.
This goes for the “social” fraternities. The academic/service ones are a different story- frats like Alpha Phi Omega are something of a different animal than say… Kappa Alpha.
I’m neutral. When I was in college there were plenty of fraternities, but fraternity members seemed to stick together so I never had much interaction with them in campus activities.
The first week of freshman year when I went to MIT was rush week, where you lived in a temporary dorm assignment and could go to fraternity parties. I went to one and stayed over. I don’t know if I would have gotten an offer or not (probably not, it was a Catholic fraternity and I don’t look too Catholic) but I decided against it before I was even close to being the last one there. Never regretted staying in the dorms for a second. But one big problem was that the frats were across the river, and who needed that kind of walk in a Cambridge January?
Ours were quite a bit less, maybe $150 a semester, which might be $400 now. And it mostly went for food and drinks expenses that I would have spent money on anyway, so it really wasn’t a burden.
Things definitely got tighter in the late 80s. When I entered college, a student ID got you into the party and access to the bar. By the time I graduated in 1991 there were paid security guards checking IDs
Interesting. I started college in 1993 and turned 21 in 1996, and have no memory of there being any issue getting into a frat party and getting alcohol underage. Obviously, varies by institution. This was at Northwestern. There may have been some sort of nominal “guest list” or somebody pretending to check — I don’t remember— but no issue acquiring alcohol or access to such parties. Even in town I was able to get into some bars without even a fake ID.
The only fraternity I wanted to join was “Tapa-Kega-Brew”. I did think “Lamba-Sigma-Delta” (LSD) was an interesting name.
I despised the fraternities/sororities when I did attend the university. During intramural sports if it ended up in a 3 way tie instead of doing a round robin playoff the would make the 2 residents/dorm teams play each other and the fraternity got to sit out. Then the winner of the dorms game had to immediately play the fraternity. Of course the dorm team was worn out and the fraternity team would win.
That’s basically the same trend I saw, but it happened a bit slower at my school (a Patriot League school of around 5000 undergrads, almost 50% greek).
I guess the way I look at fraternities (and the associated underaged drinking and partying) is that they were just part of the college experience. In all fairness, that experience at my school was a bit over the top by most standards.
When I was in college the legal drinking age was still 18. There were some students not yet legal, but not very many of them, and I don’t recall anybody at campus parties bothering about it. The professors used to give sherry parties for their students; I don’t remember anybody being carded for those either, though I suppose they might have checked who they were inviting.
I also don’t remember a whole lot of binge drinking. A significant number of people got drunk occasionally but not often, and there were some people who got drunk a lot; but the latter was pretty much frowned upon, and the one time I got really drunk at a party (by accident, while I’d been having occasional wine since my midteens I hadn’t found out where my threshhold was) I got teased about it.
I think raising the drinking age has increased the overdrinking problem, not decreased it.
Though alcohol abuse is a serious problem and new drinkers are particularly vulnerable, it boggles my mind one can drive and join the army but not have a beer. I actually think Europeans or others sometimes handle this better by starting earlier in families to teach moderation and limiting consumption. Though enough exceptions probably exist to disprove this too…. People as a group should be able to handle moderate drinking in a public park without anything crazy happening, and perhaps many cannot handle this easy task.
The regularly scheduled thread may now continue.
I attended a couple of large state universities as a grad student, but I had brothers (I mean siblings not fellow fraternity members) who were undergrad students at the same schools at the same time (amazing coincidence). This was late 80s to mid 90s.
Each of them had between 10% and 15% of students in Fraternities & Sororities. At one school there was endless trouble and “Greek Row” was a train wreck on Thursday to Saturday nights. This was a business and liberal arts focused school, lots of preppy students. There was very much a divide between the frat crowd and others.
The other school though there must have been 2000+ students in fraternities/sororities, there was no Greek Row and they were a lot less prominent in student life. This was a more tech oriented school.
In my working life I’ve encountered a couple of managers who hired VERY unqualified people who were fraternity brothers. That annoyed the heck out of me, but I’ve seen all manner of bad hiring practices.
Like many things, you can’t make any generalizations that would apply to all fraternities and sororities. My daughter had a really positive experience in a sorority at a small (6K students) state school. My son’s fraternity, however, was de-chartered both by his university (a large state school) and by the national for underage drinking and maybe some other issues.
I joined a fraternity in college and lived in the house for three years. It was in the 70s when fraternities we just beginning to rebound in popularity. They said my year was the first time time that they had to actually vote on who to invite to join; before that, membership was down so far that if you rushed, you were in. (We did not have “social members”–our policy was to have only had as many members as we had space to live in the house, which was 32.) There was nothing snobby about it, nobody really cared about your socioeconomic class. It was a good way to get involved socially. We had parties with sororities and sometimes other frats, so it was a quick way to meet a lot of people. We did not do any notable charitable work, though.
Our initiations involved a bit of mental duress (having pledges line up and answer questions from the actives) but nothing that I would call hazing (nothing humiliating; I heard of much worse stuff happening at military academies) and certainly nothing that would put anybody at risk of injury, and never involved alcohol.
At the time the drinking age was 18 so everybody in the house could legally drink. There was plenty of drinking but only rare cases of someone really overdoing it.
The thing I still find odd about fraternities is this whole fake brotherhood thing. You are basically joining a club of thousands of people, and you meet maybe 30 of them when you join, and you are expected to treat anybody in the club like a lifelong brother just because they are wearing the same pin as you. I see it more like I had a good time with a bunch of guys I lived with for a couple of years. I am still in touch with a small number of them but not because they were in my fraternity but rather because I was actually friends with them. If a younger guy asked me today for some career advice, I’d be happy to help, but I would not start calling people and telling them how great he is and they should hire him, just because he lives in the same house I lived in 45 years ago.
The chapter of my fraternity from my own school is going through a process of losing their charter from the national. I won’t get into the details here but it was not because of any illegal or immoral behavior, just socially progressive practices that the national alum OGs don’t like. I am sick of all the drama and have basically disconnected.
I forgot to mention I’m also down on frats due to their treatment of farm animals. Courtesy of Ewe Dub:
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19900125&slug=1052653
This may be true of some fraternities (maybe many, maybe even a majority, but I don’t know if anyone has numbers) but seems that you are painting with a very broad brush here. A negative public perception of fraternities is largely based on confirmation bias. I won’t say there is no truth to it, but I think the mayhem is exaggerated. There was a alcohol-related death at VCU in 2021 related to fraternity hazing, and I believe there has been a criminal conviction. But is this because it was a fraternity, or because college-age boys can be assholes? There is hazing in the U.S. military too, including deaths, but the existence of the military is not denounced.
Animal House per se was not the impetus. It came out in my second year living in a fraternity house and fraternities had already begun a resurgence before that. There was a general pendulum swing to more conservative politics and social mores. This was after a long period of liberalism, with college students protesting the Vietnam war and other establishment norms. But then Reagan was elected president, three-piece suits were back in fashion, and the New Conservatism arrived. Fraternities were part of that wave.
The timeline may not be straightforward but the movie was visibly influential to me. I was nine years old when Animal House was released. By the time I got to college, a huge proportion of the cultural knowledge of what college was about—toga parties, binge drinking, panty raids—were directly learned from the movie. And the most extreme practices along those line La happened at fraternities. Yeah, sure, not all fraternities, but that culture was in a broad sense nurtured and encourage by general fraternity culture. There’s a reason why the shared residence that always featured sloppy drunk cat callers camped out front was a fraternity house and not just some non-fraternity-related shared housing situation.
Around the time I graduated from college (1994), some places started to organize LGBTQ+ frats and sororities, and as one could imagine, the first such fraternity I heard of dubbed itself Phi Alpha Gamma, pronounced, of course, “fag.”
The hotel I worked at banned fraternity events after too many no-call/no-shows, or destruction if they did. The one thing I remember about sorority events was that they were the ONLY group that would keep coming back for more until the food was all gone. Eating disorders, anybody?