I always thought that if I started a lesbian sorority, I’d call it Delta Eta Delta.
I was going to mention black fraternities, and that many of them brand their members. Yes, with an iron, like some ranchers still do to cattle - inflict a third-degree burn, that in black people often “heals” as a keloid.
I just remembered that when my dad was in college in the 1950s, he had an opportunity to work as a cook and dishwasher at a sorority house, and in addition to a salary would get free meals. He knew a man who’d had the same job at another sorority, and said that yeah, he was going to meet pretty girls, but not the kind he’d want to date, even if any of them were interested in him, which they probably wouldn’t have been because this guy quit his job after one of the girls spat on him.
My sister briefly considered rushing a sorority, but our parents told her that if she did do that and joined, she would have to pay for it out of her own pocket, and when she found out how much that would cost, she decided not to. They told her the same thing about going to Florida on spring break, and she didn’t do that either.
I did join a pharmacy sorority, which was basically just a social club and we did a few service projects. We did have other professional fraternities and sororities, and as one could expect, the most popular one was not very thinly disguised as a co-ed party club.
Brilliant.
I started college in 1982. It was definitely a combination of Animal House and the Reagan cultural shift. The Administration at UC San Diego made it easier and easier for frats and sororities to colonize because they would go along with what the Admins wanted instead of protesting everything like the immediately previous generation.
I remember that, too. I had several classmates who transferred from small liberal arts schools where they had joined a Greek organization at their original schools, and when they moved to this city, they took one look at their Greek siblings, if you will, and decided not to transfer their memberships.
As for “Animal House”, I’ve never seen that movie in full, but I was in high school when it came out, and one of my classmates said that his dad said it reminded him a lot of his own college days.
A guy once proudly showed me his fraternity brand from a black fraternity. He said they did it with bent paperclips and cigarette lighters and yep it certainly looked that good.
I forget the fraternity, but it apparently claimed the exclusive right to chant “ice ice, baby,” and this guy boasted about how he and his frat brothers once intimidated Vanilla Ice into skipping a promotional event at a record store or something.
So from that experience, I was not impressed by the behavior of this particular fraternity.
Animal House came out my freshman year at UofI. It drew HUGE crowds to the theater right near the campus (the CoEd in Champaign).
It was weird, because there were the big frats which were very much like Animal House, with huge drunken parties, asshole jocks and rich kids, cheating on tests, misogyny, and the like. But then there were a bunch of smaller frats that you never heard of. I suspect a good number of those frats were unfairly tarred with the same brush as the big ones. One of my BILs was in one of them - said most of them were farm boys like him.
Also, I had a lot of friends in frats and spent quite a bit of time in them. Pretty much all of them were pretty beat up, showing signs of pretty hard use and deferred maintenance. As a contrast, I remember the limited number of times I was in sororities. Man, they were neat and clean, nicely finished! Quite a contrast from just about any other living situations - dorms/frats/apartments/rental houses - on campus.
I went to a Big Ten school with an enormous fraternity presence, and I absolutely loathed it all. I clicqued up pretty fast with hippies and punks, though I wasn’t really a full card-carrying member of either scene, I guess I was hippie-adjacent and punk-adjacent. I was into smoking, not drinking; I was into underground comix and 60s psychedelica. My friends were mostly skater kids and Deadhead types and a few oddball country boys who evolved into country-punks, developed artistic leanings and dated hipster girls. We straight-up scorned “frat guys.” I never went to a single frat party, and we went out our way to avoid any parties or areas considered “fratt-y.” Anything that smelled of frat culture, like polo shirts with popped collars, clothing with conspicuous logos, and general alpha-male posturing, was mocked and ridiculed.
The frat houses were constantly and publicly getting into trouble with the law, which was publicized by the surprisingly-widely-read student newspaper and the campus gossip. I remember in particular that Sigma Nu, Acacia, and both of the Jewish fraternities, ZBT and SAM, were always on the verge of being shut down for hazing, cocaine, or racial incidents.
Back then, if anyone had asked me how I felt about fraternities, I would have reflexively unleashed a torrent of hateful words. But now in my 30s I’ve befriended plenty of other guys my age who were in frats in college and I don’t think any less of them for it. I chalk it up as an immature phase that they evolved past. I don’t know anyone my age who is stuck in the frat mentality - I would not want to be friends with such an individual. Oh, I know they’re out there, but fortunately there aren’t any involved in my life.
I know of two vintage Greek houses at my alma mater that had to be demolished and rebuilt; a frat house was destroyed in a fire, as was an alumnus’ Heisman trophy, when I was in school, and more recently, a sorority house was heavily damaged in a tornado, but fortunately not during a school session so the building was unoccupied.
Yep. They were pristine on my campus, with beautiful limestone exteriors in Collegiate Gothic style, with interiors to complement. Like here’s what Delta Gamma (the sorority girl friends I had tended to be from here or Chi Omega) looks like today on my campus:
The frat houses definitely did not look like this.
I don’t know. Smoking (presumably weed), listening to punk bands, following the Dead, and country boys were pretty common within the fraternity scene at my college.
Typically colleges don’t allow sororities to have parties the way fraternities do. And many fraternity houses are only cleaned once a year during the period when they have pledges to clean it.
When did you go to college? I’ve actually heard of frat guys in the 80s and early 90s being into the Dead, but in 2005-2009 the stereotypical frat music was 1. rap and 2. Dave Matthews Band.
I graduated college in 1995. Our school wasn’t that large compared to the Big Ten so there wasn’t a whole lot of cultural diversity. Most fraternities tended to play the same mix of 90s alt rock and grunge (Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, U2, etc), the Dead and other jam bands (Dave Mathews, Rusted Root, Blues Traveler were popular), early 90s rap & hip hop (Snoop Dog, Dre), and classic rock from the 60s, 70s, and 80s (Zeppelin, the Stones,)
You go to football tailgates in the fall, the typical unisex fraternity uniform was a flannel shirt, long sleeve waffle T, baseball hat, and cargo pants or jeans. Fraternity letters on the T-shirt, hat, or a sweatshirt (not more than one article of clothing). Basically what you see in any J Crew or LL Bean catalogue.
I got a sense that to fraternities and sororities from the South who were used to dressing like they were going to cotillion, we Northern fraternities looked like a bunch of preppy hobos.
Since I never actually went inside a frat house, my only knowledge of their music came from what was blasting from their cars (the most stereotypical frat vehicle was a Jeep Wrangler - a shiny newer one whose tires had never touched dirt) or from the lawns of their houses. Most typically rap or DMB.
On my campus, some fraternities developed identities distinct from the standard preppy, business type. There were two hippie/drug/deadhead frats, a few that were rather nerdy, one for football players et cetera. These weren’t hard and fast categories, though; you would find clean cut preppies in the hippie frats; and vice versa.
The University of Maryland has a very nice school-owned “Frat Row” that looks impressive from the street but they’re dumps on the inside. The sororities are mostly maintained nicely but the frats are dumps. When I was there in the 90s the frat boys were known as “white hats” for the obvious reason (they all wore white baseball caps).
I don’t know about now, but at the time they were all still very much all about typical college-age toxic masculinity. I was never a fan. I avoided groups of white hats like they were the KKK, which was often difficult because the “downtown” area of College Park, MD is shockingly tiny for a school with 30,000 undergrads. It’s expanded now, but back in the day the " college bar scene" there was literally only three bars, all at one intersection.
We didn’t have the term back then but Yeah, I thought of frat boys on my campus as Non-Playable Characters. They were just there, doing the stereotypical frat boy things. They never personally interacted with me, I never had one in my study groups, never even knew their names.
However…as for campus drinking, my dorm floor could drink any frat under the table (1980; drinking age 18). I couldn’t BELIEVE how much binge drinking their was. Farm boys just hitting the “big city” for the first time with no supervision were drunk and/or stoned and missing classes during the week, About 90% of the freshmen dropped out the first year (or first semester). It was not a good environment for the impressionable. I wonder if they ever got it together?
I’ve never seen any benefit to joining a fraternity. I don’t have problems making friends and I have no use for people voting me into their inner circle as a condition of friendship. I wouldn’t consider anyone a friend who would haze me.
and I never saw the benefit of a frat house or dorms. I went to a commuter college. I lived at home with my own room with a TV and stereo. I got a home cooked dinner every night. When I needed to study it was quiet and peaceful. When I needed a night out I headed out with my friends.
There was no upside to joining a fraternity for me. Obviously some people like it or they wouldn’t exist.
These are both excellent points.
Presumably you lived with your parents. That would have been a nightmare for me. I would almost rather have lived on a mattress in the alley. Consider yourself fortunate and privileged. I lived in the dorms for two years. One year was great but it I should have stopped there. After that I rented apartments and others with fellow students.