Prosecute the criminals.
No one’s advocating “making it easier for (assholes) to congregate,” they do that on their own. But you ARE advocating taking active steps to make it more difficult, by banning them. My own personal view of “freedom of association” precludes me from barring people with similar interests from forming clubs.
If I were going to go after a campus organization, though, I’d kick those Dungeons & Dragons dorks back to their parents’ basements. What the hell do they contribute?
Rick Bragg, in All Over But The Shoutin, recounts an experience from his impoverished childhood in the '60s. I’m paraphrasing from memory, but essentially:
He has a good memory from being included in a frat’s Christmas party as a child. He and his siblings got coats and toys from the fraternity and sorority that threw the charity event. They were the “rich folks,” not by Manhattan standards, but by Possum Trot ones: fast-back Mustangs and Hai Karate cologne. The girls were all fucking gorgeous. There were cookies, snacks, and tons of 7-Up. He had a good time and he hopes that frat still does that.
He does draw a distinction between how poor kids are treated and how poor teenagers are treated. In adolescence, a wall grows up between the poor and the nice, clean, middle-class. He claims it would be better if it were a wall of brick, instead of glass.
His conclusion is far more poignant than the beginning, but the fact remains: frats do some outreach and charity that isn’t trivial, at least not to those who receive it.
You grow less convincing with each post. If the D&D players had a history of theft, assault, harassment and intimidation_along with more than a few rapes_I’d advocate getting rid of them too. Look, if you were one of those douchebags and you have fond memories of soggy cracker games, I guess good for you. For everybody else on campus, they ranged from being a neutral factor to outright negative.
Except we don’t ban organizations, in the US, over the criminal history of a few of their members. Who else would run the Legislative Branch?
My point was D&D kids contribute very little. But why should they have to? They pay their tuition and are members of the school community. If they want access to the stadium for a LARPing party, they should have it. Just because I think they’re easy targets for ridicule (like shooting fish in a barrel, really) is a puerile and asinine reason to consider BANNING them. Especially since they’ll just roll their 20-sided dice somewhere else.
But their meetings may very well be exclusive: they might claim it’s open to all but be fucking rude to people they don’t think “fit in” with them. Who cares? And if some of them are running a hacking ring, prosecute the hackers and leave the club alone.
I like freedom of association for everyone.
Frat rats are free to assemble with each other, have a fraternal organization, a clubhouse, a secret handshake, jackets and whatever other Boyz Club bullshit they want off campus and without the implicit or explicit approval of the college or university. They can be like a younger, much more obnoxious version of the Eagles, or Elks, Moose or other lodges that serve alcohol on their premises.
Thing is, greeks donate to their colleges at something like five times the rate of non-greeks. We make 75% of all contributions to college endowments,* though we are comfortably under a quarter of the student body. So it’s bad for the bottom line to get rid of us.
*Not really “we”. I gave my universities more than enough money for the privilege of attending. But I plan to donate a little this year.
You don’t mean this. You may think you do, but you don’t. The LAST thing universities want are frats over which the school has no control. The carrot is University recognition, composite in the yearbook, a seat on the IFC, etc, the STICK is alcohol bans, social probation, minimum house GPAs, “Double Secret Probation”, complaints to national chapters, and ultimately, ostracism.
If the university washes their hands of the frats, what control does the school have? Many (all?) schools actively exclude “independent” or “local” frats because their experience has been that they are the worst of the worst: no academic standards, no fear of open drug use, no fear of sanctions for racist or sexist party themes, no sanctions from the school for starting a bar brawl, no bans on racist membership policies, et c.
Private schools can ban Greeks by requiring 4 years in the dorms/ U housing and expelling students for anything they think violates their “mission.” State schools have to respect students’ rights to a greater degree.
My University did not have fraternities OR Dorms. Instead, they had something which was like a cross between the two – Houses. There were 7 Houses, and every Freshman was required to live in one of them (after Freshman year, you could live off campus, and had a choice of maintaining a ‘social’ membership, if you wished). Students could also be members of multiple houses, if you could get a few people in that house to sponsor you.
Note that Houses were Co-ed.
The Houses were kind of competitive but also were governed (as was everything and everyone associated with the school, including the staff) by an honor code. There was only one principle rule and that was that on member of the community could take unfair advantage of any other member of that community. And that rule was applied not only to academics, but to how people treated one another. Granted, we were not a typical college, but it worked for us.
I don’t see how it could be any worse than the “party houses” that were far from uncommon when I was in school. You had groups of people renting houses together. In some of them, life was quiet because the residents were focused on school. Others were houses full of hedonists. They held big, wild parties on a pretty regular basis. Since they lived off campus, there was fuck all the University could have done about it even if they’d wanted to.
It’s worth noting that Greek-letter organizations are invariably governed by university honor codes, and are often subject to stricter regulation than other campus organizations.
The whole Freshman class fit in 7 “houses”? Either your school was tiny, like 2000 students, or those were dorms.
My buddy had a similar (same?) set-up at Amherst College–small, exclusive, private, and expensive. He loved it, but I don’t know if the model is workable with large, public, research universities.
It’s a difference of scale. A local frat still has the budget, from 50 members’ dues, for massive parties, theme parties, hazing rituals (not a function of budget), drug parties, violence (again, not budget related), all the worst frat-related harms. A big, old Victorian house with 7 guys in it has the party budget of 7 college kids: no band, probably (partly) BYOB, probably not wide open to just anyone off the street, nowhere nearly as well-organized or funded as a party hosted by 50.
No private party I attended in college came close to the extravagance of the big, themed, frat parties. Some were just as elaborate, but for fewer people.