A Bit More About Greeks

[walkitout]

That is, fraternities and sororities. I am aware that my summation of fraternities (drunken idiots who treat women badly) is a stereotype and thus Not Fair. Part of this post is to counter or at least supplement that assessment.

I've been doing some googling, and I'm not going to reproduce it all here, but rather stick to a few selections.

(1) Some nationals have really solid anti-hazing and/or obey-alcohol-laws policies and enforce them.
(2) Other nationals produce anti-hazing "videos". I suspect their chapters use these as material for mockery while getting drunk and throwing up in their basements. That may be overestimating their intellectual capacity, however.
(3) Fraternities seem more likely to generate pledge deaths than sororities, but it is not just a fraternity problem nor is it exclusively a white problem (it's not even limited to whites and blacks. Googling "asian fraternity pledge death" produces relevant, recent results).
(4) Certain schools take their enforcement seriously. It turns out my alma mater is one of them:

http://dailyuw.com/2004/6/23/dke-denied/

A 1998 incident led to a wrongful death lawsuit that exposed hazing practices that _included alumni_, including _alumni on the DKE alumni board_. In 2001, the IFC booted them and reaffirmed that in 2004 at the time that article was published, meaning the earlier they could have become official again would have been 2009, which appears not to have happened. As with the DKE's at Yale, the group is still there and operating a house, but without recognition and the benefits that go with that. The university took it a little further, apparently:

"As the only unrecognized fraternity, DKE is singled out in letters to incoming students that discourage new students from joining the fraternity."

Other fraternities that have gotten into trouble at UW have shut down and "recolonized".

(5) In addition to a wide variety of ethnicity/religion specific fraternities and sororities (and multicultural and/or co-ed organization), there are explicitly LGBT or some fraction thereof ones as well.

(6) For all the problems that creepy alumni (a la DKE, see above) can cause, _not_ having an alumni run/influenced/sponsored/funded/whatever national can cause its own problems.

http://articles.latimes.com/2005/sep/06/local/me-frat6

I'm trying to figure out how far I want to pursue this. I think I'm about done, but if anyone thinks I'm being unfair, or missing out on a big part of the story, I'm curious. I did stumble across this:

(7) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT_and_LGBT-friendly_fraternities_and_sororities

ETA:

(8) A great "stop hazing" item from Texas A&M, aimed at consciousness raising for alumni/parents:

http://stophazing.tamu.edu/WhatToKnow/Alumni

They stay on message:

"We did it, you do it, but we realize now that it is wrong and has to stop."

Comments

gay frats

[rolandgo.livejournal.com]

One of the MIT frats when I was an undergrad (early '80s) had a reputation as a gay fraternity. I forget which one, but remember lambda as part of their name. I remember being told that their national had all kinds of trouble with them & vice versa -- as the national was particularly homophobic. The closeted thing kind of makes sense there.