'The Dark Power of Fraternities'

Organizations are only as good as the people in them. My experience was pretty good. A third of the house was conservative Catholic, a third liberal Jewish and a third Asian/Black/Hispanic. Probably the most diverse house on campus.

 

This thread is full of the usual anecdotal evidence.
I was an immature young man (!) attending college hundreds of miles from home.
I missed my parents terribly, they I.
Too depressed to contemplate all of it, I joined a house to meet girls more availably and more often than the opportunity occasioning itself playing cards with fat guys in a dorm lounge.
I never did get to have an implement inserted into my nether regions.
All other college objectives satisfied.

 

When my oldest was looking at colleges, we visited a nearby school she was interested in on its big recruiting event. Other than the obvious academic stuff, it seemed all they talked about was the Greek system. It quickly became very obvious that campus life was dominated by fraternities and sororities (we later looked it up and something like 60 percent of students were involved in the Greek system). She crossed that school off her list before we got home.

The whole thing seemed very high-pressure and the not-very-subtle implication given at that event was if you're not Greek, you're nobody. She's now at a school where less than five percent of the students are in fraternities and sororities, and she's very happy with that.

As for my own college experience, as a freshman I drank a few free beers and got shot down by a couple of girls during rush week (the drinking age was 18 then, though I was still underage), and never darkened a frat house door again.

 

Really? Ours was dirt cheap, I believe, compared to the dorms or off-campus apartments. I mean, there was a reason for that - the place was a bit of a shit hole. But it wasn't expensive at all.

The caveat to anything I post is that I was in a 25-person fraternity on a 900-person college campus. So it's possible that my experience was so far removed from what one thinks of as fraternity life that my thoughts should be afforded very little weight.

There are five guys I remain extremely close with from the fraternity. Six if you include my brother. There are at least 15-20 more I see every year. Last year, we had a reunion after a golf tournament a few of the guys hold every year to raise money in memory of a guy who died of cancer while we were in college. We held a reunion at our college bar, and it was nothing but terrific. My best friend and I ended up on the old house balcony until like 4 a.m., just sipping a couple Miller Lites like the old days, with an old female friend we ran into at the bar that we hadn't seen since college.

Nothing but positive memories, really. And nothing but positive aftermath. I would make the same decision 100 times out of 100 times. But, again, I wouldn't put it on my resume this time. Jeez.

 

It all sounds pretty gay, not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

An inside look at the Omega Theta Pi initiation ceremony.

 

This times 1,000.

A specific fraternity can be full of good guys at one campus and full of miserable, legacy pricks at another campus. Same with Greek systems. One college can have responsible people and many others do not.

I was anti-Greek when I hit campus but just happened to fall into it. Never had the feeling that I had to "pay for my friends". This was 20 years ago but dues were $225 a semester (that covered all of the social events and the insurance -- insuring a fraternity that allows alcohol took up about 65% of the $225). The rent in the house was $275-300 a month, depending on the room. Certainly not exorbitant in a fairly pricey college town that I attended.

Like anything else, Greek life (the reality and the perception) is on a case-by-case basis.

 

Fraternity parents:
Obsess with stage one: getting their kids into social frats at the HS level.
Plan with vigor and appropriate legal protection (hire off duty cops to oversee) in-house drinking parties at graduation.
Dig deep to make sure kids follow in their collegiate level footprints.

 

I have understood having Greek organizations for high school kids.

We had one sorority in our town. It was basically Junior League for teenagers. They did charity stuff and held two dances - one a formal - per school year. We already had a prom and school-sponsored organizations were doing bigger and better charity projects.

 

I enjoyed my three years of fraternity involvement. I was even an officer one year.
No horror stories, sorry.
I keep up with a few of the guys, but I made more lasting relationships at the college paper. Met my wife, for instance.

 

I heard about that.
Sigma Chi Eta Fart.

Those college meal plans suck.

 

I believe you are breaking a rule, kind sir.