'The Dark Power of Fraternities'

I read this book and it made me glad about a billion times over that sorority life never appealed to me.

Only made it in a frat house once in my four years of college, when I had to go to cover a story for the newspaper. It was chapter night, so the guys were dressed to the nines and really respectful.

My friends and I were all dorm rats. I made amazing friends in the dorms, lived there for three out of my four years on campus. I wouldn't change one single thing about that.

 

Beta Eta Fart?

Kappa Gamma Poo?

 

Never joined, never considered joining, damn glad of it.
my college had basically no Greek system to speak of. Maybe five or six frats and sororities, one of the sororities had maybe 20 members but the frats were tiny, less than 10 most of the time. A friend of mine had a birthday party one year the same night the TKEs had a "big monster blowout party." Theirs was four guys in a dorm room watching TV. The birthday party was dozens of people spread out over an entire dorm floor.
To the people on here who were in frats, did you ever get to spend time with non-Greek friends? We would always invite one of the sorority members on my floor sophomore year to go out and do things with the rest of us and her answer was almost always "sorry, too busy with sorority business." Those of us who weren't Greek could drink with friends from work one night, friends from the dorm the next, and friends from some organization the night after.
We had groups we could drink with and places we would go for parties, but we never had to pay a membership fee.

 

ColdCat, my friends were almost exclusively guys in the fraternity. I spent time with newspaper people. A lot of time. But they were almost all women. There was a guy among the leadership who I became friends with the first days on campus, and we probably would have been super tight if we hadn't joined different fraternities. So it goes.

That's just who you ended up spending your time with on my campus. Like I said, I'm still close with many of them today. We know each others' wives. Know each others' kids.

 

You take part in this bullying of me and then scream uncle when I bite back.
Not a good look for you, Wife of Bath Fart.

 

Phys-ed majors, no doubt.

 

I never looked at it as buying friends. I looked at it as buying toilet paper.

 

Go to school a few thousand miles from home.
Show me the straightest line to the girls and beer and I'm sold.
Nobody ever touched Fart's ass. Not a man, anyway.

 

Guy I worked with told a story about the year he was a pledge.

All of the pledges had to sleep in a big pit together. The experience ended a bit early when most of them came down with pink eye...

 

This ...

Joining a fraternity was the one of the best, most rewarding things, I have ever done.
I wasn't hazed. We didn't haze. But It is easy to see how things get out of hand.

My fraternity essentially controlled the student side of college life: The majority of male RAs we members. We controlled the student courts, SGA, yearbook and the school paper.
In short .. if it was a paying job we made sure one of our brothers, or a close friend, got the job.

Our fraternity was national. They didn't tolerate hazing and openly and actively campaigned against it, date rape, discrimination, all sorts of stuff ... We have a National philanthronpy that required us to do a certain number of community service hours.

That was our niche ...

We also partied, - everyone did - but we were known as the little mafia for our connections and control of college-paying student jobs.
We also dominated Homecoming (sometimes by stuffing the ballot box).

We had two local fraternities - and a national - that branded its members. And a few others that hazed pledges.

Like he said ... case-by-case basis.



As to the article: I started to read it, but it was it too damn long, with too many blocks of the writer's opinion in between.

 

Which reminds me of a funny story. They did this to a pledge while I was still in school but not particularly active in the chapter. Drove him to Bowling Green, Ky., which was 100 miles or so.

But this kid was in the aerospace program, pilot in training. He had a pilot buddy who lived up there who flew him back to town and he was sitting in the fraternity house living room drinking a beer when the guys got home. Classic.