Though they get leaked time and time again, fraternities are apparently still sending dumb, racist emails to each other over their listservs. This week’s installment comes from the University of Chicago’s AEPi chapter, a traditionally Jewish frat. Buzzfeed has the emails, which are full of references to Muslim students as terrorists, Palestine jokes, and several invocations of the n-word.
If you happened to think America’s soul-searching regarding the traditions of the Greek system had in any way curbed the drinking and hazing habits of the fine youngsters inhabiting our fraternities and sororities, well: It hasn’t.
The so-called “Safe Campus Act,” a nonsense bill that would keep colleges from punishing rapists unless victims agree to go to the police, had seemingly unanimous support from national fraternity and sorority organizations—until today. Alpha Phi has become the first sorority to come out against the bill in a statement made “at the request of many of our members and chapters.”
At a party in June at the University of Central Florida, a woman secretly recorded Sigma Nu brothers chanting “rape, rape,” “let’s rape some bitches,” and “let’s rape some sluts.” Upon receiving the video in July, UCF suspended the frat, but a university panel ruled yesterday that the bros didn’t do anything wrong.
This week, members of the University of Florida’s Zeta Beta Tau fraternity are being investigated for allegedly spitting on a group of wounded war veterans, then stealing the veterans’ American flags and peeing on them. But this is only the most literal way in which frat boys are pissing on America. Fraternity guys love to pee. On anything, anywhere.
Ten days ago, the University of Houston suspended its Sigma Chi chapter after what the school's president called "disturbing allegations of hazing within the fraternity." Exactly how disturbing could that hazing have been? Well, the rumor going around campus suggests that Sigma Chi was treating its pledges in a way that even a CIA black site might find a bit excessive: by waterboarding them with alcohol.
Fraternities in America have spent 2015 more or less acting as if the rules of law and decency do not apply to them. Of course, this is not without reason: for much of the last 200 or so years, our fraternities have been granted a unique pass that has treated their singular incubation of poisonous masculinity as a net positive for society.
Dartmouth College, an Ivy League school famous for its bizarrely powerful Greek system, is having a pretty tough year. Today it gets even worse. Dartmouth has confirmed to Gawker that it extended the suspension of one of its most notorious fraternities, Alpha Delta, over allegations of branding—that is, pressing a piece of hot metal into a fraternity pledge’s skin. If that sounds unpleasant, you might want to prepare yourself for the rumored details of what exactly transpired.
After an email containing racist and misogynist language sent to a campus fraternity by one of its members surfaced this week, the University of Maryland announced that it was opening an investigation into the case. The email's author dissuades his fraternity brothers from inviting women of color to a party and not to concern themselves with issues of consent.
The University of Virginia has imposed stricter safety regulations on campus fraternities in the wake of an alleged campus rape reported in a Rolling Stone story that was later found to have serious "discrepancies." Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity implicated in the story, has agreed to the new rules—which include stricter control of alcohol at parties—but two other frats are refusing to sign because moooooom, we don't wanna!
