Anger Over Greek Life Reaches Boiling Point at Swarthmore, Where Dozens Are Occupying a Frat House

Grace Dumdaw

Nearly 80 students congregated on Monday in the living room of Swarthmore College’s Phi Psi fraternity house. Plastered on one wall was a banner featuring the logo of Natural Light beer. But the students weren’t there to party.

For the past three days, they had been occupying the house as part of an extensive protest against the college’s two fraternities.

Activists want Swarthmore officials to terminate the leases of the fraternities, which rent their houses from the college, and ban them from the campus. They say the houses perpetuate sexual assault and discrimination against women and minority groups.

Students passed in and out throughout the day. Some planned to sleep on the fraternity’s floor for a third night. Around them, much of the wall space was covered with signs supporting sexual-assault victims, people of color, and the LGBTQ community, and criticizing what they saw as administrative indifference to fraternity misconduct.

One poster asked: “How many committees does it take?” Another, hung above the Natural Light banner, read: “Close the ‘rape attic.’ Time’s up!”

Activism at the elite institution just outside Philadelphia has swelled since two campus publications published hundreds of pages of sexist, racist, and homophobic documents that apparently describe Phi Psi’s “meeting minutes” and rituals for initiating new members, from 2012 to 2016.

A spokesman for Swarthmore said officials hadn’t yet verified the authenticity of the documents.

Swarthmore officials have suspended fraternity parties for what remains of the semester. Valerie A. Smith, the college’s president, condemned the documents’ contents for a second time in an email to the campus on Monday. But Smith said she would wait for a task force’s recommendations on improving student social life and fraternities before she took additional actions.

The task force, which has been meeting since last fall, plans to report to her on Friday, she wrote. “Any decisions that affect the entire college community must be made deliberatively, consistently, and in ways that reflect the values of our community,” she wrote.

Brewing Tensions

The Swarthmore protest is the latest example of campus outrage over misconduct in Greek life. For the past two years, after a series of student deaths at fraternity events, higher-education leaders have been reckoning more deeply with the question of whether fraternities should continue to exist. Administrators have faced criticism for not taking enough responsibility for fraternity culture.

Cracking down on fraternities isn’t easy, as the groups count many wealthy and powerful alumni as members and tend to operate as private organizations with limited administrative oversight. Fraternities are often highly influential on campuses as well.

That’s the case at Swarthmore, where the two fraternities host the vast majority of the big parties and control the social scene, several students said.

Making Fraternities Safer

Bringing problems out into the open and promoting confidential reporting have helped lift the veil of secrecy that perpetuates abusive behavior.

• Fraternities Can Change on Their Own
• Colleges Confront the Perils of Frats
• How One University Is Challenging an Ugly ‘Tradition’ Among Students

In the leaked documents, there are jokes about date-rape drugs, sex acts with intoxicated women, and transgender people. There are scavenger hunts with tasks spelled out in detail, including playing a pornographic video on a phone in a Starbucks, and taking a photo with “hot girls” holding a dildo. At one point the house’s single bedroom — only one fraternity member resides there at a time — is described as a “rape attic.”

After administrators obtained the unredacted documents, Smith wrote in her email to the campus, they reached out to an independent investigator “to determine whether any of the behaviors described in the documents are ongoing and whether any current Swarthmore students were involved.”

So far, she wrote, “it appears that the bulk of these materials predate our current students.” Members of Phi Psi said the same thing in a Facebook post: “All our current brothers were in high school and middle school at the time of these unofficial minutes, and none of us would have joined the organization had this been the standard when we arrived at Swarthmore.”

Tensions have been brewing over Swarthmore’s fraternities for years. In 2013, students rejected a ballot referendum that proposed to ban Greek life. Last fall a campus committee recommended a one-year moratorium on leasing the houses to the fraternities. Smith declined to do so.

“We have existing policies for responding to allegations of misconduct by students and student organizations, and will continue to address specific concerns as they arise,” she said at the time.

The Phi Psi fraternity was suspended from November 2016 to February 2018 for violating the campus’s drug and alcohol policy, according to The Phoenix, a student newspaper.

‘Extremely Disturbing’

This month, students created a Tumblr account to share experiences of sexual misconduct or mistreatment at the fraternities. The stories sounded familiar to Daria Mateescu, a junior who’s participating in the fraternity house sit-in. “Reading through them has been an extremely disturbing and upsetting experience, but also one that makes me feel less alone every day,” she said.

The publication of the offensive documents, Mateescu said, confirmed her worst fears about the houses. She is part of Organizing for Survivors, a Swarthmore student organization that advocates for sexual-assault victims and has led the latest surge of activism.

Over the past week, students have protested or disrupted half a dozen meetings to reiterate their demand to ban the fraternities. James S. Terhune, vice president and dean of students, wasn’t happy about it. In one case, he wrote in an email to Swarthmore students, the activists “harangued staff members, delivered ultimatums, and recorded and posted video of staff members without their permission.”

Amal Haddad, a freshman who’s participating in the protest, said that while students had shared their awful experiences at fraternities, college leaders had sat “like brick walls.” Haddad said administrators had threatened them with disciplinary action, but she stressed that the demonstrations had been peaceful.

Two former Swarthmore fraternity members publicly called last week for the fraternities to be shuttered. “During my time at Swarthmore, the leadership of Phi Psi consistently failed to expel members of the group or otherwise sanction them for their behavior, which primarily took the form of sexual violence, and homophobic and misogynistic language,” wrote Callen Rain, one of the former members, in The Phoenix.

As the protest has gained attention, students elsewhere have expressed solidarity with the Swarthmore activists on Twitter, and told of their own troubling experiences with the college’s fraternities.

Mateescu said students at other institutions had reached out to them for help in planning future demonstrations against Greek life on their own campuses. In addition to banning the fraternities, the Swarthmore activists want the houses to be “reallocated” to support minority groups on the campus. “We want that frat to be ours,” Mateescu said.

When students first made their way into the fraternity house, on Saturday, a campus-safety officer summoned local police officers. Smith, the president, wrote in her email that the local police had been called in “to provide support and ensure a calm resolution.”

Fraternity members also called the police when they learned that activists planned to stay in the house overnight, Swarthmore officials said. But no arrests have been made, a spokesman said.

At one point over the weekend, the crowd swelled to about 120 people inside and outside the fraternity house, Mateescu said. Final exams begin in 10 days, but the students said they’re not leaving Phi Psi until their demands are met.

Some people on the campus have accused the activists of having “fractured the school socially,” Mateescu said. She doesn’t think that’s true, pointing to the letters of support that have poured in from campus organizations, athletic teams, faculty members, and others.

It has typically been taboo to criticize the fraternities, Mateescu said. Swarthmore is a small campus, and many students live on the same hall with fraternity members or take classes with them. Some feared retaliation — like harassment and vulgar insults — for speaking out, she said. That’s changing.

“It is now an easy position to take,” she said, “that we don’t support the frats.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.