There is an extremely obvious action that would make an enormous difference in ending, or at least stemming, sexual assault on college campuses. Destroy the fraternities. Or coeducate them. One or the other, and they may go hand-in-hand.
The central role frats play in sexual assault has been understated. There’s no evidence that the majority of predators are frat brothers. But at most universities the Greek system dominates social life, and deforms it. I believe sexual assault happens in large part because of cemented gender norms that tell guys they must pursue girls at all costs, and many girls don’t know how to say no but don’t want to say yes. So having institutions with cemented gender norms controlling social life on campus seems like a really bad idea.
Fraternities are a uniquely American creation and closely tied to the production of young American masculinity. In The Company He Keeps (The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), a fascinating history of historically white fraternities, Nicholas L. Syrett, a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas, begins with the establishment of the first frat, at Union College in 1825.
Syrett identifies four distinct types of young men dominating four eras, the most recent of which, he argues, arose in the 1950s, when GI Bill undergrads, returned from foreign wars with notches on their belts, faced Eisenhower’s moral strictures at home. Enter the Hawaiian shirt, panty raid, and pursuit of coitus. With some percentage of female classmates on coed campuses now potentially their willing partners, sexual congress became the paramount goal. Secret hazing and pledging rituals took on multifarious forms of sexual humiliation; by surviving, pledges became members and earned the right to exhibit the same behavior — sometimes discreetly, sometimes not — toward women.
Syrett marks this era as the one when date rape metastasized at America’s universities. A 1957 sociological study records that over 50 percent of female students felt uncomfortable with male sexual behavior, and 20 percent were the victims of forceful attempted intercourse.
And yet universities benefit from the Greek system. It’s a tool for the recruitment of high-school boys and a strong emotional tie for contributing alumni. Frats also remain a magnet for a valuable economic tier — students who pay near or full freight. Universities are also deeply reliant on the Greeks for housing. “If the fraternities and sororities closed, students wouldn’t have any place to sleep,” says Peter Lake, a professor of law at Stetson University; he calls them a sprawling hospitality industry within the ivy-covered walls.
You’ve got an inherent management structure that promotes dangerous circumstances and doesn’t reasonably dissolve risk of injury and death.
But this isn’t enough of a reason to keep them, or to keep them single-sex. The sheer number of insurance claims across the board, including those for sexual assault, is why insurance rates for fraternities are up there with those for companies performing toxic-waste removal.
Brett Sokolow, a prominent Title IX legal expert, told me he believed disbanding frats might simply chase the most sexually predatory members into other organizations. “You can eliminate the structures, but it’s always going to be more effective to try to shape the culture,” he said. But he added, “I think the Greek system is weakened. Whether it will survive depends on the forces trying to reform it from within, but if they succeed, the Greek system will not retain its current form anyway. Evolve or perish is the choice they are facing. I predict they will evolve.”
At Wesleyan University, the evolution has been particularly sudden.
When I began reporting from there in 2014, much of the new radical chic — talk of genderqueerness and a wariness about performing The Vagina Monologues — felt unfamiliar from my undergraduate days, in the 1990s. (I received a B.A. from Wesleyan in 1995). I was more surprised to find that Greek life at Wesleyan had grown more robust even as campus politics had become more incendiary. Hundreds of students belonged to one of the university’s three all-male frats, which have been housed in mansions at the center of campus since the 19th century.
Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan, told me that he, too, was shocked at how popular the frats had become. When he took office, in 2007, he assumed they were vestiges of a minor tradition that would continue, quietly, to endure through his tenure. But Wesleyan’s millennial student body embraced frats. Not everyone wanted to be a brother, but the frat parties were attended by most students on campus, even radical elements.
Then, in 2010, John O’Neill, a visiting friend of a Beta Theta Pi brother, allegedly raped a female student at the frat’s Halloween party. The details of the woman’s story astonish: O’Neill cornered the woman, pushed her down on a couch, and forced her to give him oral sex. When she bit his penis, he called her a bitch and then initiated intercourse, saying, “The more you try, the faster you are going to get out of here.”
This news wouldn’t have made its way out of Connecticut if the victim hadn’t retained Doug Fierberg, a top anti-frat lawyer. “I don’t care if you’ve got a tradition that started a hundred years ago with white men smoking pipes — guess what, you’ve got an inherent management structure that promotes dangerous circumstances and doesn’t reasonably dissolve risk of injury and death,” he told me.
Fierberg gave Beta a nickname, “the Rape Factory,” that put his client’s $10-million lawsuit against Wesleyan and the frat in the national glare. The parties settled with O’Neill’s victim, and peace reigned on campus for a while. But as it happened, the case only set the stage for further discord over the frats.
As a junior at Wesleyan in 2014, Chloe shared a two-bedroom apartment with a friend. One night in the spring, she alleges, the two of them were dancing together at Beta. “This kid came up behind me while we were dancing, and he started groping me like I’ve never been groped before — not your usual low-level grope,” Chloe says. Nonetheless, she and her friend tried dancing with the guy, after which she trudged down frat row to Delta Kappa Epsilon, hung out with friends, then headed home.
In her apartment, she put on sweatpants, lay down in bed, and tucked a red Indian-print comforter under her chin. She called her long-distance boyfriend at Boston College and turned off the light. Asleep, Chloe didn’t hear her flatmate come home, nor did she realize that she’d brought along their former dancing partner for a hookup. Allegedly, in the middle of the night, after going to the bathroom, the guy made his way into Chloe’s room. She says she came to consciousness as he was groping her crotch.
Armed with the knowledge of her Title IX rights, Chloe filed a report, and the young man soon faced a campus hearing. (He did not respond to requests for an interview.)
Chloe says that to assess her case, the panel asked if the boy had penetrated her with his fingers or not. “I was thinking, I’m going to kill myself right now,” she says. If his fingers were around, not in, it wasn’t rape, but sexual assault. Wesleyan apparently disciplined the boy, and he appealed.
Chloe soon became one of the most radical activists on campus. She talked with the national survivor organization End Rape on Campus about filing a Title IX complaint against Wesleyan with the Office for Civil Rights. She and her friends held rallies and stormed offices, handing out fliers about sexual assault to prospective students and projecting art on building walls. They learned about a range of tools, from strategy to message to tone to timing, that activists must master when putting together a campaign.
Chloe studied the early history of the direct-action group ACT UP. Its slogan, “Silence = Death,” inspired her group to assume the slogan “Silence = Violence.” She began to understand that her activism was part and parcel of fighting against the cis-white-male norm that warps other Americans’ sense of themselves, making them feel inferior and giving them fewer chances in life. It was about fighting disgusting gender norms, both traditionally male and traditionally female, that were promoted by frats. When Chloe had this realization, she saw another path forward. Since the frats posed the biggest threat on Wesleyan’s campus, she would fight that fight locally.
As a student-government leader, she wanted to push coeducation at the frats, even though of the three all-male ones at Wesleyan, only Psi Upsilon could possibly admit women, since the national chapters of DKE and Beta prohibited it. (Upon coeducation, those two would have to either shut down or give away half their rooms to women who weren’t in the fraternity.)
Chloe and friends wrote a resolution, “Recommended Housing Policy Changes Concerning Greek Organizations,” then brought it to the weekly student-government meeting on a Sunday night in April 2014. “Radical reform is realistic,” she pronounced. “Sexual assault happens everywhere, but it does happen more in some places. Radical reform is the only reform appropriate for this situation.” She added, “I’m in the mood for a Hail Mary.”
The immediate reaction in the room was shock and disbelief. A frat brother argued back. “Rape is repugnant,” he said, but this resolution was “unrealistic, because sexual assault exists in female and coeducational spaces on campus. … [And] we can’t ignore the issue of historical precedent and tradition. It is real and must be considered.”
Sexual assault and the student government’s resolution made an excellent cudgel against the frats.
The clock ran out, and the meeting adjourned. But other female students heard about what was happening. “I’d had so many experiences in high school with victim-blaming and catcalling, ‘You’re asking for it, you’re doing this or that,’” says Sally, a junior. “I was like, ‘I’m here for this.’ I’d recruit my friends, and we all squeezed into the meetings.”
At the subsequent meetings, the radical sisters and the frat brothers — who also recruited their friends — turned out in force, as did administrators, including President Roth. Both factions came out swinging.
Equally tumultuous Sunday-night student-government meetings followed before a vote was scheduled for Easter, even though the frat brothers argued against a vote on a holiday. Nevertheless, on Easter Sunday, Wesleyan’s government leaders held the vote. There were 10 abstentions, mostly from students out of town for the holiday, but the vote was 14 for coeducation, 12 against.
This wasn’t the end of Chloe’s story. In 2015, when her assailant returned to campus, Chloe pressed her point. Wesleyan had issued a no-contact order, meaning that they couldn’t come within a certain number of feet of each other. She hung a whistle around her neck to alert him if he approached. One day in a cafeteria, she saw him and blew it — and he didn’t leave. A sanction was imposed.
Around the same time, an outspoken senior who told me she was raped early in her freshman year said she performed a piece of theater in which she printed out pictures of Roth and the top members of his administration, had a friend pour what looked like blood on her, talked about how they bled her out, then ate their pictures. She also collaborated on a photo project for which she dressed up like a dominatrix and led guys in shirts reading FRAT FILTH, and with ball gags in their mouths, around on a leash.
Imagine being the college president responsible for all of these students.
A university president’s relationship to frats is particularly fraught. As a liability and reputational issue, and as a matter of ethics, the president could do without the jeopardy the Greek system represents. But the president also bears the brunt of attacks when they’re banned. In the late 1990s, when Dartmouth’s president, James Wright, demanded an end to single-sex housing to force coed membership on his Greeks, a thousand students protested outside his home. A frat flew the banner JUDAS, BRUTUS, ARNOLD, WRIGHT, classifying him as a traitor to his gender.
Michael Roth was aware of those dangers. “Most of my [fellow college presidents] are grateful for having succeeded people who did it, because those people got run out of town,” he told me. Yet he had become increasingly enthusiastic about shutting the frats down since the “Rape Factory” incident. The student government’s coeducation vote wasn’t binding on his administration, but he found it interesting.
As with university presidents and radicals through the ages, there was no love lost between Roth and Chloe’s crew, even if he took their concerns seriously. Chloe found a complex essay Roth had written about Sigmund Freud in The Chronicle in which he observed that while it was important to cogitate about patriarchy and its power, there was a downside to too much thinking: “Now we know not only that sex must be deeply consensual but that it should be really healthy — so safe that it is, well, less than desirable,” he wrote. She put that quote on a banner and hung it in the campus center, making sure everyone knew who had written it.
Roth and Chloe were never going to see eye-to-eye, but perhaps he could live with that — and achieve a major goal in the process. The sexual-assault issue and the student government’s resolution made an excellent cudgel against the frats. It just had to be wielded carefully. Waved around too wildly, in a manner that attracted too much attention, it would become a rallying point for defenders of frats to push back. “C’mon, Wesleyan frat brothers are among the most liberal in the country,” said Adam Diamond, an alumni leader of Beta’s Wesleyan chapter. “And we think it benefits Wesleyan to say, ‘We’re such an open school that we’re open to everything, even fraternities.’ Stifling us just contradicts the free and open Wesleyan attitude.”
Shutting down frats on a national level probably won’t happen. But coeducation is a savvy tactic.
Shortly after the student government’s vote, alums with links to frats began mobilizing. “There is a long list of esteemed alumni from the Gamma Phi chapter of DKE at Wesleyan — none of them are criminals,” read one letter Roth received.
Soon prominent Wesleyan alumni, including major donors, informed Roth that coeducation would make them very angry. They’d finance an effort to combat sexual assault if he wanted — fund a raft of new prevention programs, funnel frat brothers into them, and voilà. Also, they insisted, an analysis of sexual-assault cases from one academic year seemed to demonstrate that only a couple of reported assaults had occurred at frats. The alumni also dug out some Facebook posts from queer Wesleyan students. “To me, the DKE house is a patriarchal space beyond redeeming,” read one. “We need to evacuated it [sic] and burn it down.” “WE SHOULD JUST THROW ROCKS THROUGH ITS WINDOWS.” Now, weren’t those violent threats?
Roth had to convince those folks that the coeducation of Wesleyan’s Greeks was not about kowtowing to radical elements. His partner in this project was the trustee chair, Joshua Boger, a biotech executive who’d flown out of his company on a golden parachute and was now often in the Fiji Islands practicing underwater photography.
Roth, at first, wanted to emphasize inclusion along with sexual assault. “Will Wesleyan be a stronger university (‘dedicated to providing an education in the liberal arts that is characterized by boldness, rigor, and practical idealism’) with or without Greek life?” he wrote in a draft memo. He later added, “This position is not about ‘political correctness’ any more than the decisions to integrate schools (rather than support the ‘choice’ of state rights) or the decisions in NYC to outlaw restricted social clubs (rather than just offering women ‘their own clubs’) were made to be ‘politically correct.’ This is about equity, choice and the tensions between them.”
Boger wanted to sharpen the point. He advised not alienating alums (“We are not trying to re-classify their college years as proto-criminals; ‘Orange is the New Red& Black’”), but at the same time, he insisted that Roth emphasize the “unifying theme between the sexual violence and frats at the root cause, which is all about male power structures.” Roth needed to “paint the frats into a corner ethically and morally. All your probative options remain open.”
Roth recast his memo, but Wesleyan’s emeriti trustees got wind of it and were enraged anyway. In a note to the current trustees, one of them had quoted the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr: " ‘There are trivial truths and great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.’ The draft policy proposes a major shift in the balance of two great truths at Wesleyan: successful coeducation and liberal freedom of association.” They added that a unilateral decision, even if Wesleyan’s bylaws permitted it, was unprecedented; nearby Trinity College would take a board vote before coeducating the Greeks. (Then again, Trinity’s president soon stepped down, and the college re-established frats quickly thereafter.)
Boger’s strategy of punching frats in the gut had backfired. In fact, sexual assault was the claim that most angered donors, which took Boger aback. “Those disquieted by the memo continue to be upset at the (unwarranted in their view) conflation of fraternities and sexual violence & drinking,” he wrote to Roth. “In any case, the ‘how we got here’ historical approach to the issues is probably unwise and unnecessary, as it does inflame these wounds, whether that is reasonable or not.”
At Wesleyan, student safety at frats also became a priority. As the summer wound down, students filtered back into Middletown. Only trustees and donors knew that Roth had made his mind up about coeducation; he hadn’t yet presented it to the student body.
Summer Elbardissy, a sophomore, came back early. On a warm September night, Beta was throwing a jock-themed party. Elbardissy bummed a cigarette and crawled out a window to Beta’s second-floor “porch,” a layer of plywood that the guys had put on top of some tresses. The porch wasn’t that far from the ground; she’d seen people jump off it.
This was an all-campus party, a before-the-reality-of-classes-sets-in party. At some point, Elbardissy’s friends may have thought she was pretty messed up and needed to chill. She said they put her in a room on Beta’s third floor. Elbardissy would be safe in there, or at least they’d be safe from her.
She doesn’t recall what happened next, but it’s probable that she crawled out the third-floor window, thinking it was the second-floor window that led to the porch. She fell 35 feet, through the branches of a tree and into the bushes. She fractured her skull and pelvis and suffered a traumatic brain injury. She spent weeks in a hospital, breathing through a tube, and months at a subacute-care facility.
Soon after a Life Star helicopter had whirled Elbardissy into the sky, Beta was shut down. Roth presented the dictum for coeducation of the remaining frats as a matter of general student safety, not safety from sexual assault. In fact, the term “sexual assault” didn’t make it into his announcement, which was covered in The New York Times and for which he and Boger received hearty congratulations. “Wow, [J]osh, bold move!” Bill Helman, a venture capitalist and Dartmouth trustee, emailed Boger. “I am chair at Dartmouth and we are thinking similarly … but you only have 2 frats, we have 15!”
The Beta brothers threw their stuff into garbage bags and moved to reassigned housing in tiny apartments and even in Wesleyan’s sober-living house, never to return.
Shutting down frats on a national level probably won’t happen. But coeducation is a savvy tactic to bring growth under control or ultimately force national chapters to include coeducation in their bylaws. A year and a half after Wesleyan’s frats went coed, Harvard ordered its frats and traditionally all-male final clubs to do the same. A sexual-assault-prevention task force had found that nearly half of Harvard women involved with final clubs experienced “nonconsensual sexual contact,” compared with 31 percent of all female seniors at Harvard.
Harvard tried to require these clubs to admit women in 1984, and the clubs broke official ties with the university rather than accede to the demand. But the university has upped the ante; beginning with the Class of 2021, student members of organizations that refuse to become coed will be barred from leadership positions on campus — the type of positions intrinsic to Harvard students’ self-worth and career momentum. Want to be the captain of an athletic team or receive an official recommendation from Harvard for fellowships like the Rhodes and the Marshall? As part of a single-sex club, you’re out of luck.
At Wesleyan, DKE fought coeducation, winning a lawsuit and flying a plane over homecoming celebrations with the banner WES PICKS OUR BROS? FASCISM. LOOK IT UP. At the moment, its doors are shut along with Beta’s. The campus is quieter, and no one much notices they’re gone.
Vanessa Grigoriadis is a contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair. This article is excerpted from Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus, out this month from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
