In her new book, Fraternity: An Inside Look at a Year of College Boys Becoming Men, Alexandra Robbins follows Jake, a freshman who pledges a fraternity chapter at a selective college, and Oliver, a sophomore running a chapter at a state university on the West Coast. Jake seeks brotherhood; Oliver wants leadership skills.
Robbins incorporates the views of many other fraternity brothers and delves into the history of fraternities and research about bonding, groupthink, and masculinity. She wanted to focus on positive fraternity experiences that counter the typical representations of hazing, sexual assault, and binge and forced drinking.
“Someone,” she writes, “must advocate for the boys who aren’t causing trouble and for the parents who want to help and understand them.” Robbins has written five New York Times best sellers, including Pledged, about sorority life, and The Overachievers, about hyperdriven high-school students.
Fraternities, when they’re done right, can help guys become more empathetic, more open-minded.
Both Jake’s and Oliver’s stories took unexpected turns, she says. But over all, she came away from the project persuaded that healthy fraternity chapters help shape boys into accountable, empathetic men. She talked recently with The Chronicle about hazing, masculinity, and how fraternities should reform pledge periods and rebrand themselves.
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You chronicle the fraternity experiences of two young men. One is the more stereotypical, with forced drinking, hazing, and a sexist outlook toward hooking up. The other fraternity parties too, but not crazily, and it emphasizes mutual support and good works. Why did you pick these two particular men?
I wanted to find smart, kind, relatable, self-aware, conscientious guys whom readers would root for. I was specifically looking for the kinds of guys whom we don’t see in media accounts of fraternity life. I wanted to find the guys whom readers would either see themselves in or see their children in. And I anticipated that both of them were going to have a very positive experience. Ultimately, their stories took trajectories that I found surprising. It sort of shows parents this is how a good boy can go a little bad, and this is what we need to watch out for, and this is what we need to be discussing with our sons before they even go to college.
When you wrote about sororities, in 2004, did you have it in the back of your mind that fraternities would be the subject of a future book?
No, I never intended to make Greek life a beat. I thought the sorority book would be a one-time thing, but there were so many requests for a book about fraternities over the years that it got me thinking about it. It took me a while to figure out the right time and the right perspective to take. And in the last few years it just became clear that what was missing was a book about good boys in college, what they think masculinity means, and how society’s interpretation of masculinity affects college students of both genders.
For all of its problems, Greek life is thriving. Why is that?
Ultimately, what the motivations for both sororities and fraternities boil down to is they want to make a large campus feel a little smaller by finding a more intimate community to belong to.
Although Fraternity is primarily case studies, you include some advice for students and parents about distinguishing good fraternities from bad.
Bringing problems out into the open and promoting confidential reporting have helped lift the veil of secrecy that perpetuates abusive behavior.
Brothers gave me a lot of good tips. One of my favorites is to ask culturally based or LGBTQ chapters their opinions about a fraternity, because they can tell you if that fraternity treats people with respect. Also, families don’t realize that before you even get to campus, it’s OK to call the dean’s office or the Greek-life adviser and ask, straight up, Can you tell me about the records of some of the chapters on campus?
At Yale you were a member of a secret society, Scroll and Key. Did you feel, in college, the intense need to belong that you describe in your books?
Everybody feels the need to belong somewhere in college. And while I was a member of a senior society, that’s not ultimately where I felt I belonged. I felt I belonged on the intramural fields, which is where I found my people.
You discuss but don’t emphasize minority fraternities. Why is that?
I focus on the fraternities that we most often hear about in the media. The cultural fraternities, while they are brotherhoods, are very different because they don’t have the same resources, programming, or living arrangements. And while some do have hazing issues, by and large they are not the fraternities that make headlines and the fraternities that people misunderstand.
Over all, you write, hazing endures because fraternity alumni want it to even if they pay lip service to reform. You also reference the psychological and sociological pressures that make it difficult to eradicate hazing. What can college leaders or legislators do?
Hazing comes from a place where members want to feel like their membership is worth something and that they have earned their letters. So instead of just saying no hazing, which doesn’t really have an effect, I think that the pledge period could be replaced with an activity that could produce the same reward, or the same sentiment. Require the group to do some sort of challenging community-service assignment, or have them go through a masculinities program run by an outside party to teach them how to communicate openly and, more importantly, that there are countless ways to be a man. That would facilitate bonding in a healthier way.
And I think that should be how fraternities rebrand themselves — as a healthy safe space for guys to be able to confide in other guys, because there aren’t a lot of spaces like that for them.
You report on nude and seminude hazing rituals. How do you think that fits into the way masculinity is experienced and performed in fraternities?
Nude rituals don’t happen in a ton of chapters, but there are varying reasons why they may happen in a few. In one chapter, a student I followed for a year said that initiation involves nudity to humble members for “our most sacred ritual.” That’s a sentiment that you can guess has been handed down, decade over decade. But then it was also to make them uneasy. At the end of initiation, there was nudity again, and that was a way of helping welcome people to the brotherhood, which is not a sentiment I think many chapters share. I think it’s supposed to represent that there’s nothing they can’t tell each other now. Or there’s always the idea that they’re just dudes being dudes.
The Greek tier system, you write, encourages a lot of the more juvenile, superficial behavior — the way the chapters try to pair up with more elite and good-looking counterparts. Is that system here to stay too? Or are there ways to mitigate it?
From the national perspective, it’s not something that they endorse, but everyone knows that the higher tier you are, the more likely you are to have a strong recruitment season. I would compare this to colleges and the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Many years ago, when I asked college administrators if they would opt out of the rankings, which I felt were incredibly skewed and misleading, they said yes — if other colleges did it too. It’s sort of the same thing here, where groups want to opt out and some of them try, but it would have to be more of a campus decision to say: You know what? This is BS. Let’s just forget about the tiers and do our own thing.
You found that fraternities can be safe spaces for LGBTQ and minority students, and students recovering from substance-abuse problems. Do you think that alt-fraternity component is becoming a bigger part of the fraternity ecosystem?
Not as big as it should be. The more that these groups are able to diversify their memberships, the more likely they are to reduce groupthink and become stronger, healthier chapters. But also the student body in colleges over all includes more minorities, more LGBTQ students, so it would make sense, and it should follow, that fraternities alter their demographics too.
Over all, did the book make you warmer or cooler toward fraternities?
I felt warmer toward fraternities because until this project, I hadn’t truly understood what college guys are going through and how few resources they have and how different they are than their media portrayals. Fraternities, when they’re done right, can help guys become more empathetic, more open-minded, more accountable people.
Psychologically, some college-partying excess, not just in Greek life, is due to the mind-set of the four-year liberty zone between childhood and adult re sponsibility. Are there ways that colleges could counter that narrative?
Hopefully the book will help spark that discussion among parents and students. Students go to college with expectations about what the experience is supposed to be, or, even worse, that college is supposed to be “the best four years of your life.” It wouldn’t hurt for colleges to say in their convocations: We’re going to help you make the most of this experience, but don’t feel the pressure to make these “the best four years of your lives.” Because the truth is, that comes later.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Alexander C. Kafka is a Chronicle senior editor. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.
