No ‘Frasorority’ for Him: Citing Sexism, Members of Foreign-Service Fraternity Rebel Against Leader

Every year, the Delta Phi Epsilon Professional Foreign Service Fraternity throws a Christmas party in its chapter house at Georgetown University. In 2013, Meghna Batra, a member of the nearby George Washington University sorority chapter, wanted to bring a date from outside the fraternity.

But doing so, she was told, would come at a price: Batra had to sign up for a shift working at the Georgetown house. For two hours, she said, she swept the floors and made deviled eggs, while other women cleaned the bedrooms and washed the socks of brothers who lived in the house. None of the men attending, she said, were required to sign up for shifts.

Carly Nuttall, a member of the George Washington sorority chapter from 2011 to 2013, said she attended the party in 2012. Any woman who went, she said, was required to sign up for a 30-minute bartending shift. Those who wanted to bring a male date were responsible for a one-hour shift as well as an hour of cleaning before the party.

A third member of the sorority chapter from George Washington, who asked to remain anonymous because she was ashamed at having agreed to clean the house, said she attended the party in 2015 and 2016 and worked a two-hour shift each year — sweeping, doing dishes, and putting dirty socks into the washer. “The Alpha house was lived in by many Alpha brothers, so this is the trash and filth of a fraternity house,” she wrote in a message to The Chronicle. Other sisters, she said, disposed of a dead rat in the basement as part of their cleaning shift.

The woman was hesitant to sign up for a shift the next year, she said, but knew her boyfriend wanted to attend the party with her. “Having a steady boyfriend meant not hurting his feelings by not including him,” she said, “so I didn’t tell him what I had to do to get his ticket.”

The experience, all of the women said, was humiliating. And it had been organized by the fraternity’s national general secretary, Terrence Boyle.

Boyle, according to several past members, has long ruled the small organization, while spouting his distaste for women and “foreigners” in Delta Phi Epsilon. And only recently, because of a an inflammatory Facebook post, has pushback against him spilled into public view.

In emails to The Chronicle, Boyle denied the allegations made against him, including those about the Christmas party. He wrote that anyone, male or female, who wanted to bring a date to the annual party was given the option of paying $50 or doing one hour’s worth of work, which he wrote “NEVER, for any brother or sister involved sweeping a floor, cleaning a brother’s bedroom, or washing anyone’s dirty socks.”

Opposition to Boyle, who joined Delta Phi Epsilon’s founding chapter at Georgetown University as an undergraduate in 1963 and is in his 40th year as general secretary, escalated in response to his post in an unofficial Delta Phi Epsilon group on Facebook. In that post, he wrote that Delta Phi Epsilon should be “a fraternity. All men. Not some kind of frasorority.”

The post was published on June 30, hours before the organization was set to have its biennial convention in Washington, at which Boyle has been repeatedly re-elected. He had taken to Facebook to oppose a slate of national-board candidates who, he wrote, “are set on a platform for installing chapters outside the US and set not only on allowing women to be initiated into DPE Fraternity but in allowing them to have seats on its national board and votes at its conventions.”

In an email obtained by The Chronicle, Boyle called the slate an attempt to turn the organization “into a hermaphrodites-only cocaine-selling society.”

‘No Women, No Foreigners’

How Delta Phi Epsilon is incorporated differs from campus to campus. It actually comprises a fraternity, a sorority, and a co-ed group called the Delta Phi Epsilon Society, on a total of 10 college campuses. Chapter members say they encourage interaction between men and women.

Boyle’s position is that the three “parallel, but membership-overlapping, entities gives everyone what, I think, anyone might want,” he wrote in the email, “unless, the anyone in question is someone insisting that no one may be allowed to have even the option of belonging to an all-men fraternity or to an all-women sorority.”

But members say Boyle’s emphasis on separation translates in practice to an explicit preference for the male members. He has a record of exclusionary practices toward women, often refusing to officially acknowledge female members or co-ed chapters of Delta Phi Epsilon, said Vivi Nguyen, an alumna from the University of California at Berkeley chapter.

Sybil Lewis, a former president of the Berkeley chapter, said Boyle had refused to correspond with one of her predecessors, a woman, via email. “He would go around her and correspond with a vice president who is male,” Lewis said. Boyle denied this.

Maria Elisa Vallejo, president of Boston University’s coed chapter, said in using its general “president” email, she does not sign emails to Boyle or to other board members. “It was agreed with my vice president, who is male, that should there be any proper communications that needed to be made, he would have to be the one to make them,” she said.

If Boyle thought the chapter had a male president, there wouldn’t be any trouble — but, Vallejo feared, if Boyle knew she was running the chapter, then Boston University could lose its voting rights at the national convention and perhaps be forced to dissolve.

Vallejo, who is at the forefront of a group of members pushing for reform, said she was comfortable being named by The Chronicle. “It’s just absolutely insane and sad,” she said, “that Terry would want to inhibit us from operating simply because we are co-ed or simply because a woman is in a position of power, even though I was elected democratically.”

Members both female and male have often internalized an attitude of trying to simply avoid Boyle. “We’re just one small student organization trying to build our network, learn more about international relations,” Nguyen said. “We wanted to focus on building our internal capacity rather than fighting this kind of uphill battle with this person who chose to not recognize our existence.”

Critics of Boyle say his views include a prejudice against foreign students. Sasha John, who served as Berkeley’s chapter president this past spring, took issue with language in Boyle’s post that the fraternity “is about foreign service, not any kind of globalism,” and that “only a few noncitizens may ever belong at any time to any chapter.”

“That’s actually quite sad, considering I’m a woman and I’m not a U.S. citizen and I was the president of my fraternity,” John said.

For John, the exclusion of non-U.S. citizens is at odds with the mission of an organization whose constitution urges members “to encourage and foster relationships of friendliness and good will between the United States and all other nations.”

Boyle wrote that the fraternity’s bylaws specify that only men may become brothers, and that no chapter’s membership may consist of more than 10 percent non-U.S. citizens. “I have never heard a good argument for altering the Bye-Laws, especially given that we have had for any who might prefer it, the parallel DPE Society, which has no sex or citizenship restrictions,” he wrote.

Stephen Young, vice president of American University’s fraternity chapter, said good arguments are before Boyle now. “The fact that Mr. Boyle defends the Board’s reluctance to change this outdated and xenophobic policy, while actively working to repress any grassroots attempt to alter it, is disheartening to say the least,” Young wrote. “The notion that we as a chapter would either have to prove the citizenship status of each of our members to the national organization, or risk losing our charter, is a disgrace.”

Because Boyle is the public face of Delta Phi Epsilon, Batra said, she felt helpless when it came to change. “A lot of us wanted to do something, but we were confused about what we could do. We didn’t feel empowered to act in any way because the system was so confusing and so convoluted we didn’t even know how to go about it. Really, when one man runs the whole thing, it’s scary.”

Andrew Lama, president of the George Washington University fraternity chapter, has clashed with Boyle over what he calls “corporate responsibility” issues. The fraternity, he said, is run by “a homogenous board that only empowers Terry.”

Lama said he had not been provided with a current copy of Delta Phi Epsilon’s constitution, board-meeting minutes, or financial reports, and that the names of national board members are not made readily available to members. Boyle denied this.

‘Talking to a Brick Wall’

Those who don’t like that status quo have been told to leave the organization or start a new one, said Maggie Donahue, founding president of James Madison University’s chapter, who graduated in May. But “the problem still remains,” she said. “Even if we leave, there’s still going to be this organization where, at the heart of it, there’s all this prejudice — bigotry, sexism, xenophobia — that is rampant throughout these older members, the more-established members. That’s not OK.”

The two sides collided at the June 30 convention. “At one point, we were just getting into some roundabout argument with him, and he slammed his fist on the table and he screamed, ‘No women, no foreigners in the fraternity!’ " Donahue said. Boyle denied Donahue’s account. “Not true,” he wrote.

“There was a lot of bigotry and sexism that just came out of his mouth continually, to argue against women really having a say at all,” Donahue said. “It was just like talking to a brick wall.”

Allison Craft, who attended an open session of the convention, called Boyle’s behavior there “jaw-dropping.” She and a Delta Phi Epsilon alumnus, she said, attended the open session — the decision-making portion of the convention is men-only — after reading Boyle’s post in the unofficial Facebook group.

At one point, Craft said, Boyle addressed a woman of color in the room, saying that Delta Phi Epsilon “used to be an all-Aryan organization” but had since become more progressive. “I mean, it was laughable,” Craft said, “if it wasn’t for the fact that it was also very scary and disturbing.”

Boyle told The Chronicle that he was referring to a so-called “Aryan clause” proposed in the organization’s early days, a century ago, by West Coast chapters, which he opposed.

A group of Delta Phi Epsilon members and alumni is leading an effort to reform the group. A reform slate of candidates and the motions it proposed were defeated, 14-9, by voting delegates at the convention. Faced with the prospect of more of the same, Batra knew she had to do something. She and a fellow alumnus, George Kadifa, circulated a private petition demanding Boyle’s removal.

It was Boyle’s Facebook post, Nguyen said, that “finally broke that bubble, where people were like, ‘OK, there’s been like years of us wanting to talk to you, and now you’re going to just post something on Facebook?’ That’s where all the outrage finally poured out.”

Boyle “argued that members from any other chapter would likely advocate for admitting and expanding the power of ‘non-US citizens’ and ‘women’ in fraternity,” the petition read. “Mr. Boyle’s statements are completely inconsistent with the values of DPE and simple basic human decency. We are ashamed to be part of an organization whose leadership would engage in this conduct.”

The petition, which Batra and Kadifa posted to Facebook on July 2 and sent to Boyle and other members of the organization’s national board, was signed by more than 500 Delta Phi Epsilon members and alumna via Facebook comments.

In an email to The Chronicle, Boyle called the petition’s allegations “baseless.”

Public awareness, the activists hope, will pressure members of the national board to resign, at which point a convention could be held to rewrite the organization’s bylaws and make the Delta Phi Epsilon Society into a national co-ed governing body. Continuing to work with Boyle would be “morally indefensible,” Lama said

Reform-minded members are committed to Delta Phi Epsilon, despite its flaws, said John. “It’s going to take a lot more than Terry Boyle making comments like that for me to give up on this fraternity entirely.”

Follow Megan Zahneis on Twitter at @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.