Resign or Reform? Fraternity Members Respond to an Unflattering Spotlight

A string of highly publicized sexual-assault allegations involving fraternities have led at least a few current and former members to renounce their memberships in Greek organizations.

“As a parent, as a husband, as a son, as a brother, it would be a real disservice to those who I love and respect not to resign,” said Gregory Britton, editorial director of the books division at the Johns Hopkins University Press and a former member of Phi Kappa Psi, quoting from a statement he posted to his Facebook page.

Others, though, believe the Greek system has the potential to bring about change, and are trying to reform it from within.

“As a group that has control over a social space, there are problems that can come up,” said Matthew Leibowitz, a recent graduate of Wesleyan University and founder of the advocacy group Consent Is So Frat. “It’s important for us to recognize that and … to change things,” said Mr. Leibowitz, whose group seeks to educate Greek organizations about healthy relationships.

Whatever courses of action they take, fraternity members are being forced to confront the issue of sexual assault, a topic long overshadowed by concerns about alcohol abuse and hazing, according to Nicholas Syrett, an associate professor of history at the University of Northern Colorado and author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

“The hazing accidents and deaths have tended to provoke the greatest national conversations,” Mr. Syrett said. “I don’t know that there was ever the sort of a nationwide conversation like the one that seems like we’re having now.”

Some fraternity members are turning in their pins over recent controversies.

Some believe the Greek system has the potential to bring about change, and are trying to reform it from within.

Sending Back the Pin

Controversial allegations of a horrific gang rape at the Phi Kappa Psi house at the University of Virginia have pushed the issue to the fore.

News coverage of those allegations, first laid out in a Rolling Stone article, prompted Mr. Britton to drop his affiliation with Phi Kappa Psi, whose Wabash College chapter he joined three decades ago. While he found the allegations in the article “appalling,” he said, he also was struck by a New York Times article about the situation, which outlined “a history of hazing and alcohol abuse” at Phi Kappa Psi chapters at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Arizona, the University of Dayton, West Virginia University, and Cornell University, as well as recent sexual-assault allegations against fraternity members at Brown University.

“The article goes on to articulate a series of other events at other campuses that clearly point to a pattern of association between this fraternity and criminal activity,” Mr. Britton said in an interview.

Having not been an active member of the organization since he graduated, he said, it bothered him to think of his name on a membership list. So he dug out his fraternity pin, still in its original box, and mailed it back to the national office of Phi Kappa Psi, along with a letter that said, “the reprehensible behavior of some members makes membership absolutely intolerable for me.”

That the University of Virginia allegations have since been contested has not changed Mr. Britton’s mind.

“There’s clearly a pattern here,” he said.

At Wesleyan University, one student loudly quit his fraternity earlier this year over discomfort with the language that some of his fraternity brothers used to discuss women, and amid allegations about two sexual assaults in fraternity houses.

The student, Scott Ellman, left the group, Chi Psi, last spring.

Now a senior, Mr. Ellman published an essay in July about his decision, in which he wrote about recognizing “my complicity as a fraternity brother in the greater context of sexual violence in the American higher-education system” and his ultimate rejection of “inequality ingrained in the DNA of these gender-specific institutions.”

When he joined his fraternity, as a freshman, Mr. Ellman hoped the group would work to change the culture of Greek organizations. But he became discouraged by what he described as the group’s inertia. For example, few of his fellow members showed up at an event he recommended they attend, on “bystander intervention” as a way of dealing with campus sexual assault.

And as the Wesleyan student body became increasingly hostile toward fraternities due to sexual-assault allegations, he said in an interview, “it felt uncomfortable to associate myself with any sort of fraternity on campus.”

Concerns about sexual assault are “not exclusive to fraternities, but I think they can be a breeding ground for it,” Mr. Ellman said. “At a school like Wesleyan that purports to be a progressive educational institution, it seems incongruous to have these vestiges of a bygone era.”

Growing Student Group

Not all concerned fraternity members have forsaken the Greek system.

“I’ve not heard of there being organized movements to disavow fraternities,” said Mr. Syrett, the Northern Colorado professor.

Mr. Leibowitz, of Consent Is So Frat, felt as Mr. Ellman did about the culture of sexual violence associated with fraternities. But, as he described in an essay response to Mr. Ellman’s piece, he decided to stay in his fraternity and work to change it from the inside as a “fraternity activist.”

Initially, his fraternity brothers hesitated to discuss sexual assault, Mr. Leibowitz wrote, being more accustomed to being lectured about the topic rather than encouraged to speak openly about it. But during Mr. Leibowitz’s college career he saw many people confront the issue head-on and embrace changes to make their events safer and their culture more welcoming to women.

“The Greek community isn’t sure how to have this conversation in a way that’s with them rather than to them,” he said in an interview. “That hesitation goes away the more you talk with people and the more it’s a discussion.”

The response to his essay led Mr. Leibowitz to found Consent Is So Frat at the end of the summer. According to its mission, the organization advocates that “consent and healthy relationships should be part of what it means to be frat” and calls on Greek members to “treat the men and women on our campuses with respect.”

Overseeing a leadership team composed of fraternity and sorority members and recent alumni, Mr. Leibowitz runs the organization as executive director in addition to his job as the Engaging Men Project coordinator at the Delaware Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Over the course of one semester, Consent Is So Frat has gained a foothold on 40 college campuses, Mr. Leibowitz said. The group has created a workshop curriculum and has a team of campus representatives, both sorority and fraternity members, working to educate their peers about consent.

“We wouldn’t have that if there wasn’t an interest in doing serious reform within the Greek community,” Mr. Leibowitz said. “We make prompting consent and preventing sexual assault what it means to be Greek.”

Mr. Syrett said such programs were not without precedent. Fraternities on some campuses have made real efforts to “buck the trend in terms of the reputation of sexual assault and misogyny,” he said.

But the professor said he was somewhat skeptical of the reform-from-within movements because fraternities have high turnover rates as students graduate and have a history of “the performance of this aggressive heterosexuality.”

“I do think it seems possible,” he said, “but it definitely does not square with the history of fraternities.”