S ecurity cameras throughout the Beta Theta Pi house at Pennsylvania State University recorded the slow, excruciating death of Timothy Piazza. Staggering drunk after a hazing ritual one Thursday night in February, he falls down a flight of stairs. His brothers carry him back up and plop him on the couch, but for the next 12 hours or so, they fail him. They throw beer at him, shoes. Wrestle on top of him. They slap, strike, and shake the semiconscious sophomore, put him on Snapchat. There are some thwarted attempts to help, and internet searches like “cold extremities in drunk person.” But no one calls 911 until 10:48 a.m.
Caitlin Flanagan has written before about “the dark power of fraternities,” and she returns to the theme in November’s Atlantic, examining the Penn State incident in depth. She acknowledges that most fraternity members in this country have happy, memorable experiences. But the death every year or so of a healthy young man is a tragedy, she writes, and the routinized response — including the college president’s bold statements and limp reforms — is a shame. “Various stakeholders perform in ways that are so ritualized,” she says, “it’s almost as though they are completing the second half of the same hazing rite that killed the boy.”
Ms. Flanagan, who has been called a provocatrice by The New York Observer and a beacon of intellectual honesty by the columnist David Brooks, spoke with The Chronicle about why young men join fraternities, how colleges are complicit, and the slim chance of change.
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In your article, Jud Horras, CEO of the North-American Interfraternity Conference, reflects on his devotion to defending fraternities. He asks, “Am I just fighting for a bunch of idiots?” Is he?
There’s a part of college that young women tend to do much better than young men, which is building a social life for themselves. Within a week, young women have made arrangements to meet and buy books together, they have three people they go to dinner with, and they’ve made a plan to see the movie on campus. A lot of young men just don’t really know how to do that. It doesn’t come naturally to them. And I think there’s a lot of underreported loneliness among undergraduate young men.
To me the problem is that American colleges are advertising fraternities, promoting fraternities, marketing fraternities, and really pushing huge numbers of kids into them.
The fraternity solves all of that, because now they don’t have to make plans. You just go to the house, and everyone’s there. That is a valuable service. But when things start going awry, they go seriously awry, and it happens very quickly. You end up with young men who just wanted to join a club and make some friends, and they’re in way over their heads — morally, physically, in terms of what’s being done to them and, once they’re in, what they’re expected to do to others. There’s an aspect of fraternity life that’s pernicious, and that I really question our shared American involvement in. Because when things go wrong, we’re not talking about a minor mistake, we’re talking about a dead student.
Is there any real reflection on this, by the national fraternity group or anyone else?
Yes and no. I think they know that hazing is a tremendous blight. And so they do a lot of things to try to eliminate hazing; they put a lot of money into these programs that are educational in nature. But they will not sit down and face the fact that it may just be impossible to separate hazing and fraternities. About 20 percent of them reportedly don’t haze — that’s the best research we have — but that means the vast majority do. Despite a big, serious effort for 30 or 40 years now to get hazing out of fraternities, there’s been no progress whatsoever.
To me the problem is that American colleges are advertising fraternities, promoting fraternities, marketing fraternities, and really pushing huge numbers of kids into them when they have far too many problems for the university to be partnered with them.
What do you mean “pushing”?
When fraternities were created, there was never supposed to be an office of Greek life. There were never supposed to be administrators who dealt with anything having to do with fraternities. They were kind of outlaw organizations that were very secret. We think of them being secret in terms of their handshakes and their rituals and their symbols, but it was secret that they existed. They would be off campus in lodges without any windows at all. And the idea was: This is where you can do the things that the university does not allow you to do.
Go online and click on any university in the country. You’re not going to see, We have a long, deep problem with fraternities. You’re not going to see, Parents, you should be aware that hazing is a deep, systemic problem within the fraternity industry. You’re not going to see peer-reviewed research from the University of Maine showing that up to 80 percent of fraternity members report being hazed. You’re not going to see any of that. You’re going to see wonderful tributes to the system and wonderful photographs of each of the houses and lots of updated information about rush. And you’re going to get the very real sense that, My university is in partnership with these organizations and thinks they’re worthy for me to join, that they’re going to improve me in some way.
The people who would be most motivated to do something are employees of colleges and universities.
That’s what happened to Tim Piazza’s parents. They went to a presentation by the Office of Greek Life at Penn State and were told how wonderful the program was. I don’t think that universities should be doing that any more.
So what will change this reality?
The lawsuits go far. It’s just that the fraternity may not be the entity paying out. It’ll be the families of the students that caused the harm, the homeowners’ insurance. In a death or a really serious injury, some legal arguments can cause the fraternity to have to pay. But civil litigation doesn’t do anything to change the fraternity.
The real question is: Is there such a thing as an American college fraternity, of this main kind, that doesn’t include hazing and heavy drinking? In other words, are those so essentially a part of this that you can’t really take them out? And if you can’t, then I would never step on anyone’s right to have that club. But it becomes like any nightclub in town, where the idea is — caveat emptor — the university does not promote or speak ill of this place.
If the fraternity industry were more honest with parents and students about how much hazing there is, if the university stopped promoting fraternities, and if people really knew, OK this is a club where I may get hazed, I may get injured, but I join anyway, that would be one thing. But to have them bound up in the university, essentially advertised by the university, that is a profound moral wrong.
When you talk about cutting the ties to the university, the immediate pushback is, Oh, but can you imagine how dangerous fraternities would be without that oversight? And think of what that is saying: that these clubs are so inherently dangerous that they will become explicitly criminal outfits without the nominal level of oversight that the university can provide.
It sounds like you’re saying that transparency and consumer information might have an effect.
Fraternities have so much specific information about the nature and extent of the hazing in their organizations that they don’t share with the public. All the claims that come in that they don’t pay out, or that they pay out and don’t tell us about. All the times a fraternity has closed, you’ll see one little line on underage drinking and hazing violations, and that always sounds so modest. And you think the fraternity is really on top of it. But that always means something horrific was going on. It wasn’t that they were bobbing for apples, I’ll tell you that.
If every fraternity had to share, Here’s how many legitimate claims we received, then I think things might begin to change, because they’d see their numbers possibly going down.
But who could who could make them do that?
Nobody, that’s the thing. Remember, fraternities are heavily represented in Congress. And isn’t the largest PAC in higher education the fraternity PAC? There’s no congressperson in the country who’s going to say, My issue is reforming the fraternity industry.
I know a lot of people who track hazing as best they can. I know a lot of parent advocates whose children were injured, tons of them. But this is just not an issue that a large group of people is ever going to get behind on a level to start changing legislation. They’ll change it about hazing itself — nobody ever really fights that. But on fraternities, the thinking normally is, These guys know what they’re getting into. It’s on them, not on society. What did they think was going to happen?
The people who would be most motivated to do something are employees of colleges and universities. But for the president, it’s really hard to come up against your board of trustees, because fraternities are so well represented there, too.
Do you expect to see any changes in the next five or 10 years?
There’s a big movement within the fraternity industry that the self-governance model, where the fraternity men police themselves, is not working, and that a university itself should get involved, through the student-conduct office. They should be the ones to police the fraternities instead of the interfraternity councils.
That was one of the reforms at Penn State.
And how long did it go until they had a kid nearly dead, a month?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sara Lipka edits coverage of campus life and other topics. Follow her on Twitter @chronsara, or email her at sara.lipka@chronicle.com.
