NYT Article: Ban of Brothers

[PhiPsiRuss]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/magazine/09FRATS.html

January 9, 2005

Ban of Brothers
By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS

By modern fraternity standards, Phi Delta Theta's tailgate party was a real rager. For one thing, there were kegs. I couldn't see them just then, but proof of their existence was everywhere. Packed into a backyard near the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., were some 100 drunken college students, beer spilling from plastic cups, industrial-size ketchup bottles overturned on the grass near the grill and gaggles of hard-drinking sorority girls (including one self-described Phi Delt groupie) keeping pace with the boys.

Amid the revelry, I spotted a lanky, easygoing Phi Delt sophomore from Texas who goes by the nickname Two-Shot, because two shots is about all it takes to get him acting silly. ''Two-Shot!'' I said loudly as he meandered through the crowd in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, a beer in one hand and a cheap plastic bottle of vodka in the other. ''Where's the keg?''

He pointed toward a far corner. ''Hey, homey,'' he said. ''The beer's over there.''

''You going to the game?'' I asked.

''Man, that's a good question,'' he said. ''I got great intentions, you know. But stuff happens. Sometimes I don't make it.''

I wished him luck (''Keep it real!'' he replied) and made my way toward the keg, where I bumped into Theo Michels, Phi Delt's likable chapter president, and Greg Bok, a big, sarcastic, deceptively smart sophomore. (Bok looks like a meathead but says he scored a 1,550 out of 1,600 on the SAT.) Both Michels and Bok were marveling at the success of the day's tailgate.

''Six kegs and no cops,'' Michels said. ''This has to be some sort of record. Last year, we had an off-campus party that started at 10:30, and by 11 the police came with a paddy wagon. A paddy wagon. We're college students trying to have a party off campus, because we can't have one in our own fraternity house, because we're not allowed to drink there. So we try to have one off campus, and it gets broken up. Basically, we can't have a party anywhere.''

Peter Micali, a square-jawed Phi Delt sophomore who had wandered within earshot, chimed in, ''Yeah, it was easier to party in high school.''

Bok shook his head sadly. ''The good old-fashioned fraternity experience is dead,'' he said, pausing for dramatic effect. ''So long, 'Animal House.' ''

It's doom and gloom time for many fraternity boys at Northwestern and at colleges across the country. University administrators, alarmed by the extent of binge drinking on their campuses, are cracking down on the excesses of Greek life, saying it's high time for fraternity boys to shape up and sober up. While all kinds of college students binge drink, the 2001 College Alcohol Study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that fraternity house residents are twice as likely to do so as other students.

Eleven national and international fraternities, including Phi Delta Theta, now require most of their chapter houses to be alcohol-free, no matter what their university's policy is. (Sororities have long banned drinking in their chapter houses.) Take away the booze, the new alcohol-free theory goes, and fraternities will be safer, on more solid economic footing (fewer lawsuits, cheaper liability insurance) and more conducive to the creation of real bonds of brotherhood. Friendships will be forged out of genuine respect, not the shared misery of hazing or the shared fog of drink. ''We just didn't see a way to dramatically change the fraternity culture without removing alcohol,'' said Bob Biggs, executive vice president of Phi Delta Theta, when we met last fall in his office at the fraternity's spotless, museumlike international headquarters in Oxford, Ohio.

But what, exactly, would a dry fraternity look like? And would anyone want to join? You'd have a better chance, I thought, of getting James Carville and Bob Novak to open ''Crossfire'' with five minutes of meditation. As I listened to the brothers in that backyard go on about life at one of Northwestern's ''alcohol free'' fraternities, I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for them. I was a Phi Delt at Northwestern in the mid-90's -- not that long ago, to be sure, but seemingly a different time entirely. While we considered ourselves tamer than fraternities at many state schools (where Greek affiliation can often take precedence over just about everything), my brothers and I still saw drunken debauchery in the chapter house as our fraternal mandate. We threw rowdy keg parties. We got drunk in our rooms and then broke into other fraternities, stealing their sacred robes and toaster ovens. Some of us smoked marijuana, which we grew and harvested in an off-campus apartment. And many of us eagerly participated in drunken hazing, which most of the hazers and hazed saw as a kind of comic relief integral to fraternal bonding. To my brothers and me, a dry fraternity would have been inconceivable.

In less than a decade, though, the inconceivable has happened. When I told a friend from college that his fraternity, Theta Chi, was now dry, he was baffled. ''What's the point?'' he wanted to know. Indeed, what is the point of a fraternity if you can't give a party -- or drink a beer in your room with a brother and watch ''Cops'' at 3 a.m.? Wasn't alcohol what enabled fraternity boys to be, well, fraternity boys?

When I first heard of the move to ban alcohol from fraternity houses, I was reminded of a scene in the film ''Roger Dodger,'' when a 16-year-old boy sneaks into a bar with his uncle, who promises to teach him the fine and complicated art of picking up women. When the boy declines an alcoholic beverage, the uncle becomes apoplectic. ''You drink that drink!'' he demands. ''Alcohol has been a social lubricant for thousands of years. What do you think, you're going to sit here tonight and reinvent the wheel?''

A number of fraternities are brazenly trying to do just that, arguing that the fraternity wheel is broken -- and badly in need of a redesign. But what does this new, redesigned American fraternity look like? I was back at Northwestern to find out, and to try to make sense of my own fraternity experience. Had I joined for the drunken keg parties, or was brotherhood about more than that? And was I really a ''frat guy,'' or an anomaly -- a guy who played sports and wore baseball caps but who really should have been hanging out with fraternity-mocking English majors?

Nearly a decade removed from college, I still view my fraternity experience with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. And I'm not alone. Two fraternity brothers told me that while they loved being Phi Delts, I was not, under any circumstance, to mention their names in this article. I understood. Never mind that Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Newman, Walter Cronkite and Ted Koppel -- not to mention nearly half of all U.S. presidents and 40 percent of Supreme Court justices -- belonged to a fraternity in college. The stereotype of the fraternity guy as party-loving imbecile is alive and well: just listen to any rant about President George Bush's lack of intellectual curiosity, where a reference to him being a frat boy is most likely used as indisputable proof.

In that backyard in Evanston, though, surrounded by beer-guzzling fraternity boys and the girls who love them, I didn't feel ashamed. I felt old. ''Dude, you're the reporter dude, right?'' one brother said, grinning wildly. ''Let me introduce you to some freshman girls! You want to meet some freshman girls? You're with Phi Delts, man. You remember how it is! It's all about the girls!''

Word spread among the brothers that I was a Phi Delt from way back in the 1990's, and before long several cornered me. They wanted answers: ''How often did you have keg parties in the house? Was the house packed with girls? Were the girls hotter? How much cooler was it?''

They listened intently as I held court in the backyard, recounting salacious stories of riotous fraternal living -- a little exaggerated in the retelling, of course. But the more I went on about our ''huge keg parties,'' the more pathetic I felt. Was I really trying to impress college students? And were all of my favorite fraternity stories really about getting loaded?

Since 1997, the year I graduated, Northwestern has expelled five fraternities -- in cooperation with their national organizations -- for alcohol and hazing violations. The last casualty was Kappa Sigma, banished after its 2003 formal dance party at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. In a gaffe almost too dopey to be believed, a Kappa Sigma brother dropped a flask into the aquarium's beluga whale tank. Already on probation for an alcohol-related incident that sent a pledge to the hospital, the fraternity was booted off campus by Northwestern administrators (it can petition to return in 2007), but not before the brothers could make going-away T-shirts. They read, ''Kappa Sigma -- a Whale of a Good Time.''

Of the 17 fraternities now at Northwestern, 13 are alcohol-free, and any new chapter starting at the school also must be dry. (In 1997, not a single Northwestern fraternity was dry.) Across the country, some 30 colleges -- including the University of Iowa, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Oregon -- have gone even further, banning alcohol in all their fraternity houses. (Some have also made their residence halls alcohol-free.) And many schools are increasingly placing fraternities on probation, requiring that they meet specific academic and behavioral standards. Others are moving fraternity rush from fall to winter, heeding the words of the Arizona Supreme Court, which in 1994 opined that ''we are hardpressed to find a setting where the risk of an alcohol-related injury is more likely than from under-age drinking at a university fraternity party the first week of the new college year.'' To try to combat the tendency of fraternity members to simply move their parties to off-campus apartments and houses, university officials are also cooperating more than ever with the local police.

And then there's Alfred University in Western New York and Santa Clara University in California, which have taken the most drastic step of all: they decided to do away with fraternities altogether. ''The Greek system is beyond repair,'' Robert McComsey, chairman of Alfred's board, told The New York Times in May 2002.

Fraternities did little to improve their image this fall, making headlines across the country in hazing and alcohol-related deaths. At Colorado State University, Samantha Spady, a sophomore, was found dead in a lounge at the Sigma Pi chapter house by a member giving his mother a tour of the fraternity. At the University of Oklahoma, Blake Adam Hammontree, a freshman, died at the Sigma Chi house from alcohol poisoning. And at the University of Colorado, Lynn Gordon Bailey Jr., a Chi Psi pledge, was found dead after drinking during an initiation ritual.

Some fraternity leaders point out that drinking-related deaths at fraternity houses make up fewer than a dozen of the 1,400 alcohol-related deaths at colleges each year (car accidents are involved in approximately 1,100 of those). Whatever the numbers, none of those deaths occurred at dry chapters, which would seem to bolster the argument that alcohol-free fraternities can and do make a difference.

In 1997, Phi Delt was among the first fraternities to announce its plan to go dry, arguing that it would save lives, lift grade point averages, improve the condition of chapter houses, boost slumping recruitment numbers by attracting a new kind of college student (fraternity membership nationwide is down 25 percent from its peak in 1990) and help its members return to the core principles on which the fraternity was founded -- friendship, sound learning and moral rectitude. The policy called for all chapter houses to be dry by 2000.

In July, Phi Delta Theta will celebrate its fifth anniversary of being alcohol-free. And while some fraternity leaders still question how effective the policy is in stopping binge drinking (''We're not sure that focusing on where a person drinks will have any impact on how much that person drinks,'' Mark Anderson, the president of the Sigma Chi Corporation, said), Phi Delt's executive vice president, Bob Biggs, insists the policy is bettering the daily lives of members -- and keeping them safe. For the first time since he can remember, Biggs said, the fraternity isn't facing any lawsuits. ''It was common before we instituted this to have four, five, six claims at any one time,'' Biggs told me. To go with its newfound sobriety, Phi Delt even has a new motto: Brotherhood -- Our Substance of Choice.

But sobering up chapter houses isn't easy, and the backlash has been fierce. Some chapters have refused to go dry, choosing instead to break away from their national organizations. And many theoretically dry chapters are anything but -- there's plenty of alcohol, pot and harder drugs behind closed doors. ''I don't think anyone is naive enough to think that there's no alcohol in many dry houses,'' one fraternity chapter president at Northwestern told me. ''If it's done in a somewhat covert way, you're fine.'' It's often not, and both Biggs and Dave Westol, executive director of Theta Chi, whose chapters started going dry in 1998, have recently closed chapters that brazenly ignored the no-alcohol policy.

But the greatest opposition to dry fraternities often comes from alumni. Westol has received hundreds of e-mail messages from angry alums who, he said, ''can't imagine that a fraternity can be fun without alcohol.'' He went on to say that among the biggest challenges in persuading current fraternity members to take the dry policy seriously are alums who return to the chapter armed with countless stories about the fraternity's drunken past -- or, worse yet, with six-packs. When I sheepishly admitted to having done just that (minus the six-packs), Westol went easy on me. ''Don't beat yourself up,'' he said, ''but you see what I'm talking about.''

Many fraternity members can't help thinking that alcohol-free fraternity houses came about not out of genuine concern for their well-being but because the fraternities were worried about their pocketbooks. While Biggs denies that fear of costly lawsuits was the primary factor in going dry, he concedes that increases in litigation and liability premiums played a part in Phi Delta Theta's decision.

In the 1980's, the number of lawsuits and insurance claims resulting from fraternity binge drinking and hazing skyrocketed, causing the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to rank fraternities and sororities as the sixth-worst risk for insurance companies -- right behind hazardous-waste-disposal companies and asbestos contractors. Some insurance companies began refusing to cover fraternities, forcing fraternities to take measures to minimize their risk.

In the mid-90's, Phi Delt's executive board considered going even further. ''We wondered, Can we conceive of a fraternity that doesn't allow alcohol in its chapter houses?'' Biggs said when I met with him. ''But we knew it wouldn't be easy. When we decided to do it, someone made the analogy to when John Kennedy said, 'Let's go to the moon and back by the end of the decade.' So that's what we did.'' (It's a telling analogy. Neil Armstrong brought his Phi Delt pin with him to the moon's surface in 1969.)

At its annual convention in 1998, the fraternity broke out fireworks to celebrate its 150-year anniversary and its alcohol-free future. But back at Northwestern that fall, ''we thought the world was ending,'' said Nick Logan, the chapter president at the time. ''Northwestern had actually told us that we needed to go dry that year, so unlike other Phi Delt chapters that had two years to prepare, we didn't. It was absolute pandemonium. I mean, we're like 19, 20, 21, many of us have been drinking regularly since high school, we join a fraternity partially for the social scene and now we're supposed to just not drink? It was like telling a monk that he can't pray.''

Many dry chapters still have members who try to skirt their dry rule. Chapter presidents, who are sometimes under-age, are put in the difficult position of policing the drinking of members who are 21. But even those fraternities that do follow the rules insist that administrators, in their efforts to crack down on drinking, have failed to do just that -- and, in the process, managed to take much of the fun out of fraternity life.

At the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house at Northwestern, members told me of their fruitless attempt this fall to show the classic 1978 fraternity movie ''Animal House'' at one of their philanthropic events co-sponsored by a campus sorority. The Sig Eps were all set to make a special T-shirt for the event -- it would read ''Fat, Drunk and Stupid Is No Way to Go Through Life, Son,'' a famous line from the film -- when they say the university ''very strongly suggested'' they not show the film.

''It was really a very ironic event, of course, because most fraternities now are pretty far from the 'Animal House' model,'' one Sig Ep brother told me. ''But the administration and the Panhellenic Association, which oversees the sororities, didn't see the humor in it. They acted very disappointed in us, because we'd been a frat that had worked hard to dispel the 'Animal House' stereotype.''

Then there was the controversy surrounding Sig Ep's annual prep-school party, at which female undergraduates traditionally arrive in their best Catholic schoolgirl attire. As one of the school's four ''wet'' fraternities, Sig Ep can have parties with alcohol in their house, as long as the beer is sold by an outside vendor and no one under 21 drinks. But this year the party was going to be dry. ''The university brought our attention to some clause in the student handbook,'' said Jordan Cerf, the chapter's vice president of recruitment, ''that says that any event that freshmen attend during the fall quarter in a house has to be dry.''

The Sig Eps were still expecting a huge crowd when I talked to them in October. ''Here's what the school has done by making this party dry,'' Nick Johnson, the chapter president, explained. ''Before coming to the party, everyone is going to get loaded at their dorm, or off campus, or in their car. They're going to drink more, and they'll drink faster, so that their buzz lasts them through the party. That's really the disingenuous thing about this policy. I don't see how this is keeping anyone safer. It's just moving the binge drinking somewhere else.''


I never expected to be a hard-drinking frat boy when I arrived at Northwestern in the fall of 1993. I considered myself far too much of a ''free thinker'' to join a fraternity, and I certainly wasn't going to be ''paying for friends,'' which is what I considered the monthly dues to be.

There was also my father's fruitless fraternity experience to consider. In 1958 he joined Lambda Chi Alpha at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a fraternity, he says, ''for guys other fraternities wouldn't take.'' Still, it was a welcome social outlet for my shy dad, and he happily went along with the heavy drinking and the endless talk of sorority-house panty raids if it meant having friends. But things went awry when my father wanted to attend a racial-equality march, which didn't gel with the fraternity's conservative views. The chapter president told him not to go, and when my father said he was going anyway, the president insisted that he not wear his fraternity pin. Outraged, my father moved out of the chapter house and started writing anti-fraternity letters to the school newspaper. He was expelled from the fraternity soon after.

My dad's experience played right into my stereotype of fraternities: they were for close-minded people. But as the fall quarter of my freshman year progressed, my anti-fraternity stance softened. I realized that a third of Northwestern's undergraduates (including plenty of people who seemed perfectly decent) belonged to fraternities or sororities. I also loved fraternity parties -- my friends and I spent many weekend nights stumbling from one fraternity kegger to the next. And as much as I liked to mock fraternity guys, I desperately wanted to belong to something. I was a mostly clueless drifter in high school, and I didn't want to be one in college too. As an only child, I was intrigued by the idea of brotherhood -- by the concept of guys contractually obligated to have my back. Maybe paying for friends wasn't such a bad idea, after all.

So I didn't object when my classmate and new friend, Dave, who struck me as even less of a fraternity guy than I was (he was a film major prone to outbursts of hypersensitivity), suggested we head up to Phi Delta Theta and enjoy the free food at its Rush Week event. I didn't know much about the chapter, but Dave apparently knew a brother there. That evening I was introduced to many of the members, and everyone seemed cool enough to me. Dave and I went back the next night, and I was summoned to a room and offered a ''bid'' -- an invitation to ''pledge'' membership to the fraternity. I had a Groucho Marx moment -- did I really want to join a fraternity that would have me? -- but I got over it and accepted on the spot.

They threw a pledge T-shirt on me and we ran downstairs, out the front door and onto to the porch, where there was a lot of congratulatory hollering and a few ''who's that skinny dude?'' whispers from pledges who didn't know me. Before I knew it, I was being hurled high into the cold night air, and everyone started singing a ditty you won't find listed among the official songs of Phi Delta Theta.

To hell to hell with Fiji, to hell with Sigma Nu,
And if you're not a Phi Delt, to hell to hell with you,
So listen to me lassie, so listen to my plea,
Don't ever let a Phi Delt an inch above your knee.
He'll take you to the back shed and fill you full of rye,
And soon you'll be the mother of a bouncin' baby Phi.

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