Rocky Mountain News on GLOs side at U Colo

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Rocky Mountain News
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Double standard exists

September 18, 2005

Fraternities are an acquired taste. Cost, and the tribal rites that must be suffered to gain membership, mean they attract a small minority of any college's student body.

Some cynics wonder if the right to freely associate, an offshoot of the First Amendment, would even exist if the modern fraternity had been contemplated. Yet fraternities persist, generation after generation, like barnacles on the hull of institutions of higher learning.

Now the University of Colorado is trying to scrape them off by treating them not like other student groups, but like off-campus organizations. Whatever your opinion of fraternities, CU simply isn't being fair.

CU severed ties with its 15 fraternities because they refused to accept two of 11 mandates laid down by the administration last year in the wake of 18-year-old Lynn Gordon Bailey's death by alcohol poisoning during a Chi Psi initiation. Chi Psi was subsequently closed, not by CU but by the national organization.

The two sticking points: CU's insistence that the Greeks' rush period for freshmen be delayed until the spring semester, and that each house be required to put up for free a live-in adviser who's at least marginally more mature than the undergraduate residents.

The sororities, under pressure from their national organizations, agreed to the terms. The fraternities, just as unanimously, did not.

The frats claimed a delayed rush would cost them too much in lost revenue - about $250,000. The free-room requirement especially upset the smaller houses with relatively few rooms to rent.

In addition to depriving fraternities of revenue, the university increased their costs by making them pay much higher off-campus rates when they tried to recruit pledges, and pushing their booths into lower-traffic locations. The Inter-Fraternity Council is also being required to pay the full off-campus rate, almost $5,000, for the one-hour rental of Mackey Auditorium for a speech on the hazards of hazing and alcohol on Monday.

Fraternities, in short, are treated differently now than, say, the Young Communist League or any of the dozens of other only slightly less hypothetical student groups that can recruit at any time and at lower rates. And yet they are composed only of registered, tuition-paying students. Sure, frat boys can get drunk and annoying, but they certainly haven't been the only binge drinkers on campus.

Out of fairness, the university should relent and let the fraternities resume their ways as ordinary student groups. After all, many of the members do learn useful skills, such as how to manage a business - which is what a fraternity is.

It might even help the school financially. Most fraternity boys do eventually mature and turn out all right, participating heavily in alumni activity. Wasn't President Hank Brown a Delta Tau Delta?