This book focuses largely on a single fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, in the hope that the narrative’s specificity will yield a richer portrait—that the part will shed greater truths about the whole. As David Stollman, a member of rival Sigma Phi Epsilon, told the men on the SAE leadership cruise, fraternities are more alike than different. Stollman, who has visited hundreds of campuses to hold boot camps on recruitment, mentioned the handshakes, Greek letters, and secret rituals featuring candles and robes. More important, he said, Greeks tend to espouse a similar set of ideals. Sigma Chi’s creed begins, “I believe in fairness, decency and good manners.” Tau Kappa Epsilon calls for a “life based upon integrity, justice, sincerity, patience, moderation, culture and challenge.” The Kappa Alpha Order (KA) tells its initiates that “the manner in which an individual enjoys certain advantages over others is a test of a true gentleman.” The creed becomes an organizing principle for a life well lived. When members of SAE die, the fraternity holds a service, replete with religious symbolism, to honor the recently departed, those who now reside in “the chapter eternal.”
Using the measure of members initiated over time, SAE claims to be the largest fraternity. Since its founding, SAE counts 336,000 brothers, with two-thirds alive today. At its peak in 2014, almost 15,000 undergraduates belonged to SAE chapters on more than 230 campuses. Like every fraternity, SAE has its own character. At its most populous chapters, it has a regional flavor. SAE claims the distinction of being the only continuously operating general fraternity founded in the antebellum South to survive the Civil War. Its members have included the writers William Faulkner at the University of Mississippi and Walker Percy at the University of North Carolina (UNC). Its chapters have especially strong ties to Wall Street. T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oilman-turned-investor, and Henry Paulson, the former Goldman Sachs CEO and secretary of the US Treasury, are both SAEs. LinkedIn, a networking website for professionals, recently listed almost 3,000 alumni in finance, more than any other industry. SAE holds a prominent place in popular culture. Stephen Colbert’s conservative blowhard character on The Colbert Report comedy show proclaimed his Dartmouth SAE membership. SAE plays a supporting role in Animal House, the sine qua non of frat films. In that 1978 movie, SAE inspired the rich, snobby fraternity that was the nemesis of comedian John Belushi’s out-of-control chapter.
Today, SAE is perhaps America’s most notorious fraternity. The Oklahoma video and other racial episodes continue to alienate African Americans and trouble some of its own black members. “I couldn’t believe it,” Devontae Dennis, a black member from the University of Wisconsin, told me on the leadership cruise. “SAEs are like my brothers.” Dennis stood by the fraternity, but it hadn’t been easy. A month after the video hit the Internet, Dennis, wearing an SAE T-shirt, was on spring break in Panama City, Florida. An African American woman ran up and chided him: “You’re a traitor.” The same year that the video surfaced, The Hunting Ground, a documentary about campus rape, singled out SAE. One section left a lasting impression on viewers. In the movie, a narrator asks women on various campuses what SAE stands for. “Sexual Assault Expected,” they say again and again.
For almost a decade, SAE was the deadliest fraternity. From 2005 through 2013, at least ten people died in incidents related to SAE, mostly from drinking and hazing, and more than any other fraternity. (During the same time span, more than sixty died at all fraternities.) As a result, SAE paid the highest costs for liability insurance of any fraternity. Universities have disciplined more than 130 SAE chapters over the past five years, some repeatedly. More than thirty chapters have been shut down since 2013.
The leaders of SAE know they are a legal judgment away from oblivion. “We’ve faced the greatest challenge since the Civil War,” Steven Churchill, its national president, told undergraduates at the start of the leadership cruise. As the members came aboard, he could see the wide-eyed stares of other passengers, especially the parents fearing for the safety of their teenage daughters in a sea of men wearing Greek letters. “When people who are on this ship find out we are a fraternity, they will be alarmed,” Churchill, a former state legislator from Iowa, said. “When they hear it’s SAE, they will be even more concerned. Be a true gentleman. Be mindful of what you say and do. If you’re not careful, it can spread like a cancer.”
In other words, no matter its power, influence, and storied history, the American college fraternity faces an existential choice. It can perpetuate the ugliest chapters of American history. Or it can turn the page and once again reflect the country’s highest aspirations.
PART ONE
VICE
1
DRINKING GAMES
“Whose Self-Control Is Equal to All Emergencies”
Relaxing after a couple of tough exams on a cold and rainy February night in 2011, George Desdunes and his fraternity buddy drank straight Jameson Irish Whiskey out of plastic cups. Before they knew it, Desdunes and Kyle Morton had polished off the better part of a bottle in half an hour. For most, downing nine ounces of the eighty-proof liquor that fast would be quite a feat. By Morton’s accounting, it amounted to the equivalent of six or seven mixed drinks apiece, enough to bring their blood-alcohol level to twice the legal limit for driving. Desdunes and Morton were just warming up. In Morton’s bedroom, the brothers from Cornell University were “pre-gaming,” a routine practice on an ordinary Thursday night at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house. At 10:30 p.m., Morton, a junior from Scarsdale, New York, headed downstairs for the night’s main event, a beer-pong tournament, a test of alcohol tolerance and hand-eye coordination that would last until the early hours of the next morning. Desdunes skipped beer pong that evening because he had better plans. The nineteen-year-old sophomore, who had a fake ID, was getting ready to hit a bar or two in Collegetown, the nighttime haven for Cornell students in Ithaca, New York. He hoped to meet up with his girlfriend, an outdoorsy young woman who had just graduated in January 2011 and was preparing for a career on Wall Street.
“What are you up to tonight?” Desdunes texted her at 11:00 p.m.
“Dunbar’s,” she replied, naming a dive bar featuring a $6 “Group Therapy” drink special—a pitcher of beer and a carafe of shots of vodka, triple sec, and lime.
Desdunes said he’d probably hit Dino’s, another local hangout. Or maybe Level B, a basement dance club and bar known for its $18 “fishbowl,” a half bottle of vodka, or sixteen shots. They’d meet up later. Now, before he headed out, all Desdunes needed was a few more drinks—a second round of pre-gaming. About 11:30 p.m., Desdunes hauled a jug of Captain Morgan into another bedroom, where he and three other SAE brothers mixed rum-and-Pepsis strong enough to knock out a sailor on shore leave. Each plastic cup had two or three shots of liquor. Within half an hour, the brothers knocked back three apiece. They averaged seven drinks per guy, one of them figured.
Desdunes and his Cornell fraternity brothers worked hard and played hard, as college students liked to say—and, by play, they meant drink. On the first floor, the bar and the library sat side by side in their ivy-covered mansion of a frat house. Built in 1915, the SAE chapter house at Cornell had been dubbed “Hillcrest,” evoking the grandeur of an English country home with its Tudor-style architecture and view of nearby Cayuga Lake. It was a sprawling residence, able to house ninety men. Among its illustrious members had been Eamon McEneaney, Cornell class of 1977, considered the greatest lacrosse player of his generation, later becoming a senior vice president at Wall Street’s Cantor Fitzgerald. He died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, while saving the lives of sixty-three people. More recently, two members had been elected to the Ithaca City Council while undergraduates, and still others belonged to the prestigious Quill and Dagger secret honor society. Nominating the chapter for an award the year before, Travis Apgar, the associate dean overseeing Greek life at Cornell, had called Sigma Alpha Epsilon “an example of what a fraternity and its members can and should be.”
The current crop of SAE members,
including future financiers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, liked to think they were cut from the same cloth. They vied for top grades and summer internships with the same gusto they had for beer pong. Regardless of the damage to their livers and brain cells, many were fine physical specimens and world-class varsity athletes, demonstrating the competitive drive that would also be prized on Wall Street. Eric Barnum, the chapter’s “Eminent Archon,” or president, played varsity golf; Connor Pardell rode on the polo team; Max Haskin played varsity tennis; and E. J. Williams was a wide receiver on the football team.
Lean and muscular, with a wide, open smile, Desdunes was a natural fit in the chapter. A graduate of Berkeley Carroll, a private school in Brooklyn, he had been on the varsity soccer and swim teams. In one way, though, he was unusual among the brothers and their country-club sports. An African American in a historically white fraternity, he was the child of a single mother, a Haitian immigrant who worked as a hospital aide. Now, he hoped SAE’s prestige, along with an Ivy League degree, would ensure his success. With dreams of being a doctor, he was taking the notoriously demanding science and math courses of the pre-med track.
For all his ambition, Desdunes slept with a jug of Jose Cuervo tequila on his dresser. Even at a hard-partying chapter, he stood out. His roommate, Matthew Picket, noticed that Desdunes would drink heavily three or four times a week. By heavily, he didn’t mean five drinks in a sitting—as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines binge drinking. Picket meant the kind of bender that ended with the loss of consciousness and, in some cases, dignity. Desdunes had been known to tip over while seated at a bar. “He probably drinks more than he should, but he’s usually OK to get home on his own,” Picket remembered later. “He would be someone that you would check on in a bar, for example. If he was keeled over, you wanted to make sure he was OK.” One time, Desdunes urinated by accident on the door of another brother’s room; another time, on a Sony PlayStation 3 system. “I almost expected to hear that George would be in the ER from drinking too much,” Picket said. “If you continue habits like that, your luck has to run out.”
If his fraternity brothers were alarmed, they didn’t do much about it. Maybe it was a matter of glass houses. Who didn’t have trouble remembering the previous night? “I mean, I did almost the same thing,” said Picket, who later listed single-malt scotch as an interest on his LinkedIn profile. As much as vodka made a screwdriver, drinking defined the Cornell SAE house. That night and into the next morning, pledges—provisional members seeking full acceptance—were on call as “sober drivers.” Like chauffeurs tending high-rollers at a casino, they served at the pleasure of older members who could call on newbies for rides at any hour. In 2006, Cornell disciplined the chapter after discovering a written pledge guide that suggested the role alcohol played in a freshman’s SAE initiation. Among other things, new members were expected to clean vomit out of cars. Along with their driving duties, they could also be called on as janitors for those who couldn’t hold their liquor. Pledges were full-service alcohol enablers, pressed into service by the fraternity.
Members knew firsthand the dangers of bingeing on alcohol. In September, an underage woman who had been drinking at SAE was hospitalized. The campus police had pulled over a car and found her moaning in the back seat, her dress pulled down over one shoulder. The Cornell judicial board sentenced SAE to six weeks of social probation to “educate the chapter of the dangers associated with over-intoxication.” After the chapter was busted, Barnum, its president, had promised SAE’s general counsel that every member would sign a statement agreeing to abide by the fraternity’s policies about drinking. In exchange, the national organization dropped its $100-per-member fine for supplying the alcohol to the underage woman who was hospitalized. Five months later, as Desdunes prepared for Collegetown, much of what the men were doing that night violated SAE’s “risk-management” policies, as well as Cornell rules and New York State law. They were playing drinking games, providing alcohol to minors, offering alcohol from a “common source” with no controls, and serving the already drunk. SAE spelled out its expectations in a manual called “Minerva’s Shield,” named after SAE’s patron Roman goddess of wisdom. The manual suggested a deeper meaning to its rules; they existed “so may you through wisdom learn to subdue the baser passions and instincts of your nature.”
But if the men had read Minerva’s Shield and agreed to honor it, they certainly didn’t show it. The familiar tropes of fraternity drinking culture persisted, which meant that their private behavior continued to show little resemblance to their public pronouncements. It was a bit like Casablanca; if word got out, all would be shocked, shocked to find out there was underage drinking at SAE. But even a casual visitor would have noticed the first-floor bar and the beer-pong table. SAE brothers were also supposed to be on the lookout for dangerous drinking, referring members to counseling and acting, in the words of the fraternity, as their “brother’s keeper.”
Instead, the chapter seemed to revel in Desdunes’s drinking. Members shared stories about his exploits and challenged him to a beer-chugging contest. One day, perhaps, Desdunes’s tolerance for alcohol could become inspiration for the next pledge class, kids still in high school who didn’t remember John Belushi in Animal House or Will Ferrell in Old School. It was all summed up in Desdunes’s nickname, one of those signposts of frat culture like beer funnels and hangovers. One pledge was known as “Tuna Tunnel,” slang for vagina, because the brothers considered him timid. Another was known as “Cornhole Compressor,” a reference to anal sex, a preoccupation of frat life. Desdunes’s nickname reflected one of his pastimes. The brothers called him “Blackout George.”
AT AMERICAN COLLEGES, particularly elite ones, the drinking and buffoonery of fraternity men can seem mystifying. Why would such ambitious students choose to pursue minors in humiliation, vomit, and semi-consciousness? Each time a chapter house gets busted for underage drinking or worse, a national fraternity will say its chapter has strayed from its values of character and leadership. The explanation rings hollow for good reason. The two seemingly irreconcilable strands—debauchery and ambition—have for two centuries been the key ingredients of Greek life. Even if the guys wanted to be sober—and most don’t—disentangling high times and high ideals would require a reimagining of one of America’s oldest subcultures. Drinking is so deeply associated with fraternities that many can’t conceive of chapter houses without alcohol.
Consider the precursor of the Cornell SAE house and the American fraternity: Phi Beta Kappa. In December 1776, high-minded men at William and Mary, the first public university in America, founded the literary and academic society. Its initials stood for its motto, “Love of learning is the guide of life.” It’s worth noting, too, that its founders met in a bar, a famous one, the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia. Phi Beta Kappa, of course, developed into an honorary scholarship organization, the epitome of academic achievement.
By the nineteenth century, however, the impulse behind Phi Beta Kappa turned into something that looked more like the modern fraternity. In 1825, students at Union College in Schenectady, New York, were tired of studying theology and the dusty Latin and Greek manuscripts of early nineteenth-century universities. They wanted to become movers and shakers, not preachers and monks. This feeling led some Phi Beta Kappans to band together to form what is considered the first “social fraternity,” the Kappa Alpha Society. Members of social fraternities rebelled by reading American literature and poetry. They also sought the friendship and loyalty of their peers, so they could start successful businesses and law firms. Animating hidebound institutions with a kind of adolescent energy, Greek-letter organizations became a linchpin of what Roger L. Geiger, the Pennsylvania State University historian of higher education, called the “collegiate revolution” and its focus on extracurricular activities and the liberal arts. Colleges promoted the social skills and knowledge necessary for entrée into the upper middle class. In t
hat way, fraternities helped create the American-style college experience.
At the same time, these societies immediately attracted men whose heavy drinking overshadowed their other accomplishments. Fraternity members, like college students across the country, were chafing at what they considered tyrannical rules governing their behavior. College presidents imposed curfews and fought against gambling and liquor. Students even rioted. These conflicts with college administrations intensified fraternities’ secrecy and they became places where men could indulge in their favorite vices. Drinking became central to the identity of the fraternity man. Late nineteenth-century accounts of Yale’s fraternity-dominated social life expressed admiration for the “well-known drinking bout” and the “the noble and hearty” souls who enjoy “a little of the fiery flavor of sin.” At Ohio’s Miami University, future US president Benjamin Harrison led the Phi Delta Theta fraternity and complained of the “drinking and spreeing” of two of the fraternity’s most popular men, including his own roommate. In 1851, these two horrified the community when they arrived drunk at a meeting of the Young Men’s Temperance Society. Phi Delta Theta kicked them out, but other fraternities quickly welcomed them.
SAE’s birth in 1856 reflected this mix of high ideals and low behavior. Its founder, Noble Leslie DeVotie, was a Phi Beta Kappa–style scholar. Pale and with brooding gray eyes, weighing only 120 pounds, he was the University of Alabama’s valedictorian and a scholar of French and English literature. After attending Princeton Theological Seminary, he became a minister like his father. But DeVotie’s fellow founders were mediocre students and troublemakers. The University of Alabama’s president, Landon Garland, hated fraternities and did all he could to stamp them out. He once told trustees that they “tended only toward evil” and promoted the drinking, fighting, and vandalism that was scandalizing the college’s hometown of Tuscaloosa. Even the symbols DeVotie chose for SAE reflected a duality: Minerva, the Roman name for Athena, the goddess of wisdom, represented its respect for the intellect; its other symbol, the lion, reflected an untamed spirit.
True Gentlemen Page 2
