After watching the trial, speaking with Gabriela and her parents, and poring over evidence that had never fully been disclosed, I saw how the realities of race and class influenced its outcome. Although Gabriela’s family found her attackers’ punishment less severe than they had hoped, it far surpassed the punishment after a similar assault the next year. At Stanford, Brock Turner, the white star swimmer who assaulted the unconscious woman outside the Kappa Alpha fraternity house, was sentenced to six months in county jail; Ethan and Chaz, five years in prison. The California decision sparked outrage from those who said it reflected the privilege of wealthy men and the minimization of sexual assault. The two cases illustrate how white male defendants can pay a lower price than African Americans for similar crimes.
Race and class may have also partly explained why the Johns Hopkins crime, alone among recently reported SAE assaults, resulted in convictions. Gabriela’s attackers were easily identified because they were outsiders, working-class African Americans who stood out at the chapter house. That night, they made up nearly all of the black guests at the fraternity. When Gabriela described the suspects as skinny African Americans with beards, the police could quickly zero in on suspects and get warrants for DNA tests. If they had been white college students, narrowing down suspects at a party of one hundred would have been more challenging, especially if fraternity brothers didn’t volunteer information. The search for the white attacker at the Los Angeles SAE party that same weekend went nowhere. I had to ask myself: What if the men who attacked Gabriela had been white? What if they had been Johns Hopkins students? What if they had been members of SAE?
4
THE SAE LAW
“Who Does Not Flatter Wealth, Cringe Before Power”
I an Gove’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter was in serious trouble. Gove, the son of a sailor in the Merchant Marine, wasn’t about to back away from a fight to save it. On a Tuesday evening in November 2012, he sat in a conference room facing a panel of classmates and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Gove, who was twenty-one years old and chapter president, planned to go to law school to become a litigator. Now, the college senior had the chance to test his mettle. Usually, he drove a pickup truck and chewed tobacco. On this day, he wore a suit and tie as he confronted the student-conduct board hearing. The chapter faced charges of hazing, underage drinking, and violating a ban on social events. Overseeing the prosecution was an assistant dean, an educator with a PhD who administered the school’s honor code and wanted SAE shut down.
It looked like an unfair fight, but Gove had a secret weapon: One of the sharper legal minds in the state of North Carolina sat by his side. His associate was a trial lawyer, state senator, and sometime law professor named Thom Goolsby. A leading Wilmington citizen, Goolsby was an SAE alumnus from his days at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Known for his caustic wit, conservative Republican politics, and dapper style, he was a man who could pull off a purple seersucker suit with white shoes. He didn’t think much of the proceeding or the way his fraternity brothers were being treated. “This is a kangaroo court,” he sniffed to Gove. The eminently qualified SAE legal adviser whispered in Gove’s ear as if they were co-counsel.
“As a reminder, Senator Goolsby, you may not speak or address the board, but you are allowed to talk with the respondents,” the student chairing the tribunal had said at the opening of the hearing.
Even in silence, Goolsby’s presence spoke volumes to administrators in the room. UNC–Wilmington counted on state funding. Not only had Goolsby chaired the state legislature’s judiciary committee, he sat on the finance and higher education panels as well. Outside the hearing room waited another state-capital power broker, Parks Griffin, one of the chapter’s founding members. Griffin ran a local insurance agency and also raised money for Pat McCrory, North Carolina’s Republican governor.
That evening, during the more than three-hour hearing, Gove did Griffin and Goolsby proud with his aggressive representation of SAE. Every chance he could get, Gove objected to the proceedings as biased against the fraternity. Gove asked members to disregard e-mails from a next-door neighbor who had dutifully chronicled a series of late-night keg parties that fall. He saw it as outrageous that he couldn’t cross-examine the neighbor, whose integrity he soundly impugned.
“These are college kids living next to a neighbor who obviously doesn’t want college kids living next to him—which is why he fabricated this testimony that he’s not here to defend,” argued Gove in his low, flat baritone that signaled confidence and command.
At times, Gove had to be nimble, as he was acting as both defense attorney and defendant. A board member asked him why he had lied to the police when the officer had busted a party at an SAE house. Gove had been asked if it was a fraternity party, and he had said no.
“That’s actually a form of profiling by police officers,” said Gove. “It’s like someone asking if I was Jewish when they were out on the scene. Yeah, I said, ‘No.’ I shouldn’t have answered it. That doesn’t pertain to the officer’s investigation.… That also shows a very biased tendency from the officer. We have to be cautious of when, you know, you deal with police profiling.”
Gove exuded confidence, even though the dean’s evidence seemed overwhelming. The ill-fated evening had begun at the Cape Fear Men’s Club, the haunt of generations of politicians and business leaders in Wilmington. The state’s oldest private club, known for its extensive collection of maritime memorabilia, faced periodic criticism over its lack of black and female members. On a Wednesday evening that September 2012, the chapter had gathered at the club to initiate eighteen pledges. After the so-called pinning ceremony, the men were still wearing ties and jackets with their fraternity badges when they stopped for slices at Fat Tony’s Pizza. They then headed to an off-campus house for a celebration with sorority women. The fraternity leaders directed the young men to drink only from a cooler with strong liquor inside, a pledge later told the university. He suspected it was “PJ,” the term often used to describe grain alcohol mixed with Kool-Aid. After a neighbor complained about the party, the police arrived around 11:00 p.m. One eighteen-year-old pledge mistook a police cruiser for a taxi and tried to climb inside, then vomited in nearby bushes. An officer reported seeing men screaming at pledges in coats and ties who were doing push-ups. Later that evening, police found a drunk pledge, who had left the party, passed out in the bathroom of Wilmington’s Browncoat Pub. He became the third underage SAE recruit to be hospitalized for drinking after fraternity events that year. Pending an investigation, the college banned the chapter from holding parties.
The next month, SAE was cited for violating the ban by holding a toga party mixer with the Phi Mu sorority. The dean’s office asked a Phi Mu member to testify. Before the hearing, SAE’s vice president contacted her and told her to deny it was a mixer, even though she had signed a document saying it was. He told her to call it instead an informal “grab-a-date,” a category of party where women each pick a man and aren’t restricted to a single fraternity.
“This has the potential to completely kick us off campus,” the vice president texted her. “We need you to say you just filled it [the form she signed registering the mixer] out too quickly because you didn’t think it mattered and that you intended to have a Phi Mu grab a date. There were other organizations there other than SAE. I know this is a lot to ask but our fraternity could potentially hang in the balance of what you say.”
The dean’s office seemed to have unassailable evidence of fraternity wrongdoing: documentation of witness tampering, police testimony that included a seventeen-minute dash-cam video of the drunken underage pledges, and a signed statement from a pledge about the cooler full of mysterious liquor. Many a defense lawyer would counsel his client to plead guilty. But Gove had no such plan. Neither did Senator Thom Goolsby or Parks Griffin, who would be chairing the governor’s inauguration committee. When they were finished, the administration and the college’s
own president would learn the cost of tangling with SAE.
COLLEGE ADMINISTRATORS WHO try to crack down on fraternities find themselves confronting a determined adversary that is well financed, politically connected, and capable of frustrating the most dogged investigators. Even college presidents have reason to fear for their jobs. Both on campus and through their trade organizations and Washington political-action committee, fraternities have successfully fought measures to curb drinking, hazing, and sexual assault. The battles are so bitter partly because they reflect America’s cultural divide. Decades of studies have found that Greek-letter organizations attract conservative students on college campuses, whereas college professors are more likely to be liberal. Reflecting this ideological clash, fraternities chafe at restrictions on individual behavior in the belief that young men are best left to their own devices to govern themselves. Their mostly white, male members can view themselves as an aggrieved group, oppressed by what they consider to be the overbearing regulation of “politically correct” universities.
In a country divided so starkly by political orientation—into Republican “red state” and Democratic “blue state” territory—college administrators and fraternity leaders often find themselves speaking different languages. Consider how Gove compared himself to a member of a minority group who had been the victim of police profiling; as they pressed their case, Gove and his alumni backers would increasingly employ the vocabulary of the American civil-rights movement that fraternities once so firmly rejected. The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has identified a defining characteristic of the American right’s definition of freedom. It focuses on the “freedom to”—such as the freedom to bear arms or ride without a motorcycle helmet. Fraternities often cite this kind of liberty—to choose their friends and to socialize—without interference from those they consider to be hostile college authorities. (To an outsider, it recalled the 1980s Beastie Boys lyrics: “You gotta fight for your right to party.”) In Hochschild’s view, progressives tend to stress a different view of freedom—the “freedom from,” for example, pollution, racial bias, or sexual discrimination and assault. Universities, then, have a bias toward regulation. They are more concerned about students’ freedom from the dangerous environment some fraternities create.
The solution, on both sides, would seem obvious: secession. Colleges could ban fraternities or refuse to recognize them. Fraternities could operate as truly private separate organizations, free from disciplinary control. But universities and Greek organizations often need each other. Fraternities are heavily invested in their colleges and communities. Fraternity and sorority alumni are more likely to give to their colleges and are larger lifetime donors than other graduates. Especially at cash-strapped public universities, colleges rely on their housing as quasi-official dorms and would have to come up with an expensive alternative. Fraternities and sororities, which house 250,000 undergraduates, are the second-largest student landlords in the United States after colleges. At the same time, a college’s blessing helps a fraternity recruit dues-paying members that keep their houses and national organizations solvent. Chapters benefit financially from colleges’ endorsement, their free advertisement on websites, the complimentary office space on campus, support from administrators—and, in places such as Indiana and Alabama, direct taxpayer support, by offering public land for their houses. For all their power, fraternities are often scrambling for funding for their houses because only a relative handful of alumni volunteer or donate money. Like a couple stuck in a bad marriage, fraternities and universities both need—and resent—each other.
The dynamic is even more complex because national fraternity organizations, whose small headquarters can each be responsible for hundreds of chapters, rely on colleges to police members. As a result, the umbrella group often finds itself at odds with undergraduate members and local alumni. On campus, college deans are a national organization’s first line of defense against extreme behavior that could kill members, as well as subject a fraternity to years of costly and potentially institution-ending litigation. The year before the three Wilmington SAE pledges were hospitalized for intoxication, George Desdunes, the Cornell University SAE brother, died of alcohol poisoning. Earlier that same year, Jack Culolias, the SAE member at Arizona State University, was found dead in a river after a night of drinking. The next year, Joseph Wiederrick died under a bridge of hypothermia after drinking at an SAE party at the University of Idaho. To prevent such tragedies and protect itself from catastrophic financial losses, the national SAE organization promotes rules against underage drinking. In the UNC–Wilmington hearing, the college was, in effect, trying to enforce SAE’s own rules. In fact, Blaine Ayers, SAE’s executive director, backed the school’s disciplinary efforts, saying the Wilmington members had “tarnished the good name of the fraternity.” But the chapter pressed on with its fight anyway.
Local alumni can employ rough tactics. In 2002, David Fiacco, the University of Maine administrator overseeing judicial affairs, suspended its SAE chapter for a year for underage drinking at a party. Citing “high-risk student behavior” and a history of similar violations, Fiacco ordered the chapter to undergo alcohol education, perform 750 hours of community service, and ban drinking in its chapter house. The chapter’s prominent alumni decided to fight back. They included Greg Jamison, an insurance executive who chaired the University of Maine Alumni Association, and James Dill, a University of Maine pest-management specialist who later became a state senator. The alumni hired an attorney, Larry Willey Jr., a former Bangor mayor, who retained a private investigator to look into Fiacco’s background for evidence of bias against fraternities. The investigator tracked down Fiacco’s 1998 conviction for driving while intoxicated in Colorado, as well as a restraining order taken out by a former girlfriend, according to court records. The group, none of whom responded to requests for comment, arranged to have the information mailed in a plain manila envelope from Colorado to the University of Maine System Board of Trustees, the university president, the campus newspaper, and the Bangor Daily News. “Is this honestly the best qualified candidate that the University of Maine could find for the Office of Judicial Affairs?” they asked in an unsigned letter. The newspapers didn’t print the material, and the university stood by Fiacco. The judicial officer later sued SAE over its tactics, alleging the intentional infliction of emotional distress. In his complaint, Fiacco said he had become depressed and withdrawn and had to receive counseling. A judge dismissed his case because the information was true and Fiacco was a public figure. Fiacco, who retained his role, said the episode reflected poorly on the chapter’s values. “If you’re going to say it, put your name to it,” Fiacco told me. “To have someone mail something anonymously from Colorado back here in Maine, it’s pretty shady.”
Frustrated with disciplining individual chapters, colleges often target all their fraternities, and, when they do, they run into a powerful roadblock: the North-American Interfraternity Conference, the trade group representing about seventy historically white fraternities. Founded in 1909, it works with the main sorority trade group and other Greek organizations, as well as sympathetic politicians in Washington and state capitals across the country. Its leader was Pete Smithhisler, a bespectacled, gray-haired Midwesterner who choked up when giving a speech about the day he was invited to join Lambda Chi Alpha as an undergraduate at Western Illinois University in the 1980s. “I knew those men, and I knew I wanted to be like them,” said Smithhisler, who became the Interfraternity Conference’s president in 2007. He spent most of his professional life promoting and defending fraternities, which he called “the premier leadership experience on college campuses.”
Smithhisler’s Interfraternity Conference fought any college trying to restrict recruitment. Some higher-education leaders and public-health experts promote bans on recruiting freshmen, especially in the first semester. First-year students make up about 40 percent of fraternity-related deaths. It’s no mystery why. Fraternity members d
rink more than any other group on campus, and the youngest students, away from home for the first time, are the most likely to binge drink and be victims of hazing. Aaron White, who directs college and underage drinking prevention research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, told me: “The first couple of months of school are a particularly vulnerable time for students with regard to heavy drinking. Delaying rush makes a lot of sense.”
But Princeton, Duke, and Vanderbilt are among only eighty of eight hundred campuses with fraternities that require the organizations to defer the recruitment of freshmen, typically for a semester or longer. The Interfraternity Conference has successfully opposed deferred recruitment at dozens of other campuses. Fraternities, of course, stand to lose one-fourth of their revenue if freshmen can’t join. The conference also argues that restrictions deprive freshmen of opportunities for leadership, career networking, and charitable work. As Smithhisler once said, “It would be a travesty if the fraternity experience were not available for the development of these young men.” At the University of Colorado at Boulder, the conference backed fraternities’ decision to operate without university recognition, rather than accept deferred recruitment and live-in chapter advisers. The conference threatened to sue the University of Central Florida when it instituted a recruitment moratorium because of excessive drinking. The college lifted the ban.
At times, the pressure can build behind the scenes. In 2010, California Polytechnic State University banned the recruitment of newly arrived freshmen after the alcohol-poisoning death of Carson Starkey, a first-year pledge, during an SAE initiation ritual. Almost immediately, the Interfraternity Conference sprang into action. Conference officials e-mailed and met with administrators. They even paid the $8,000 bill for an assessment of Greek life. The report, prepared by fraternity executives, college administrators, and a social worker, was damning. It called recruitment “dehumanizing and superficial” and said alcohol was “a, and perhaps THE, defining factor” of Greek life. Nevertheless, the report called for an end to deferred recruitment, saying it ran “counter to a student’s right to choose.” A new president and vice president for student affairs—both fraternity men—supported the argument, even though the student newspaper editorialized that the school was “opening the door to more trouble.” Carson Starkey’s parents, who ran a nonprofit group to raise awareness about alcohol poisoning, also opposed the move. “I find it troubling that they would be advocating against our efforts to try to save lives,” his mother, Julia Starkey, said of fraternities.
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