True Gentlemen

by John Hechinger

  More recently, the Interfraternity Conference, along with college alumni, sought to block another way to change fraternities: forcing them to accept women, partly to reduce the risk of excessive drinking and sexual assault. In 2012, Trinity College, a well-regarded liberal arts institution in Hartford, Connecticut, took aim at single-sex fraternities, saying they were part of a “hedonistic” culture that hurt academics and endangered students. In recent years at Trinity, two drunk pledges had suffered spinal cord injuries, and scores of others had been hospitalized for excessive drinking. Under President James Jones, the college cracked down on events with alcohol, banned pledging, and said Greek houses must recruit co-educational pledge classes by 2016. Fraternity alumni revolted by withholding donations and raising money for a lawsuit. Many worked on Wall Street or in influential corporate jobs and had been among the school’s most loyal supporters.

  “I’ve been contributing for many years; I’m not going to anymore,” said Hans Becherer, a 1957 graduate and former chairman of Deere and Company, the world’s largest agricultural-equipment company. “It’s a very nice liberal view that Jimmy Jones is pushing—that everybody is going to be happy in a new social organization. I think people like to join with similar-minded kids.”

  Not long after, Jones announced he would be leaving a year earlier than expected, in 2014. His successor as Trinity’s president, Joanne Berger Sweeney, dropped the plan to require co-ed fraternities.

  Similarly, Trinity’s Connecticut neighbor, Wesleyan University, that same year mandated that its two remaining all-male fraternities accept women by 2017. The school required all undergraduates to live in school-sanctioned housing. Amid concern about sexual assault, the Wesleyan Student Assembly had conducted a survey. It revealed that 47 percent of students felt that fraternity party spaces were less safe than elsewhere on campus—and of those, 81 percent said co-education would make the spaces safer. A student had sued Wesleyan in 2012 after she said she was raped at a fraternity house. Sexual-assault concerns helped convince President Michael Roth to require co-education. He also saw a broader need to remake Greek life for a modern college. “All of these Greek organizations excluded African Americans; all of them excluded Jews; many excluded Catholics, at some point in their history,” Roth said. “And then they changed. This seems to me like that kind of change.” The fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon sued, claiming it had been deprived of rights enjoyed by other organizations on campus. With the case pending, the group has been operating without a house. “I think it’s a really tragic loss for the campus, but also for my brothers,” fraternity vice president Will Croughan told a reporter.

  As mentioned in Chapter 3, Harvard University’s leaders also want all their campus groups to be co-ed. Along with fraternities, the school is targeting its all-male “final clubs,” such as the Porcellian, which counted President Theodore Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as members. In 1984, Harvard stopped recognizing final clubs, yet they continue to exert a powerful hold on campus social life, as do fraternities. After complaints about the 2016 decision to forbid members of single-sex clubs from holding leadership positions, Harvard said it would re-examine the policy. But in July 2017, a faculty committee advocated a more decisive step: a ban. The professors’ policy would prohibit Harvard students from joining “final clubs, fraternities or sororities, or other similar private, exclusionary social organizations.” The school would phase out the organizations, eliminating them entirely by 2022. The groups promote “gender segregation and discrimination” and “go against the educational mission and principles espoused by Harvard University,” the committee said. To take effect, Harvard’s president would ultimately have to endorse the controversial plan.

  As at Trinity and Wesleyan, the school faced a backlash from the Interfraternity Conference and other Greek organizations, as well as many Harvard alumni, professors, and students, who said the college has violated undergraduate rights. “I sincerely hope that the administration will not set the precedent of creating a ‘blacklist’ of organizations that students cannot join,” said Charles Storey, graduate board president of the Porcellian. “Such McCarthyism is a dangerous road that would be a blow to academic freedom, the spirit of tolerance, and the long tradition of free association on campus.” He also said that admitting women would increase the risk of sexual assault. He later apologized and resigned his Porcellian post after outrage over that remark.

  Fraternities have many allies in this fight. Federal law enshrines Greek life. In 1972, the landmark Title IX civil-rights law endangered single-sex groups. It prohibited sexual discrimination at colleges receiving federal money. Two years later, Senator Birch Bayh, Title IX’s author, introduced a law specifically exempting fraternities and sororities. The Indiana Democrat, while fighting for women’s rights, was also a fraternity man. He had joined Alpha Tau Omega as an undergraduate at Purdue University. Greek organizations, unknown to most outside their world, hold extraordinary sway in the federal government, as I was to discover during a trip to Washington, DC.

  IN THE SHADOW of Capitol Hill, taxis and limousines arrived to drop off guests for cocktails at the elegant Liaison Hotel. Flanked by two American flags, members of Congress posed for photos with fraternity brothers and sorority sisters. The congressmen were the honored guests of the Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee, or FratPAC, which bills itself as the largest PAC representing college students and higher education in America. Each spring, hundreds of fresh-faced undergraduates storm Congress to lobby for fraternities and start a lifetime of networking for their own careers. The day culminates with this $500-a-plate cocktail reception and fund-raiser. On this Wednesday evening in April 2016, their host was FratPAC’s executive director, Kevin O’Neill, a partner at the Washington law firm Arnold and Porter. O’Neill, a member of Lambda Chi Alpha who graduated from Syracuse University in 1992, had been the school mascot, Otto the Orange. Now, he name-checked rival schools’ teams to get the crowd excited during the cocktail reception as politicians grabbed the microphone and held forth on the power of Greek life. Bradley Byrne, a US congressman from Alabama, proudly recited his fraternity credentials. At Duke University, he had joined Phi Delta Theta. Two of his sons were now members. A third joined the Kappa Alpha Order. His daughter was a Chi Omega and his wife, an SAE “little sister.” His chief of staff, Alex Schriver, was a Delta Tau Delta at Auburn University before he took the DC job at twenty-five. “He hired one of our star students,” O’Neill bragged to the crowd about Schriver. “He’s the youngest chief of staff in the House of Representatives.”

  Richard Hudson, a congressman from North Carolina, also testified to the power of the fraternity network. He had joined the Kappa Alpha Order at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he became student body president. After college, his KA brothers worked on his political campaign. His chapter treasurer, who became a corporate executive specializing in accounting, handled the finances. “I’m eager to work with you,” Hudson told the crowd. “It’s important to be here in town and network like you’ve been doing. Keep those business cards and stay in touch.”

  FratPAC magnifies the formidable clout of fraternities in Washington. As noted in the introduction to this book, 39 percent of senators in the 113th US Congress, and one-fourth of US representatives, belonged to Greek organizations—as well as one-third of all Supreme Court justices and about 40 percent of US presidents. SAE hasn’t had a president since McKinley, but it has had its share of kingmakers. Bill Brock, a 1953 graduate of Washington and Lee University, was a former US senator from Tennessee who became the Republican National Committee chairman credited as the architect of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory. In the 1990s, another RNC chairman, Haley Barbour, who had joined SAE at the University of Mississippi, helped engineer the first Republican takeover of the US House and Senate in forty years.

  During the FratPAC evening at the Liaison, the conservative Republican bent of Greek life was on full displ
ay. The two Southern speakers Byrne and Hudson were both Republicans. Byrne could trace his ancestors in Mobile to the 1780s. The National Journal called Hudson the twelfth-most-conservative member of the 113th Congress, and the National Right to Life and the National Rifle Association both gave him top ratings. Since 2005 when it was founded, FratPAC has given almost two-thirds of its more than $1.3 million in campaign contributions to Republican lawmakers.

  FratPAC’s legislative goals represent the fundamental contradiction at the heart of its agenda: it wants public support without government scrutiny. On the day I visited its annual fund-raiser, FratPAC’s priority was passage of the Collegiate Housing and Infrastructure Act, which would let Greek organizations use tax-deductible donations to build and renovate chapter houses, not just for libraries and study halls. Congress has estimated the law would cost taxpayers $148 million over ten years, although fraternities maintain their housing saves public universities from issuing billions of dollars in debt to finance new dorms. Representative Pete Sessions, an alumnus of Pi Kappa Alpha’s chapter at Southwestern University, first sponsored the tax proposal. The Texas Republican, who received $42,000 from FratPAC, had more than one hundred co-sponsors. In an early round, its sponsor had been Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican and former vice-presidential candidate who later became Speaker of the House. FratPAC funneled $42,500 to Ryan, who belonged to Delta Tau Delta as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. Now these politicians were joined by eager, impeccably dressed fraternity men and sorority women who stormed their local members of Congress to beg for a tax break.

  Two of the fraternity lobby’s other priorities include ensuring the survival of single-sex campus organizations and opposing what it considered ill-advised plans to rein in student misbehavior. In 2012, FratPAC bore down on US representative Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat and former elementary school principal. Wilson, known for her flamboyant cowboy hats, called herself the “Haze Buster.” She had backed a Florida anti-hazing law in the state legislature and had proposed a national anti-hazing law. It would revoke federal financial aid from anyone found responsible by a school disciplinary board for hazing. She appeared in Washington with the mother of Harrison Kowiak, who had been beaten to death during a Theta Chi hazing ritual at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina. O’Neill, the FratPAC executive director, reached out to Wilson, as did some college administrators and members of African American fraternities. The lawmaker had belonged to the historically black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, and FratPAC had donated $1,000 to her campaign. O’Neill maintained that hazing was better handled by local police because college disciplinary boards don’t offer enough legal protections, such as a right to a lawyer. Wilson never introduced her bill.

  The fraternity lobby had been even more worried about the due-process rights of college men in sexual-assault cases. Although others, including prominent law-school professors at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, shared its concern, FratPAC took its zealous defense too far for even many of its own undergraduate members. In 2015, three Republican lawmakers introduced the innocuously named “Safe Campus Act.” Its most controversial provision would have required the victims of sexual assault to report the allegations to law enforcement before requesting a campus hearing. Two of its sponsors were beneficiaries of FratPAC, Sessions and US representative Kay Granger, a Texas Republican who had received $10,000 in contributions. To make the case, the Greek movement formed the Safe Campus Coalition. It was made up of the two main fraternity trade groups—the Interfraternity Conference and the National Panhellenic Conference, which represents sororities—as well as three national fraternities, Kappa Alpha Order, Alpha Tau Omega, and Sigma Nu. The coalition spent $250,000 lobbying for the bill. It hired FratPAC’s O’Neill and Trent Lott, a Sigma Nu member and the former Republican US senator from Mississippi.

  The bill provoked a firestorm. US senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Claire McCaskill of Missouri both excoriated Greek organizations for backing the measure. Democrats and prominent advocates for sexual-assault victims, they were also sorority women. Gillibrand had been a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at Dartmouth; McCaskill, a member of Kappa Alpha Theta at the University of Missouri. Each had received $2,500 from FratPAC. Many individual members of sororities and fraternities, not to mention groups representing universities, also considered the proposal wrongheaded. Eight national sororities ultimately broke with the trade groups and dropped their support of the bill. “We believe our sisters who are survivors should have choices in how, when and to whom they go for support or to report the crime,” Alpha Phi wrote in a letter to its members. The national fraternity groups ultimately abandoned the bill, too. Amid concern over the lobbying campaign and the Interfraternity Conference’s overall approach, Smithhisler resigned.

  In this case, the Greek organizations met their match. The UNC–Wilmington disciplinary hearing would be a tough fight, too.

  AS THE HOURS wore on in the Wilmington hearing room, Ian Gove, the SAE chapter president, never really disputed the central accusation against SAE: the fraternity threw a party where many pledges and other underage students were drinking to excess. Instead, he stressed a few sidelights. The police didn’t see any “open source” of alcohol that the fraternity provided, and they didn’t make any arrests. (They did, in fact, issue a citation for underage drinking.) As for the alleged hazing, Gove maintained that a couple of members, not pledges, were showing off in a push-up competition.

  In one stroke of luck for the chapter, one of the pledges at the party recanted his signed statement that said the fraternity had insisted the new members drink from the cooler full of mysterious liquor. (This was the same undergraduate hospitalized after being found in the local bar.) He testified that the university had pressured him to sign a statement he hadn’t read completely. That evening, infuriating the assistant dean prosecuting the case, he now said that the liquor at the party had found its way to him through a different route: A “good-looking girl,” whose name he didn’t remember, had handed him a drink.

  What about the pledge who had been so drunk that he mistook the police car for a taxi?

  That pledge also sought to shift responsibility from the chapter. While taking a taxi to the pinning ceremony some four hours earlier, he said, he stopped at a store and convinced a stranger to buy him a 23.5-ounce Four Loko, a caffeine-infused malt liquor drink, and a 24-ounce Bud Light Tall Boy. Back in the cab, he said, he had chugged those drinks but had imbibed nothing else at the party. The board was skeptical that the early evening alcohol could have left him so sick and disoriented. He weighed 215 pounds and said he regularly drank three beers in a sitting. And how should the board understand the e-mail begging the sorority member not to describe the toga party as a mixer? Gove and his vice president maintained the gathering had, in fact, always been “grab-a-date,” and the message had merely been inelegantly worded.

  At the hearing, pledges testified that most of the people attending the party were holding drinks and, of course, many, if not the vast majority, were under age twenty-one. Gove was asked if, as president, he bore some responsibility for underage drinking at the party.

  “I mean, to be honest with you, I don’t, you know, go around and [check] breath,” he replied, then added: “I’m not trying to be smart.”

  At the end of the hearing, Gove promised that the chapter would undergo alcohol education.

  “I don’t think it’s right that many underage people are drinking,” Gove said. “If it was one or if it was all of them, that’s not OK. I’d like to take steps as the president to make sure that’s understood, and I’d like to reach out and help these members.”

  Nevertheless, the board found the chapter responsible for alcohol violations based on several underage pledges’ admissions they were drinking at the party. The panel also found that the fraternity had held a mixer with Phi Mu, violating the terms of the social-events ban. It didn’t find the c
hapter guilty of hazing.

  Chip Phillips, the assistant dean overseeing judicial proceedings, recommended a four-year ban on the chapter, citing a need for “significant change in its culture and behavior” and “a consistent pattern of violations.”

  “It is only a matter of time before someone becomes seriously hurt or dies as a result of the actions of this organization,” Phillips said.

  Gove was outraged.

  “Four years of suspension is absolutely absurd,” he told the board. “I feel like bringing up stuff in the past that we have been found not guilty of is an extreme violation of our student rights. I feel like we do a lot for the community, the school, through our breast cancer awareness, our philanthropy events and community service.”

  After the proceeding, Dean Phillips headed out into the hall where, he said, about fifteen members surrounded him like “a gang in a schoolyard.” Phillips, who was asked for a copy of SAE’s disciplinary file, said he felt so threatened that he asked for a police escort. (“They were there to support me,” Gove told me later. “They weren’t there to intimidate anyone.”) Mike Walker, dean of students, later called out the fraternity for its “potentially intimidating behavior and disrespectful conduct toward university staff.” The board ultimately suspended the chapter for two and one-half years. Gary Miller, UNC–Wilmington’s chancellor, rejected SAE’s appeal.