True Gentlemen

by John Hechinger

  These family connections open doors on Old Row. Like football coaches scouting for prospects, fraternities start recruiting in high school. Chapters have feeder schools, and alumni lobby for their children long before less privileged freshmen figure out the best route to the dining hall. The most likely candidates come from affluent enclaves in Birmingham, Mobile, and Montgomery.

  SAE has long favored Goodwyn’s private school, Montgomery Academy, founded in 1959 by white families fleeing public schools after the US Supreme Court mandated desegregation in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Seven percent of the students at the onetime “segregation academy” were now black, 15 percent members of minority groups, but its hometown still revels in its traditional ways. Each spring at the Montgomery Country Club, the Southern Debutante Cotillion introduces sorority sisters wearing white ball gowns and long white gloves. Goodwyn escorted his girlfriend, an Alabama Tri-Delt, or member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority.

  Of course, not all SAE members are legacies, or even from Alabama. Still, it helps to have a connection. Goodwyn introduced me to Holden Naff, a twenty-year-old junior who was expected to succeed him as president. Naff graduated from Birmingham’s Mountain Brook High, a public school that is also a feeder into Old Row. Naff, who planned to go to medical school, wasn’t an SAE legacy. His father belonged to Delta Kappa Epsilon at Tulane University, and his grandfather was also a DKE at Alabama. But his father’s boss, a prominent Birmingham money manager, was a member of SAE at Alabama. It also helped that Naff played competitive golf in high school. “Where I’m from, where you go is centered on the fraternities,” Naff told me. “A lot of golfers come to this house from Birmingham.”

  With the right calling card, membership confers social entrée, especially to mixers that are called “swaps” at Alabama. Swaps offer up hundreds of sorority women, selected in no small part because of their attractiveness to fraternity men. (A former Alpha Omicron Pi sister told me her sorority rated prospects’ looks from one, which meant too unattractive to join, to four, “drop-dead gorgeous” and a shoo-in.) SAE holds its swaps at an annex called the Band Room. At 10:00 p.m. on a Thursday night that fall, the men had transformed the cavernous space into a nightclub pounding with pop music. Young women in short dresses and stilettos arrived in SUVs so packed that some of them tumbled out of tailgates before heading to the party. SAE’s signature event is the “Stockholders Ball,” one of the hottest tickets on campus. The extravaganza costs $20,000, and brothers must pay a “special assessment” of $250 apiece. During a week each spring, hundreds of people attend parties Thursday through Saturday, when the event culminates in a black-tie gala flowing with champagne and featuring an ice sculpture shaped like an SAE lion.

  Old Row offers the amenities of a private men’s club, yet its dues and room-and-board fees can be competitive with the $13,000 estimated cost of living on campus with a meal plan. It helps that the university subsidizes fraternities. SAE’s house sits on public land, and the fraternity has a $1-a-year, 150-year lease. The chapter employs a staff of seven, including cooks and housekeepers, all supervised by Cindy Patton, the “house mom.” She is an ardent booster of Alabama Crimson Tide football: she wore crimson earrings that are replicas of its elephant mascot, crimson nail polish, and a crimson belt and ballet flats. A cook known as “Miss Angie” prepares such Southern favorites as macaroni and cheese, collard greens, corn bread, fried chicken, and catfish. For “guy” time, the men retired to a poolroom featuring a big-screen television that might not look out of place in a multiplex.

  Beyond all the perks, the top fraternities wield power. The Old Row Greek organizations formed a secretive voting bloc, Theta Nu Epsilon, a kind of uber-fraternity known universally as the “Machine.” This cabal traced its birth to 1870, when Theta Nu Epsilon broke away from Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society. It spread nationwide before it reportedly died out except in Alabama, where it has dominated student government for generations, and SAE is a charter member. When I asked Goodwyn the name of the fraternity’s Machine representative, he laughed and looked away. “I don’t know,” he said, then added, “The Machine doesn’t exist.” Goodwyn’s response was not surprising. It is said that members are fined for acknowledging the Machine’s existence.

  Those with the Machine’s backing nearly always win the student-government presidency. In the last six years alone, two members of SAE, Hamilton Bloom and R. B. Walker, won the presidency. Like Goodwyn, both were graduates of Montgomery Academy. Bloom, son of one of Alabama’s top lobbyists, was known on campus for his seersucker suits, bow ties, and impressive collection of fashionable socks. He now works in Washington for Richard Shelby, the powerful Republican senator from Alabama. Shelby is said to have been a Machine president as a Delta Chi at Alabama in the 1950s. Walker, a former lobbyist for Alabama Power Company, became director of government relations for the University of Alabama system. Goodwyn, who was a student-government senator, drew inspiration from their success. “I’ve gotten the kind of leadership experience that I can’t get anywhere else,” he told me. “SAE is a good stepping-stone if you want to go into politics.”

  Secrecy heightens SAE’s appeal and power. When I visited, members had sequestered themselves in their chapter room to learn about fraternity rituals. As a nonmember, of course, I couldn’t attend that meeting, but later I took a tour of one of SAE’s most sacred spaces. DeVotie Memorial Hall is named after founder Noble Leslie DeVotie and was decorated in SAE colors of purple and gold. Gold chandeliers hung from the high ceiling and deep purple drapes framed the floor-to-ceiling windows, while purple candles in gold sconces gave the room an air of luxury. One wall displayed a fraying brown manuscript, the original chapter minutes from 1856. Nearby, gold-framed portraits of DeVotie and seven other severe-looking founders seemed to look down disapprovingly at the ease and informality of a younger generation. One founder, the bearded John Barratt Rudulph, wore a double-breasted Confederate uniform. Outside this shrine, the rest of the house gave you the eerie feeling of being watched. In room after room on the main floor, the photos of hundreds of young men in coats and ties hung on the walls. In the 1930s, the brothers wore their hair slicked back like matinee idols. In the 1970s, a few sported long hair and striped blazers with wide lapels and ties. In more recent years, short, neat hair and jackets with cleaner lines evoked a timeless preppie style.

  The unspoken truth of this world was clear. This was a white fraternity. One hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, sixty-four years after SAE dropped the discrimination clause from its laws, seven years after the election of the first African American president of the United States, the founding chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon had never had a black member.

  On that late afternoon, one African American man made his way through the halls. In SAE’s lexicon, he was known as the “butler,” but he was really a custodian. He mopped the hardwood floors, then buffed them until they gleamed so brightly he could see his own reflection.

  SAE’s FOUNDING CHAPTER reflects the social barriers that keep minority and low-income students out of historically white fraternities. Their recruiting practices, opaque and favoring insiders and legacies, all but guarantee a candidate pool dominated by white students. Even if a black student were welcomed into an old-line fraternity house as a candidate, he would have trouble seeing himself inside walls covered with portraits of white students and Confederate soldiers. The flare-ups of overtly racist episodes, such as the Oklahoma video, have further discouraged minorities from joining. For lower-income students, both white and minority, the cost can be prohibitive; an environment of assumed affluence—of $250 “special assessments” for a party—has repelled students from modest backgrounds. An Alabama political science professor described this system, with its unspoken rules and assumptions, as textbook “institutional racism,” the kind that may not always be intentional but can be just as hard to overcome.

  These barriers reveal themselves most clearly in
the South. At the time I visited Alabama, I was told its SAE house was among several Southern chapters without black members. Like Oklahoma, the region includes some of the largest SAE chapters in the country, and their recruitment focused on legacies. Clark Brown, an SAE member who graduated from the University of Arkansas in 2007, told me nearly all his fraternity brothers were legacies who had secured spots when they were in high school. Others had to stand out in some way. Brown wasn’t a legacy, but he was a member of the varsity tennis team and a Chancellor scholar, an honor for entering freshmen. At the same time, African American and other minority fraternities pushed hard—and early—for members. “By the time rush comes along, they’ve already picked the smartest, most accomplished, most athletic guys,” said Brown, now general counsel for SAE at its headquarters. “There aren’t many left who you’d want to join your fraternity. The stars would have to align perfectly for an African American to join the Arkansas chapter.”

  After the Oklahoma video became public, SAE hired Ashlee Canty, its first director of diversity and inclusion, who planned to visit campuses such as the University of Mississippi to encourage them to welcome minority students. Canty is African American and, amid the controversy about SAE, at first resisted taking the job. Her friends questioned her judgment. “I didn’t know if this was a public relations move or a legitimate position that will have some clout in the fraternity,” she told me. She came to view the fraternity as committed and sincere. She also had an abiding belief in the virtue of Greek life. As an undergraduate at North Carolina State University, she joined the historically African American Zeta Phi Beta sorority, as had her mother before her, and worked as a graduate assistant in the Department of Fraternity and Sorority Life. Growing up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, she never considered joining a historically white fraternity because her mother’s sorority experience inspired her.

  Canty considered the racial divisions of Greek life a matter of self-selection. “At the core of it, SAE is a historically white fraternity,” she said. “They are always going to be majority white. People want to join with people they connect with—and the first thing they connect with is ‘people who look like me.’” Canty said fraternity chapters reflect a college’s culture as much as the national organization’s. SAE leaders said they won’t institute the kind of admissions policies that universities rely on to increase diversity, namely, racial preferences. Fraternity leaders criticize that approach as amounting to “quotas.” Although controversial, such “affirmative action” plans have repeatedly been upheld by the US Supreme Court as serving a compelling national interest. I asked her if she would track each chapter’s racial composition to encourage less diverse houses to reach out to minorities. “I don’t want it to get to the point of counting brown faces,” she replied.

  When black students choose African American fraternities, they often lose out on the amenities and career networks taken for granted at historically white organizations. This inequality extends well beyond the South. For a study published in 2012, the sociologists Rashawn Ray and Jason Rosow spent nine months observing and interviewing fifty-two members of historically white and black fraternities at Indiana University. Even in the Midwest, they found unfairness reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. White students held private parties in their palatial chapters. Black fraternities had no houses, and African American men were excluded from parties at historically white fraternities because they were open only to members or recruits. Class played an explicit role, too. Men in white fraternities placed socioeconomic barriers to admission. One of the top chapters asked for parents’ income on its membership application. Members cultivated an aura of privilege, bragging of their chapters’ wealth and influence. As one member said, “There are kids in our house worth $400 million.”

  In 2015, the Indiana University Faculty Senate, which had been troubled by such divisions, received a rare glimpse of Greek demography. The professors asked the Student Affairs Division to poll its chapters. Through a public-records request, I obtained a summary. On a campus where 20 percent of US students were members of minority groups, several big chapters reported a minority membership of less than 5 percent. Others, including SAE, were more diverse. One-sixth of SAE’s roughly 110 members were minorities. The university didn’t collect data about subgroups of minorities. Andrew Cowie, SAE’s Indiana University president, told me the chapter had three black members. Cowie said his house took pride in its diversity and marched with an African American fraternity after the Oklahoma video surfaced. Steve Veldkamp, the university’s director of student life and learning, said the survey’s results surprised him because all fraternities of any significant size had minority membership. “There was more than tokenism,” Veldkamp said. “This isn’t 1950. We’re headed in the right direction.”

  Veldkamp, like many administrators who oversee Greek life, is a true believer in fraternities and sororities. From his office at the Indiana University Student Union, he also directs the Center for Fraternity and Sorority Research, a nonprofit funded in part by Greek organizations. Veldkamp, tall and lean with a neatly trimmed beard flecked with gray, comes from a white, working-class background. He grew up in Flint, Michigan, and his father worked construction and drove trucks. As a first-generation college student at Grand Valley State University, he joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, which he credits with teaching him leadership and social skills. “It was the ideal fraternity experience,” he told me. Still, others on campus hardly see fraternities as a haven for the working class. In contributing to the school’s strategic plan, a group of thirty-three Indiana students, faculty, and alumni issued a 2016 report that found, for all its philanthropy and leadership, Greek life contributed to an “elitist social hierarchy” that is “replicated in recruitment and social opportunities.”

  Campus geography reinforces the inferior circumstances of non-white students in Greek life. Indiana University’s main fraternity row sits on a ridge above the campus—a visual reminder of its privileged position. In the 1950s, the university gave fraternities and sororities twenty acres of prime real estate, land that then president Herman B. Wells, a member of Sigma Nu, called “admirably suited to give large houses a dignified setting.” The university also backed loans for financing new houses and for expansions and renovations that feature imposing stone entrances, Tudor-style gables, manicured hedges, and porches with swings.

  A few blocks away on a fall afternoon, an Indiana University junior named Frank Bonner, the son of a middle-school math teacher, worked the front desk at a dorm to earn money to help pay for college. Bonner was president of Iota Phi Theta, an African American fraternity that has no chapter house. Like many black students who join African American fraternities, he was drawn to their legacy of providing a haven for students shunned by white Greek-letter organizations. Rather than Confederate soldiers, their alumni have included W. E. B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., who all belonged to Alpha Phi Alpha. “You have a history of black organizations advancing equality and social justice,” Bonner told me. Once, as a freshman, Bonner tried to go with friends to what he called the “mansion house” of a historically white fraternity. “We didn’t know anyone, so we couldn’t get in,” he said. He hadn’t been to a “mansion house” party since. Bonner, who was also president of the organization representing black fraternities and sororities, said his members aren’t pushing for houses of their own. It would be hard to pay for them; his fraternity charged an initiation fee of $700 and $125 in annual dues. Bonner said he would rather push for economic and academic help that would benefit all minority students, not just those in Greek organizations. “In the grand scheme of things, trying to cause an uproar to have a mansion house doesn’t make sense,” he said. “There are other battles.”

  Greek organizations at Indiana and other big public universities may not have a formal fraternity “Machine” that dominates elections, but they still tend to exert a powerful influence on campus politics. At the Universit
y of Texas in 2013, fraternity and sorority members made up 15 percent of students but 45 percent of those elected to the Student Government Assembly. Suchi Sundaram, a columnist for the Daily Texan, the student newspaper, criticized the result of this imbalance: a succession of white fraternity men as presidents. “The Greeks have ultimately created a dynasty out of a democracy,” she wrote.

  After college, these student-government positions burnish résumés and form networks propelling students into successful careers in politics and business. Lauren Rivera, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, determined that bankers prefer fraternity heads to candidates with better grades. “People like people who are like themselves,” Rivera, who interviewed 120 professionals involved in hiring graduates for banking, law, and consulting jobs, told Bloomberg News. A 2001 study of seniors at Dartmouth found that those who networked with fraternity and sorority members and alumni were more likely to get higher-paying jobs, especially in investment banking or Wall Street sales or trading. In 2013, Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta fraternity received an e-mail from an alumnus working at a unit of Wells Fargo and Company, the largest US mortgage lender. Its San Francisco office had hired Alpha Deltas for four straight years. If they mailed résumés to a fraternity brother, the e-mail said, it would go to the top of the pile. That year, Conor Hails, the twenty-year-old head of the University of Pennsylvania’s Sigma Chi chapter, recalled exchanging a secret handshake with an executive at a recruiting reception for banking giant Barclays PLC. “We exchanged a grip, and he said, ‘Every Sigma Chi gets a business card.’” Hails recalled in the same Bloomberg article, “We’re trying to create Sigma Chi on Wall Street, a little fraternity on Wall Street.”