True Gentlemen

by John Hechinger

  The men shouted and cheered: “Phi Alpha!”

  Hallam wanted the lions to be special. They would be tall, fierce, and hewn from marble. They would rival the sentinels standing before the grandest old chapters of the South. They wouldn’t come cheap, but Hallam had a plan.

  He had life insurance. He wasn’t married and didn’t have children. It would be his final gift to the fraternity he loved.

  FRATERNITY LOYALTY RUNS deep. Many SAE brothers told me a version of a story that ended with, “The fraternity changed my life,” or even “The fraternity saved my life.” One student had suffered a devastating rejection from a first love; another lost his sense of mission after an injury kept him sidelined from varsity sports. A third worried he couldn’t cut it academically. Each time, they said their brothers helped them survive and even thrive. Sometimes, this loyalty can be writ large. In 2012, Bob Dax, the longtime alumni adviser of the Carnegie Mellon University SAE chapter, was diagnosed with ALS, the degenerative illness often called Lou Gehrig’s disease. In his honor, his brothers dedicated their goofy, annual fund-raiser to Dax. It was called the Donut Dash. Members run a mile, eat half a dozen donuts, then run another mile. In 2016, the event raised a record $175,000. Other efforts remain private. At California State University at Northridge, Alexi Sciutto found out his mother had been diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. His SAE brothers helped him raise money to fight the disease; then, on his mother’s deathbed, they made her an honorary member. “I’ll do whatever needs to be done to keep SAE alive,” Sciutto told me. “And I’ll do it until I die.”

  These bonds can’t be dismissed lightly in a world where scattered families and social media make genuine human connection increasingly precious. But can they be saved from the pathologies of Greek life? Fraternities have all kinds of power: financial, political, and historical. Do they also have the power to change? Despite their love of dubious traditions, fraternities have, in fact, evolved during their two-century history in higher education. Often, it has been from necessity. Outside pressure forced reform. Fraternity men have reimagined their values to welcome other religions and races. They have even led campaigns to abolish their own organization when they became convinced it served the greater good.

  Consider the evolution of the first fraternity, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, founded in 1776. In 1831, it abandoned secrecy, a core feature of the brotherhood. Setting itself apart from the newer social fraternities, Phi Beta Kappa would focus on scholarship. Whereas early fraternities worked in opposition to faculties, professors became key members of Phi Beta Kappa. The organization, perhaps because of its focus on academic merit, dispensed with discrimination long before social fraternities did. In the 1870s, chapters at the University of Vermont and Wesleyan inducted the first women. Yale and the University of Vermont elected African Americans. Today, the organization has 286 chapters and half a million members. Since its founding, its inductees have gone on to have illustrious careers, among them seventeen presidents, thirty-nine Supreme Court justices, and more than 130 Nobel laureates. Many social fraternities have sought to improve their standing by incorporating students’ grade-point average and other achievements into their selection criteria. They have also publicized their members’ GPAs.

  Other fraternities focused on community service. A latecomer to the movement, Alpha Phi Omega, was created in 1925 at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Its founder was a returning World War I sailor named Frank Reed Horton who wanted to found a service organization open to men of all religions. At the time, Horton was also a member of SAE, with its Aryan-only policy. President Bill Clinton joined Alpha Phi Omega as an undergraduate at Georgetown University in the 1960s. In 1976, inspired by the women’s liberation movement, the organization voted to become co-ed. “Why discriminate because of sex?” Joseph Scanlon, the fraternity’s executive director wrote in 1970. “Forty-five years ago, Alpha Phi Omega dared to differ with the times. It set out to prove an organization committed to service, opposed to membership discrimination because of race, creed, color, economic status or national origin, could exist on college campuses.” As a “service fraternity,” the organization had no houses, and members of single-sex social fraternities could become members. It offered many of the same features as traditional fraternities: pledgeship and other rituals, friendship and parties. Today, the group has 375 chapters and 400,000 members. Alpha Phi Omega proved that a fraternity could reject discrimination while flourishing on a modern campus.

  Some members of traditional fraternities found they had to separate from their national organizations if they wanted to embrace more egalitarian principles. At Dartmouth, for example, Phi Tau broke away from Phi Sigma Kappa over racial segregation in the 1950s and, in 1972, admitted women. Similarly, at Brown, members of Zeta Psi withdrew from that organization to form Xeta Delta Xi in the 1980s so they could include female members. Unlike the more recent efforts to promote co-ed fraternities at Trinity, Harvard, and Wesleyan, change came from within chapters. Members, interpreting fraternal values for themselves, rebelled against older restrictions.

  At Williams College, a fraternity man named John Edward Sawyer led one of the earliest and highest-profile campaigns against the excesses of Greek life. As an undergraduate, Sawyer had been president of Zeta Psi, as had his brother and father. As an insider, he understood the negative influence of Williams’s fraternities, which had become bastions of debauchery and intolerance. After World War II and through much of the 1960s, the Williams trustees worked to eliminate fraternities. They gradually reduced their power while offering attractive alternatives for living and dining. In the 1950s, for example, Williams, then all male, banned freshman rushing. It also built a new dining hall for first-year students. In the 1960s, Sawyer became president of Williams and created an alternative to fraternities. The school established its own residences for students and converted fraternity houses into dorms. By 1968, only 10 percent of upper-class students belonged to fraternities. The school then ordered the end of all fraternity activity by 1970. Sawyer’s timing was excellent. Fraternities had become less popular during the anti-establishment 1960s, and national organizations’ opposition to racial integration undermined their support, especially on Northern campuses. Abolishing fraternities “would be a lot more difficult to pull off today,” his successor as president, John W. Chandler, told me. “We thought the line behind us would be long. It really wasn’t.” Williams stuck with the policy even amid the more recent Greek revival. To this day, Williams prohibits fraternity membership and promises to suspend or expel students who join.

  Williams paid no price for confronting its fraternities and, in fact, prospered because of it. In his history of Williams and fraternities, Chandler argued that the death of fraternities made it easier for the college to start admitting women in 1970. Williams may have bucked wealthy fraternity alumni, but its academic standing improved as it drew students with top grades and standardized test scores. In fact, Williams became the richest US liberal arts college, with a $2.3 billion endowment. Chandler called Sawyer “the most transformative leader in Williams’ history” and the abolition of fraternities “the key to his accomplishments and his crowning achievement.”

  The success of Williams College put pressure on its New England peers, sometimes referred to as the “Little Ivies.” In the 1980s and 1990s, other colleges—Amherst in Massachusetts, Colby and Bowdoin in Maine, and Middlebury in Vermont—banned their fraternities. Williams and its rivals demonstrate that colleges can eliminate Greek organizations, even when they are a powerful part of a school’s tradition. All these schools say they benefited academically and socially from eliminating fraternities. Of course, they have continued to struggle with drinking and sexual assault; but, unlike colleges with Greek life, they don’t find themselves on lists of top party schools or those with the most alcohol-related arrests. In 1996, a year before Bowdoin began eliminating fraternities, 29 percent of graduating seniors were “satisfied” or “very satisfied”
with the “sense of community on campus.” Ten years later, that figure had risen to almost 70 percent. These schools needed alumni support for prioritizing academics over social life and the wherewithal to invest heavily in housing and dining.

  Private colleges have more freedom to promote bans. Small, wealthy liberal arts colleges can more easily afford new residence halls. Private institutions also face fewer legal constraints. As Greg Lukianoff, a lawyer and campus free-speech advocate, has explained, the First Amendment and its freedom of assembly provision don’t directly bind private universities, though many have their own policies that protect expression; as government agencies, public universities are fully subject to constitutional limits.

  Yet short of banning fraternities, public colleges can still institute tougher regulation. In the 1990s, one president, Robert Carothers, decided to attack the culture of drinking at the University of Rhode Island. The Princeton Review had named the college the country’s number one party school for three consecutive years. The university, whose initials are URI, had earned a nickname: “You are high.” At homecoming, students would regularly be hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and students had been known to bring kegs to commencement. Henry Wechsler, then director of the Harvard School of Public Health, found that an astonishing 70 percent of students there were binge drinking. Carothers was horrified, and he understood the challenge.

  As Williams had done decades before, Carothers sought to improve his university’s academic standing and its image by attacking the fraternity culture. Like Sawyer, he was a fraternity member. In the 1960s, he had been president of Delta Sigma Phi at Pennsylvania’s Edinboro University. Still, at the University of Rhode Island, Carothers led the charge to ban alcohol at any social function on campus sponsored by the school—and that included fraternities. Students who violated policies three times were suspended for two semesters—a three-strikes policy. Seven fraternities that resisted were kicked off campus; the university bought their houses and either razed them or used them for dorms or administrative offices. The change all but eliminated the kind of tragic alcohol-related deaths that had been a regular occurrence. A 2009 study found a decrease in the number of drinking-related police reports, as students became more aware of the consequences of flouting the law. When he took on fraternities, Carothers heard warnings about a backlash from alumni. But he said older graduates understood the seriousness of the problem, and he found himself getting congratulatory notes, with $1,000 donations. The college attracted students with higher grades and test scores and had more success shepherding them through graduation. After the crackdown, “People would say, ‘I hate to see my fraternity come to this,’” Carothers told me. “But they would also say, ‘You have to do what you have to do.’”

  More recently, Philip Hanlon, Dartmouth’s president, took on his school’s famed fraternity culture. Half of Dartmouth students belong to Greek organizations, among the largest proportion of any US college. Previous presidents had tried and failed to rein in fraternities. In 2015, the school banned hard liquor. Hanlon also urged professors to curb grade inflation, and to stop canceling classes the morning after party nights. As at Williams, Dartmouth created a new residential system, which would assign first-year students to “houses” based around a cluster of dormitories. Again, it apparently took a fraternity man to make some inroads. Hanlon, a 1977 Dartmouth alumnus, had belonged to Alpha Delta, whose Dartmouth chapter had inspired the movie Animal House. When Hanlon announced the measures to curb the party culture in 2015, he wouldn’t rule out banning fraternities: “If in the next three to five years, the Greek system does not engage in meaningful, lasting reform, and we are unsuccessful in sharply curbing harmful behaviors, we will need to revisit its continuation on our campus.”

  Dartmouth and the University of Rhode Island turned to what Wechsler has called a “comprehensive community intervention.” Rather than focus on discipline and individual compliance, the schools employed the same kinds of tools that succeeded in public-health campaigns against drunk driving and smoking. This approach combines a variety of measures aimed at reducing the behavior that society wants to discourage: heightened enforcement, higher penalties and financial costs, and consistent, clear public messaging. The goal wasn’t prohibition, but a reduction in drinking. Wechsler recommended enlisting local authorities to make sure bars and stores insist on proof-of-age; pushing to raise state and local taxes on liquor; and passing ordinances forbidding the serving of cheap shots and huge bowls of alcohol. Wechsler also praised colleges that have offered inexpensive, attractive alcohol-free housing. These methods have more impact than the alcohol-education programs offered on most campuses. “You can’t just tell students how dangerous it is,” Wechsler told me. “You have to change the environment.”

  Any discussion of college drinking inevitably leads to what sounds like a logical approach: lower the drinking age to eighteen. Proponents argue that this approach will bring alcohol into the open, eliminating the secrecy and associated luster, thus leading to more moderate and responsible drinking. Its adherents hold up Europe as a model.

  In 2008, a group of more than one hundred college presidents, led by John McCardell, the former leader of Middlebury College, suggested just that. But public-health authorities have come to an overwhelming consensus supporting the higher drinking age. Since the increase in the 1980s, alcohol consumption has declined among high school students and adults aged eighteen to twenty, with most of the drop occurring in the 1990s. Countering the college presidents in 2008, public-health experts noted that the number of sixteen-to-twenty-year-old drunken drivers killed annually had fallen by half. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has estimated the law saved more than 26,000 lives since the 1970s. Still, college students drink more than their peers who aren’t enrolled. Wechsler blamed lax enforcement and an environment awash in cheap alcohol. It’s worth repeating that studies show that white men in general—and fraternity members in particular—drink more heavily than anyone else on campus.

  Judson Horras, who became president of the North-American Interfraternity Conference in 2016, has embraced the public-health approach. Horras was a longtime executive at Beta Theta Pi, which has shut down many chapters since the 1990s, then reopened them as alcohol free. Horras proposed working with fraternity councils and building a campus consensus on stricter alcohol rules. It would be a gradual approach, tailored to the current state of behavior. At an out-of-control campus, he would advocate starting with a ban on hard liquor; such a ban would lower the risk of alcohol poisoning. Then, the conference might push for restricting the number of parties with alcohol. The next step would be “damp” fraternity houses. Members could have no alcohol in common spaces—in other words, no social events with alcohol. Members who were twenty-one and older could have alcohol in their own rooms. The final step could be dry houses. Any event with alcohol would have to be held at a restaurant with professional bartenders. Or, as Bob Biggs, the chief executive of Phi Delta Theta, likes to say: the fraternities would finally get out of the bar business.

  Horras has also pledged to help fraternities replace an aggressive vision of masculinity with another ideal, a man who acts with “humble confidence.” In his experience, new chapters tend to be idealistic, open to adult guidance and members who show leadership on campus. As they grow more successful, they often shift away from those qualities and seek members who are “cool.” They start lying to their advisers and prizing a brand of outlaw culture that is celebrated on social media and websites such as Total Frat Move, ostensibly a satire that often functions as a how-to guide for young men’s darkest impulses. Horras said he viewed increasing diversity as both a moral and a business imperative. Catering primarily to white males will relegate organizations to irrelevance. “Diversity is the next big wave of growth for our organizations,” Horras told me. “We are going to embrace it. We are embracing it.”

  HALLAM’S LIONS WERE stuck in customs. They had been crafted out of marble
in the mountains of Southeast Asia. A Vietnamese SAE member had found craftsmen who would carve a pair for about $4,000. It was a bargain, and it meant the brothers could raise thousands more for landscaping at their new home. Hallam could even keep his life-insurance money to help his parents with end-of-life expenses. With all the delays, the men worried that Hallam might not live to see his lions. Finally, on a Friday in April 2016, a flatbed truck pulled up in front of the chapter house. A Bobcat crane hoisted the two giant wooden crates and carried them up the hilly lawn. The lions each stood five-foot-eight-inches tall and weighed 5,000 pounds, as much as a midsize SUV. They were gold, their manes flecked with red. Each had a giant paw resting on an SAE badge, as if protecting the fraternity’s legacy. A plaque dedicated them to Hallam. “The epitome of a True Gentleman,” it read.

  The next day, Saturday, was rainy and overcast. Men from across the country descended upon the Ohio State chapter. Hallam arrived late, his wingtips sinking into the mud around the new lions. He wore a pink Oxford shirt and an SAE pin on the lapel of his black blazer. He had dark circles around his blue eyes and a red rash on his throat from chemotherapy. On this afternoon, though, he had plenty of energy. He had taken a break from his medication, so he wouldn’t feel so tired for the day’s events. “They’re a lot bigger than I thought,” Hallam said as members gathered around the lions. “It means so much that I can be here to see this.”

  Inside, the chapter overflowed with fraternity brothers. They spilled out of the basement meeting hall and up into the stairs to the first floor. In his tribute, Kevin Bowen, the undergraduate who had recruited Hallam, remembered the sorry chapter his adviser had adopted.

  “People were paying dues only because they forgot they were members,” Bowen said sarcastically. “It speaks volumes to the lives you’ve impacted and the changes you’ve made here that this many people are here on a Saturday when Ohio State students could be drinking. The improvements you’ve made to this house will live on far beyond the time you’ve spent here. I couldn’t be happier that you’re a brother of mine.”