The sexual assault allegations at Cornell have rekindled debate about the role frats play in shaping masculinity
By Nicholas L. Syrett
Nicholas L. Syrett, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of "The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities."
Abolish fraternities. That has been the reaction among many people outraged by a case at Cornell, in which seven men from the Chi Phi fraternity chapter were accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting a fellow student in 2024 and advertising it in a group chat.
It isn't the first time the public has demanded accountability. Every few years there is another headline-making case of fraternity misbehavior: a hazing death, a rape case or sometimes, the odd cocaine ring.
But banning fraternities from universities often doesn't fix these problems. In many cases, the bad behavior just goes further off-campus, where it gets less oversight from school officials.
An example from the school where I teach, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from just this semester: On Sept. 23, after receiving an anonymous tip, police raided the house of the Madison chapter of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity.
In the basement, police found around 30 partially clothed male students, most of them 18-years-old, covered in condiments and other food. Several of them had injuries consistent with being physically assaulted, according to a police report. The thermostat in the room had been set to 81 degrees to make it even more unpleasant. The Madison Police Department arrested the fraternity's president and vice president because hazing is illegal in the state of Wisconsin.
UW-Madison said in a statement after the incident that its Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards would "investigate any students implicated in the incident according to its nonacademic misconduct policy."
The problem in this case is that, as a result of breaking rules about 10 years ago, AEPi was already derecognized by UW-Madison for running afoul of its misconduct policy, which means the fraternity is officially unaffiliated with the university.
And yet, as a chapter of a national organization, AEPi continues to initiate young men who are students at UW-Madison.
It leaves the university administration in something of a limbo: Barring adult students from joining an off-campus organization outright, especially at a public university, would likely run into thorny legal issues around the first amendment right to freedom of assembly. (The national AEPi office has suspended activities at the UW-Madison chapter pending an investigation into the incident; hazing is prohibited by the fraternity's health and safety policies.)
This is not an isolated problem. Colleges and universities are constantly kicking fraternities off campus for bad behavior, sometimes suspending them and sometimes expelling them permanently. Right now, for example, there are 10 fraternities currently suspended for hazing and other misconduct at Penn State alone.
For administrations, this creates a thorny situation in which fraternity chapters remain associated with the universities -- or at least, in physical proximity with them, and enrolling their students -- even if they are not sanctioned by them.
The other barrier to abolishing fraternities is their popularity. Many freshmen specifically seek out colleges and universities with robust Greek-life programs, and participation is on the rise.
In their ideal form, fraternities are social clubs where students come together, meet each other and form lifelong bonds. Some fraternities are paired with sororities, teaming up to host campus events or charitable activities. Fraternities also provide valuable networking opportunities for their members across generations through close-knit alumni groups run by the national offices.
Because of this, when university administrators discipline fraternities, they often receive pushback from otherwise loyal and generous alumni. Only a handful of wealthy liberal-arts colleges like Amherst, Williams and Middlebury have actually eliminated fraternities altogether.
Since banning them has thus far proven unpopular and ineffective, the question seems to be: Can fraternities be reformed?
As I learned researching my book, "The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities," which is based on archival research from the founding of fraternities in 1825 to the turn of the 21st century, the cultural pressures that perpetuate problems with fraternities have been there since the beginning.
The first known fraternity hazing death in the U.S. is believed to have occurred in 1873 at Cornell when a newly initiated fraternity brother, Mortimer Leggett, fell off a cliff during an initiation rite. Nearly 150 years later, in 2019, a Cornell freshman named Antonio Tsialas was likewise found dead at the bottom of a gorge, with signs of acute alcohol intoxication and physical injuries as a result of the fall. He had attended an unsanctioned fraternity rush party where pledges were pressured to drink alcohol.
In response, Cornell required Greek-life chapters to hire independent event monitors and submit to random security spot checks, among other changes. Six years later, the campus is on fire over new allegations once again.
At the raid last month at my own university, police were alerted by an anonymous tip. Was it one of the pledges, scared enough to report his fraternity but hoping to make it through initiation?
I found similar incidents as early as the 1940s, when letters signed only by "Anxious Pledges" were sent to administrators at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, begging them to intervene in hazing: "We ask your help before it will be too late. If the practice is kept up, it will end in someone being seriously injured, or perhaps killed."
There are distinct social dynamics that lead to group think, misguided allegiance and, when drugs and alcohol are involved, dangerous and illegal behavior.
Fraternities enroll men who have already decided they want to join single-sex organizations for friendship, belonging and status. Pledging, a period of initiation, tests that resolve -- often with degrading or illegal hazing rituals that bond fraternity pledges to one another and to the organization itself. Keeping secrets on behalf of the fraternity creates loyalty, especially when what occurs during pledging is counter to the law or a university's rules of conduct.
Also, as University of Kentucky professor Alan DeSantis explains in his 2007 book, "Inside Greek U," and as I found in my own research, men who join fraternities often find it appealing that they will be able to "act like men" in their downtime with no women around and that they will be joining an organization that will reinforce their own masculinity.
That makes them susceptible, however, to having their masculinity tested and questioned in dangerous ways.
Since at least the 1980s, some fraternities have pushed brothers or pledges to report on sexual successes. In one notorious incident at Dartmouth College in 2001, student reporters obtained weekly newsletters from the Zeta Psi fraternity, which detailed who had had sex with whom, and referred to female Dartmouth students who were a "guaranteed hookup."
One newsletter concluded with "Next week: [Brother X]'s patented date rape techniques!"
It's easy to see how the pressure to be sexually successful can lead to sexual coercion.
The problem is exacerbated by the alcohol-fueled parties that often grant fraternity men exalted status, a phenomenon familiar in pop culture hits about bacchanalian Greek life, including 1978's "Animal House," which was based on filmmaker Chris Miller's experiences at Dartmouth College. (The comedy is credited with increasing interest and participation in fraternities alongside President Ronald Reagan's 1984 law raising the drinking age to 21, which contributed to college students drinking outside of bars.)
Of course, it is illegal for fraternities to serve minors, but many do. Most national sororities ban the hosting of parties in sorority houses, which only increases the power that fraternities can have over campus social life.
That this leads to huge problems is not a secret. Warnings among women about staying vigilant lest a drink get spiked and keeping friends in sight are de rigueur on most campuses and show up regularly in a variety of movies and TV shows.
This is not to say that fraternities are all bastions of abuse and vice. But it helps explain studies, including one from 2020 by Professor John Foubert of Union University and his colleagues, that found fraternity men and athletes are "significantly more likely to commit alcohol-involved sexual assault than other men on campus."
National fraternities and many colleges and universities have sought to curb the worst excesses of fraternities by banning hazing, curbing drinking and instituting extensive workshops on consent for incoming first-year students. Some evidence indicates that bystander intervention training is effective in helping people intervene in assault on campus, but at least in one 2019 review of 27 studies, there was no evidence that it discouraged men from perpetrating sexual assault in the first place.
At Cornell there appeared to be no bystanders willing to step in. What is so telling about this incident isn't just the allegation that seven men participated in a sexual assault of one woman for hours on end, plying her with drugs and alcohol; it's the way they chose to do all of this with one another -- as if it were a bonding activity. After one fraternity brother advertised "free" sex in a group chat on Snapchat, other brothers allegedly replied with messages including "I fucking love Chi Phi" and "CHI PHIII."
Snapchat, by the way, is a platform famous for messages that disappear. The fact that the image exists indicates at least one person had the instinct to take a photo of the messages.