“When fraternities were first established — and some are nearly as old as American higher education — they were secret societies in an adversarial relationship with colleges, who didn't approve of their existence.
By the turn of the 20th century, though, it was clear that fraternities weren't going away. And as they became more entrenched, building houses directly on or adjacent to campuses, they were also doing colleges a favor. Colleges no longer had to house students or supervise them; the fraternity was doing it for them.
"The wiser among college officials are encouraging the development of fraternity life in every way possible," Baird's Manual of American College Fraternities, a guide to the already flourishing societies, instructed in 1920.
As Caitlin Flanagan wrote in her investigation of fraternity culture and lawsuits for the Atlantic in 2014, this dynamic hasn't changed…
The basic bargain is "don’t kill anybody, and we’ll renew your contract," says Alan DeSantis, a professor of communication at the University of Kentucky who in 2007 wrote a book, Inside Greek U, about fraternity and sorority life. "If the universities were really committed to kind of this mission … of enlightenment and changing lives and diversity and questioning, you think there would be something, somewhere, that says, 'You have to do more.'"…
Once you start looking for it, it's easy to see how tightly Greek life is integrated into the university. Many colleges have a division within the student affairs office dedicated to overseeing fraternities and sororities, resources that often aren't available for students in other groups. Student government has seats set aside for members of Greek organizations, but not for members of other clubs, even if members of fraternities and sororities can win elections in other ways…
At least, that's the case for historically white sororities and fraternities — a group founded to be "the elite of the elite," Hughey says, and groups that have remained overwhelmingly white. On the other hand, black, Hispanic, and Asian Greek organizations are typically treated like other clubs — not given full-time oversight, assistance, or campus housing.”
It’s so interesting. Princeton is having a conversation about our eating clubs right now, which have been slowly slowly degrading in centrality for a few decades now. I think that trend is picking up speed, and I wonder if maybe these kinds of articles and studies and concerns are coming up now because it’s more palatable. There is less power now.
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