The Economics of Fraternities

0:01Adam Tooze: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Hey, it's Cameron. So before the show starts, a quick announcement from me and Adam. This one is directed at people in Berlin or nearby, I guess the rest of Germany, Poland, Italy, Scandinavia, France, England.

0:39Adam Tooze: That's up to you. The point is we are having another live show. It will be in Berlin. The date will be November 10th. And the good news is that it It will be in a slightly bigger venue, specifically Festsaal Kreuzberg. Locals in Berlin may have gone to a concert there in the past. The point is, it is slightly bigger than the venues we've had live shows at in the past. And that's a reflection of how quickly the tickets for those live events have tended to sell out. Now, that is related to the potentially bad news, which is these tickets we are imagining are likely also to go quickly. So if you are interested in coming, the link to the tickets is already live.

1:19Adam Tooze: It's in the show notes. It's bound to be a good time. The show will start at 8.15. Doors will open at 7.30. And the good thing about Festel Kreuzberg, it's open late. It'll be open after the show. We'll all hang out. You know, these shows are always a good time. You get to ask questions during the show. You get to ask questions after the show. We'll be there, and we hope to see you there as well. Again, the link is in the show notes, November 10th, if you're interested. We'd love to see you there.

1:53Adam Tooze: Hi, and welcome to Ones and Twos, FPs Economics Podcast. Every week, we take a couple of data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron Abadi, FPs Deputy Editor with you in Berlin, Germany. Joining us, as always, is FPs Economics Columnist and Columbia University Professor Adam Tuos in New York. Hi, Adam. Hi, Kevin. So one segment for you all today, that is 19. That is the number of American presidents who have been members of fraternities during their time in university. That's according to the North American Interfraternity Conference. That's a trade body of men's fraternities.

2:34Adam Tooze: So you might want to take that statistic with a grain of salt. And in any case, it's not American presidents who have put fraternities back in the headlines in the United States recently. Instead, in September, a former student at Cornell University filed a lawsuit alleging that she was drugged and gang raped by members of a fraternity at that university in October 2024.

3:02Cameron Abadi: A student at the center of a sexual assault scandal rocking campus is now saying she felt unsupported by the school's president.

3:11Adam Tooze: The local district attorney, who had initially declined to pursue criminal charges, says he's reopening the investigation. What changed? Now, several of the men have denied wrongdoing, and these remain allegations. But clearly, this case is part of a much wider story. There are some 6 ,000 chapters of fraternities on campuses across the United States, some 6 million alumni of fraternities. And these organizations have long been controversial. They have had legal troubles for years on end, and that makes them interesting social and legal and economic actors in the United States. They are holders of real estate, buyers of insurance, and members of very complicated alumni networks across the United States.

4:14Adam Tooze: And so, Adam, we thought we'd unpack how these institutions work and what exactly they are. They are a uniquely American institution, it seems like. But to start off with, maybe we can get into the history. I mean, how exactly did fraternities become such a big phenomenon? And reading about the history of them, I found it interesting that they started off essentially as secret literary societies at universities. And they have grown to become these mass social institutions. So what was that evolutionary process like exactly?

4:47Cameron Abadi: Yeah, this is something easy to get lost in the maze of all of this. But anyone who's had anything to do with American university culture will know about these. And if you haven't actually attended or been around a U.S. university, I mean, you might have encountered them via films like Animal House. And the frat boy and the sorority girl are stock figures in any account of an American campus. they're present at almost every American university but very strong in some and weaker in others and their origins go back to the founding of the republic so the oldest I think recognized Greek letter organization is Phi Beta Kappa which now no longer really is a conventional fraternity but is an academic honor society that that students are inducted into if they have particularly good grades at different stages in their university careers the more typical frat emerges with the so-called union triad and it's called that because it emerged at union college in new york and that was kappa alpha sigma phi and delta phi with the original three and at that stage there is still a really strong association with with literary conversation with debate their training in rhetoric and a very close association, at least atmospherically and in terms of rumor, because these are secretive organizations in the first stages, with Freemasonry.

6:14Cameron Abadi: And there's scandals around Freemasonry and the alleged murder of somebody who was about to disclose Freemason secrets that sort of explodes these societies into public view in the US. It doesn't seem to have done them much harm because they kept on growing. at my own university in ohio you then get the so-called miami triad which is beta theta phi phi delta theta and sigma chi i can't even believe i'm saying these names and then by the 1850s you begin to get the development of sorority organizations to match the men's institutions and these are increasingly and explicitly justified and self-justifying as social clubs not principally as literary societies.

6:56Cameron Abadi: So that seems to have been the moment of transition. And then the Civil War both shuts down the large part of the American university system. And then in the aftermath of the Civil War, we see a huge expansion of education in the US, both at the college level and in the more glamorous high schools. So most of the modern private American high schools come out of that moment. And it goes hand in hand with something similar going on in Britain at the same moment with the proliferation of fee-paying private schools for the bourgeoisie in the upper middle class. And then in the course of the 20th century, as one would imagine, you get struggles notably over the creation of black student organizations at historically black colleges starting at Howard.

7:36Cameron Abadi: So they are by the early 20th century recognized as key social institutions for American universities and have moved from being 18th century Freemason-aligned enlightenment, sort of the undergrowth of the bourgeois public sphere to being, you know, hail and hearty institutions of late Victorian, Edwardian, Gilded Age, sociability for the middle and upper middle class who are increasingly gaining the benefits of college education. I mean, college education at that point is a truly minority experience, but for people who are having that experience, they become very important institutions on US campuses.

8:17Cameron Abadi: And the many of the houses, if you see them, if you actually get to tour a college, date back to that period. That's when they first begin to acquire real estate, which is where a lot of the malfeasance happens, a lot of the disasters, the allegations of a great many of them actually proven, the hazing. You need a private space to do that kind of thing. And those kind of bastions of Greek life get established. And also, I don't want to take a purely negative view. It's where they're really striking. For the first time I was at University of Illinois and seeing a system where they know university with a really big Greek system and just the extraordinary kind of display around Christmas time of, you know, incredibly decorated houses.

9:00Cameron Abadi: So they are, you know, in big university campuses like that with tens of thousands of students, they're a major source of kind of anchoring and identity clearly for their members.

9:10Adam Tooze: So this is, you know, an economics podcast. So it seems only natural to ask what the economic function of fraternities is in the United States. Often what gets cited is sort of a networking function that they provide that feeds into American economic life. And I'm curious if it's possible to kind of describe how that works and what the effects of that are exactly.

9:38Cameron Abadi: Yes. If one focuses narrowly in the first instance on doing social science quantitative work, there is some, not overwhelming, but there is some evidence that they generate more or less precisely the effects that you would expect. So through networking, through the whole variety of different mechanisms that can be in play here, through alumni referrals, which are very powerful in American labor markets, through informal mentorship, trust, reciprocity, social signaling, enabling mobility around the US, entrepreneurial networks, leadership positions, access to finance, like they're powerful networks in American society, you would think.

10:16Cameron Abadi: And then social scientists have gone out to test for this. And one study found a substantial bump in the income for frat members. Another one really characteristically found what a liberal, non-Greek person like me might suspect, which is a substantial 36 % bump in income and a half, in an American academic grading scale from zero to four, a half point reduction in grade average. So that's the total cliche, is that they substitute partying and socializing and that kind of networking for academic study. And then the liberal in me, the progressive is kind of outraged. But then if you think realistically about what American higher education is about, I think a different kind of reading emerges, which is really that they're a manifestation, they're an organic expression of precisely what it is.

11:13Cameron Abadi: these kind of universities, including the one, of course, that I work out do, which is to credentialize and to create elites and to shape a sort of esprit de corps of a kind. And that is shot through with hierarchy and all of these other things. And for some kids, there's no question that a frat, if you're coming from a relatively modest background, can be a good way to escalate up the social food chain within a university like this. a country boy who comes to a big complex campus and gets adopted by frat brothers and then becomes a key figure of that scene is a transformed person. But they're also clearly exclusionary, and one of their core functions historically was to create also zones of segregation, both along gender and along racial lines, which are key hierarchies in American campuses.

12:01Cameron Abadi: And the universities have a complex relationship with them because in a sense they are the public articulation and the rather vivid and manifest articulation of something which we all know effectively the universities are doing. And this isn't peculiar to US universities, all universities do this around the world, right? More or less frankly, more or less openly, certainly Oxbridge does it, certainly the Grand École in France. But the criteria along which these distinctions are organized vary. And what these fraternities do is they really translate the kind of hail and hearty culture of a late 19th, early 20th century higher education into the present.

12:39Cameron Abadi: There used to be a time when if you met somebody who'd been to Cambridge and Oxford and you asked them what you did while you were there, you were not asking about their major, but about what sport they played. Literally, that's what the question meant, was were you a rugger person, were you a football person, were you a rower? That's the question. And that kind of culture was one in which you got a gentleman's seat, a gentleman's third. It means you passed and you showed up and you were sober enough to actually take the exam, but no one was anticipating you actually doing any study. And that culture of higher education was quite general and quite common and very well understood as the logic for the vast majority of people who weren't going to go on to be academics and were nerding out.

13:20Cameron Abadi: And it was quite efficient in a way, right? Because we didn't dissimulate, we didn't pretend we were trying to do anything else. Anyway, I think that perhaps have a kind of striking, have a striking and uncomfortable presence because they remind us of that history, which until recently, the kind of meritocratic revolution has changed that to a degree.

13:39Adam Tooze: Yeah, I'd love to unpack this some more because I'm interested that you would use the word organic in describing the relationship between fraternities and these institutions of higher education, because it seems to me like it could be a far more unstable relationship. You You know, if we were just to consider, yeah, the mission of fraternities as essentially social, like in the way you were describing, versus at least at some point, it seems like these institutions of higher education do have a distinct educational role above all else in a meritocratic society and knowledge economy, etc. it seems like there's a distorting effect that may be in place there.

14:24Adam Tooze: And there's almost like a distinct pathway that fraternities carve through these institutions of higher education that become available to students. I mean, yeah, what is the kind of sociological impact of this kind of social party pathway that fraternities create in colleges in the United States?

14:44Cameron Abadi: Well, I mean, I wasn't familiar with that phrase party pathway, but apparently it's a term of art used in educational sociology to describe something which is clearly true about American higher education, which is, and we see this in the social mobility data, the sort of Chetty kind of data, the large studies, because of the huge amounts of data that American universities collect. They're amazing laboratories for understanding social mobility. And there's a class of universities in the US, above all the state system and the city system, which are amazing generators of social mobility, moving huge cohorts of people from the bottom 20 % of the income distribution that are the top 20%, exactly what meritocratic public education ought to do.

15:24Cameron Abadi: And then there's the sort of places that I teach at, which are uber elite boutique Ivy League schools, which in some cases produced huge escalator social mobility, but in very large part reproduce existing structures of privilege within the top 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 % and have huge financial advantages that enabled us. And then in between, there's this huge slice of American university education, ranging from big private universities, some of the better endowed state schools to small liberal arts colleges and the rest, whose sociological function is actually quite indeterminate. And when you do kind of rate of return type studies of how much it costs the study there and what you get out in terms of income, there's increasingly alarming data, which shows that these are very bad investments because they don't belong in either of the two groups.

16:12Cameron Abadi: And one of the things those schools stand out for and are marked by, it would be invidious to name names, is precisely that what they do offer, a very large body of their students, is an extended adolescence or an adolescence on steroids. I mean, literally on steroids. Hyped up or hormonally supercharged because of all the crazy American drinking laws, siloed institutions where you can actually drink to excess, like European students do regularly from the age of about 16 onwards. But in the America, it's siloed in frats in part because it's illegal to drink outside. It's illegal to drink in the frat as well, but you can hide the keg better and you can obscure who's drinking it.

16:57Cameron Abadi: And often that's a monopoly of the frats rather than the sororities that don't go in for the alcohol supply business. But that's one of the way in which the boys draw people into their parties. And this is essentially what university is doing. And if you measure it in terms of meritocratic outcome, it's clearly just not, that's not what it's functioning to do. And these institutions know this and cater to it quite deliberately. So this is part of the logic of building huge investments in sports teams, for instance. Again, very hard for any other culture outside the US to really understand, But the highest paid people in many of the states of the United States are the college football coaches.

17:35Cameron Abadi: And they generate the cheer, they generate the enthusiasm on campuses, which is then echoed down and organically linked to the enthusiasm in the social clubs that organize that by the frats and the sororities. When you see those huge gangs of cheering Americans, which to anyone from the outside of the culture, look, frankly, fascist, a lot of the grassroots energy around that, the most wild characters with their shirts stripped off, are part of this culture. And the universities, this is a huge element of what it actually means to go to college in the US.

18:09Adam Tooze: Yeah, I mean, I would say the surprising thing is not that, you know, some people go through universities like this, but rather that it's a kind of formalized understanding and pathway through universities for some people. It's understood what some people are doing in colleges is to kind of emphasize this particular type of social life. It's what they're imagining when they enter and what they pursue when they're there. But on top of that, it's also something that the universities themselves seem to not only tolerate, but almost seemingly encourage to some extent. And that seems to me surprising, even though fraternities are these kind of institutions that kind of have this peripheral relationship to education.

18:56Adam Tooze: Why would universities, you know, embrace it in that way? And I guess, you know, as an economic factor, I would ask whether, yeah, are there sort of direct benefits that universities get from fraternities in this way? Are there sort of in the form of donations that interest universities? Or are there sort of other kinds of in-kind donations that universities benefit from, from sort of encouraging frat life on their campuses?

19:19Cameron Abadi: Yeah, the two that immediately come to mind is it's clear to go back to that image of the giant horde of American students cheering for their college. It's pretty clear, though the testing of this is difficult, but it's pretty clear that Greek system involved, so frat brothers, sorority sisters, are much, much more likely to give money to their alma mater. So maybe two to one, so maybe a 10 % contribution rate compared to a 5%. And it reflects the fact that for those students, the Greek life is the organic part of how they relate to the university. That's one element. And the other element is housing, in that the frats and sororities actually organize a certain amount of housing.

20:03Cameron Abadi: From the late 19th century onwards, the Greek system is buying accommodation. And that's either owned by them or there are, in many places, really symbiotic relationships where the university will lease land to a sorority or fraternity over a very considerable period of time at a peppercorn lease. lease. And so then they will own or build or manage housing. So there is a kind of outsourcing, an outsourcing function. I mean, and I think these are very valid and these are part of what stabilizes the Greek system in really big universities. And when faced with an outrageous incident like the one at Cornell, somebody, an outsider comes along and just says, why don't you just abolish them all?

20:45Cameron Abadi: How can these things exist? What are exactly the question you're asking? What Aren't they just the ticking time bomb? Isn't it extraordinary that more disasters like this don't happen? There is a shrugging response of just, do you understand what that would entail? This would alienate a huge constituency of our most loyal alumni. It would violate a shared tacit understanding that university is actually fundamentally about more than what's taught there, and really fundamentally about more. Of course, there has to be some teaching, but that's not really what gets celebrated most of the time in very many universities.

21:26Cameron Abadi: It's more the having been there, the sense of a membership, the joining of a lineage. Often it's multi-generational in fraternities and sororities. So those functional arguments are powerful, I think. And I think ultimately they may be one of the safety catches. You really don't want to alienate. In some universities, you'll have Greek system-affiliated people on the board of the university, which is the ultimate decision-making body in many cases. And given their links to politics and so on, any serious move against the Greek system would be, and especially if it was motivated by liberal concerns, would be understood as a kind of woke civil war move.

22:02Cameron Abadi: you know i think those sorts of factors have to be taken at least as seriously as just a matter of like how much money is raised or you know how much housing is managed we're going to take a

22:11Adam Tooze: quick break right here but we'll be back in a second to continue talking about fraternities

22:34Adam Tooze: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Is your home wish list just sitting in your cart? Well, get ready to hit checkout because Wayday at Wayfair is here.

23:05Adam Tooze: Save up to 80 % off everything home during the biggest sale of the year. Whether you're refreshing the living room, upgrading the bedroom,

23:13Cameron Abadi: or finally tackling that home project you've been putting off, now's the time to save big.

23:18Adam Tooze: Shop Wayfair's Wayday sale and get up to 80 % off now till October 26th. These deals won't last. Go to Wayfair.com today. Wayfair, every style, every home. obviously we're talking about the risks of these fraternities uh on u.s campuses and if we're talking about risk then it only seems natural to ask about insurance i mean how are fraternities insured ultimately against all the risks they pose in terms of the social lives of students that they encourage and how does that play out in terms of yeah the governance of these fraternity organizations in general.

23:58Cameron Abadi: Well, I mean, you did some research on this and I came out with all this amazing stuff, right? About, I mean, they actually engage in purchasing groups, like, so the fraternities get together and buy collective insurance. They have various pledges. So if you want to, obviously, if you seriously want to reduce the risk of mishaps with, you know, with young people, and especially with young men, you want to keep them sober. And so there are kind of dry pledges, which reduce your insurance bills. And insurance is a key element in lots of these stories like most college accommodation, like the apartment I live in in New York, Columbia owned, you know, there's an absolute ban on smoking, because that's also an insurance risk.

24:33Cameron Abadi: But the other thing is that the way in which they handle these liabilities is legal structure. So you basically have a three-way division with an entity that owns the property, which is where bad stuff might happen. You have a local chapter, which is a version of the fraternity or sorority in a particular college. And that's distinct, again, from the mother organization at the national level. And so you have like a three-tiered separation of risk and liability. If things go wrong, you can slice and cut this at different levels. So that is the way I think that the risks are overwhelmingly handled as you parcel them out.

25:11Cameron Abadi: Of course, you know, there's a self-conscious effort and we should take it seriously. Like these aren't all bad actors by any means. And this is just sensible. In a litigious culture like the United States, It's the more legal protection you can get against litigation, the better. Anyone in their right mind would engage in this kind of structure. So one shouldn't interpret it as some sort of Machiavellian method to create, you know, dense of sexual violence. That's not the plan. The plan is just this is a sensible way of stretching. It has the effect that when bad things happen, it's difficult to pin liability back.

25:45Adam Tooze: Yeah, and reading about this is also clear that there are legal structures in place that that protect sororities and fraternities, essentially? I mean, you know, there's all sorts of laws that make it hard to hold fraternities accountable. I'm curious how you would describe the legal situation that fraternities are embedded in.

26:06Cameron Abadi: Well, that division of responsibility is key for the legal issue, because who's liable in that kind of setup is, you know, something bad happens in a frat house in a particular university, where does the chain go? The question then is also, of course, towards the university. But then two decisions were made in the early 70s, 1972 for both of them, which I think is indicative because you could say that's the beginning of the cultural war moment in American history that we've been living in for the last 50 years. I mean, it's a bit arbitrary to say that. You could say civil rights movement, but nevertheless, these two.

26:35Cameron Abadi: And one was a ruling by courts, a high-level court, which basically ruled that public colleges could not deny recognition to student organizations, even if they regarded their goals as disreputable or not contributing to the educational purpose. So that meant that a general liberal crackdown was ruled out. And then, remarkably, the education amendments of 1972, which include Title IX, the basis on which various types of anti-discrimination legislation action are brought in the United States, the famous regulation that pushes, for instance, towards the equal treatment of men's and women's sport in the US creates women's soccer in the US and so on.

27:18Cameron Abadi: It exempts fraternities and sororities from the basic rules because they would lose their rationale if girls could apply for admission to fraternities. So the Title IX actually exempts them. So it's not just a matter of legacy. There was actually conscious effort by the legislator to create a carve out which would enable the fraternities and sororities to continue in their classical conservative kind of two worlds kind of form with polite lovely ladylike sororities on the one hand and then the frats with their very very different kind of culture on the same campus often you know side by side so that's key and then the third element is the university here so what is the university's role.

28:04Cameron Abadi: And the basic shift is that from the late 1960s onwards, in loco parentis, understandings of the role of university and their role with regard to students have been progressively weakened. So the university is not some sort of fundamentally separate legal sphere, it's not a family-like structure. To an outsider, what I find remarkable is how much of the loco parentis in loco parentis understanding still remains right the this is key to the cornell the cornell disaster that's not just a crime committed by people in their early 20s against each other like so many other crimes no doubt sexual violence happens in ithaca you know most weekends when people get drunk but that happens in a public space outside a bar or in a parking lot or whatever whereas this happens in a we think in a frat house associated with the university and all of a sudden then there's this whole reporting chain which has a cornell police department of sorts which there does and does not pass on accurate information to ithaca's police department which there does and does not you know so so there is actually this intermediation of authority which you know has elements of a kind of pluralistic legal structure that is that is frankly i find vaguely bizarre like because it undermines and it punctures the The basic simple understanding is that once you reach the age of maturity, you're subject to the rules of the law of the land, end of story.

29:33Cameron Abadi: And in the end, that's true in these cases as well. But it runs to all of these other tiers, at which point the university, despite no longer being the truly paternalistic institution that it was until the late 60s, is necessarily entangled. It's naive to imagine the university can stand that much as somebody like me who just liked to teach class. I'm working against my prejudices in this show because my instinct would be just like, raise the lot and have done with it. But that's just a total misunderstanding of what American education is about and how these institutions function. And the kind of weird sphere that we inhabit in Columbia right now with the gates closed and an internal security system that's separate from New York.

30:15Cameron Abadi: And Mamdani suing us to reopen what is actually a thoroughfare of the city. it's uh it's more complex than that kind of tabula rasa progressivism would uh encourage us to think

30:26Adam Tooze: yeah sometimes i do think these differences have to do with the age at which people enter these institutions and and you know here in germany it's not uncommon for people to be going to university you know maybe they've graduated high school they tend to graduate a bit later here they might take a year off and they'll be 20 years old when they enter university and will have been drinking since they were 16 at least sure and it's a very so it's a completely different assumption about their relative maturity and what they are doing at these institutions uh versus a 17 year old showing up and living on their own for the first time and yeah the universities then have a you know necessarily some parental uh role i guess even as strange as that may sound uh when we're talking about yeah partly people in their 20s but i guess in talking about all these peculiarities, it only seems natural to ask whether there are any comparable institutions anywhere else in the world, or is this really just a kind of sui generis, specifically US phenomenon?

31:30Cameron Abadi: Yeah, I mean, it's really funny because one of the things I learned in doing this show is that my prejudice, which is that the American system must be derivative of European models. I grew up in Heidelberg, after all, which is one of the great centers of the German Borschenschaft tradition, So the German student fraternity of legend, I think, of the patriots of the post-Napoleonic period. And there were big frat houses in Eidelberg. In fact, if you're visited as you grow up to the castle, you're actually surrounded by frat houses. So I assume that this was, in fact, a European model that was widely adopted in the US.

32:01Cameron Abadi: And there are frats notably in Germany, in Belgium, in the Netherlands. But it turns out, historically speaking, that they don't really in any simple sense predate. And, you know, though it's true that American higher education in the late 19th century adopts European models, on the one hand, the Ivy League take after Oxbridge to a considerable extent. and on the other hand the research university model is derived from the german tradition and some of the best american universities blend the two in a very powerful way the frat culture in the u.s is more you know it's more it's more co it coincides with the development of what we think of as modern fraternities and it goes back to the same common basis of enlightenment of secret society organization of freemasonry and then the big breakout in the europe as in the u.s is in the early 19th century and from then on kind of urbanization and industrialization and uplift and growth take over.

32:55Cameron Abadi: And so you have this kind of social formation that is similar. It has different modalities, like fencing is more important in Germany, but certain ball games are played universally. American football derives from soccer and rugby. So there are these sort of organic links that run between. In the present day, the huge difference is that, notably in Germany, which had the biggest frat system in Europe by the late 19th century and where the really brutal bloodletting of saber fighting. So this isn't, you know, dueling with, you know, rapiers as we see in the Olympics. This is two guys with Olympic style headgear with their cheeks exposed who stand very close to each other and slash at each other with sabers, which are about an inch wide and razor sharp.

33:44Cameron Abadi: And the honor of a frat boy in Germany in the late 19th century, a schmisser. So these big pronounced scars on the cheek, if you look at pictures of German generals and officers from World War I and World War II, you see a lot of them. Those aren't war wounds. Those wounds they got at university. That system, though it was originally liberal, became extensively nationalist before World War I, often very anti-Semitic, and then fell into disfavor really in the 50s and 60s because it became more and more closely associated with the neo -Nazi or the post-Nazi and extreme nationalist side. And that's where the vast majority of frats in Germany are now located.

34:21Cameron Abadi: They exist. They are part of the AFD milieu, notably in the West. They want to reincorporate the old traditions of, you know, Grand East German universities. And they belong in that scene. And though I think it's probably true to say that in most American campuses, frats tend right wing, certainly in Columbia, I think that's true. And I imagine it's true in other big universities in the US. Yes, it's nowhere near the same sort of, you know, intensities in Germany. The system which seems closest, oddly, and I didn't know this until recently, is that the Dutch have in the old elite universities of the Netherlands, there is a frat culture that is in fact quite similar to the US system with frat houses and ties and pins.

35:08Cameron Abadi: But it's a kind of blend because it's very explicitly old world. So it's quite fogey. It's quite tweedy. It's quite explicitly an embrace of a form which is recognized as archaic, but it's kind of a lifestyle choice. Whereas in big Greek campuses in the US, it's like your first point of call for a social life. And that's not true to the same extent in Dutch culture with big public universities, though it's interesting that it has persisted there. And it doesn't have the same truly obnoxious right-wing politics that the Brotschenschaften have in modern Germany. So it's more akin in that sense, and maybe a little unfair to their politics, to the dining clubs of Oxford at Cambridge, the notorious Bullingdon Club that a lot of the Tories came out of the 2010s, but bigger than that.

36:01Cameron Abadi: So the dining club culture in Oxbridge is truly boutique. In the Netherlands, the frats are a bigger phenomenon, and none of them, all of them, are dwarfed by the U.S. system.

36:12Adam Tooze: Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, it strikes me that in the U.S. case, what's really distinct is the fact that it's a mass phenomenon, and that the publicity is essential to it. I mean, it is a kind of so upfront and so public. And yeah, there are obviously social institutions that I guess are similar, but they are somehow more private elsewhere. You know, even if they're not technically private, they are somehow in the imaginary a bit more, yeah, in the background. But that's America for you, taking something and making it bigger, louder, more upfront. And yeah, you know, impossible to ignore.

36:54Adam Tooze: And, you know, obviously sometimes to the detriment of all, as we're all seeing right now in Cornell, perhaps. But I guess that'll bring this conversation to an end, though. And of course, we'll be back, as always, in a week with new data points.

37:12Adam Tooze: Ones and Twos is written and edited by Adam and me and produced by Claudia Tatey. The show is made possible through the support of foreign policy readers and Ones and Twos listeners. As always, we love getting listener feedback. You can leave voice messages on the Ones and Twos homepage on foreignpolicy.com or email us. That's podcasts at foreignpolicy.com. Or you can tweet us. That's at OnesandTwosPod. I'm Cameron Abadi. Thank you very much for listening, and we'll be back in your feed next week.

37:57Adam Tooze: Is your home wish list just sitting in your cart? Well, get ready to hit checkout because Wayday at Wayfair is here. Save up to 80 % off everything home during the biggest sale of the year. Whether you're refreshing the living room, upgrading the bedroom, or finally tackling that home project you've been putting off, now's the time to save big. Shop Wayfair's Wayday sale and get up to 80 % off now till October 26th. These deals won't last. Go to Wayfair.com today. Wayfair, every style, every home.