Ban Frats

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1:56Susan Matthews: Hey there, before we start the show, I just wanted to turn the microphone around and ask you a few questions. Seriously, right now, if you go to slate.com slash whatnextsurvey, you are going to find a form with just a few questions we'd love for you to answer. Questions about what you like about the show, what you don't like, how you listen. Yeah, it's quick, it's easy, it helps us a lot. We want your feedback and we're going to use it as we think about the future of the show. So go on over to slate.com slash whatnextsurvey. You can fill it out as you listen.

2:37Susan Matthews: Susan, how soon after the Cornell rape case got reported, did you know you wanted to write something about fraternities? Ah, immediately. Susan Matthews is the executive editor of Slate. And to know why the alleged rape at Cornell immediately made her think about the problems of Greek life, you need to know a few things. First of all, she went to Dartmouth. More than half of the students there are part of the Greek system. But also, Susan was the editor of her college paper. And she is still on the board. So she is talking to college students a lot. It's not often, I think, that these stories spill out into regular land, regular people land.

3:29But I went to a frat school. And there hasn't really been a time where this story has gone away from my life and world. When you say this story, you mean the story of what? But Greek life, sexual assault on campus, students trying to figure out how to change something when it feels like the administration is willing to pay lip service to it, but it's not really on board. There's a real tension and a push and pull between people. And one of the things that I've seen that I think is the most interesting is that people come in. They spend a few years. They realize what's happening. They're seniors and they have influence and they want to change something.

4:12And then they graduate. and it just starts all over again.

4:20Susan Matthews: The article you ended up writing, its title was Ban All the Frats. Pretty straightforward. The funny thing is you loved Greek life. I loved the culture for a time. I still loved it. When I go back, I like to play a game of Pong. I had Pong tables at my wedding, outdoors with my friends. Like it was fun, but I loved it. And even while I was there, I knew that it was a problem. Really? Did you just like push that part down? You're like, that's fine for me. I think that I knew that it was not fine for everyone. My freshman year, very early on, one of my very good friends was sexually assaulted in a frat, like super early, Like freshman fall, like in the month of September.

5:12And I think that I think that I did what everybody is doing with this story, which is that you think it's a bad apple. It's this person is evil. This is the problem, but it's not the system. because it makes you feel safer. If I can get rid of this one person or avoid this person, it will be okay. And getting rid of the whole system felt totally impossible to me at the time. I have to tell you, Mary, like my husband wasn't a frat. And his mom went to our college. And when I wrote this piece, she was like, Susan, congratulations. Like that was so brave. And my husband had not yet read the piece and was like, oh, like I could tell that he was irritated with it.

6:10And I think that he really self-identifies with his frat was totally different. It didn't have Greek letters, actually. Like it was so it was it was the one that was sort of outside the norm. But I still can't get the affirmative argument out of anyone of why we should have fraternities now. And like if you were making a college from scratch anywhere, why you would start with that system. If I'd asked you like 10, 15 years ago if you were going to write a story telling colleges to ban frats, would you believe me? Yes and no. So I would say that five years ago, I would have said I would have written the piece that was make all frats co-ed, like just integrate the Greek system.

6:58That's that's enough. Now you're like burning all down.

7:01Susan Matthews: Yeah. Today on the show, the case for banning frats. I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next. Stick around.

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10:43Susan Matthews: So, Susan, we talked about how you went to Dartmouth. You kind of didn't go there for the Greek life, but you ended up enjoying it and being part of it. You did seem to have this realization that happened over the course of years about Greek life. And I want to kind of walk you through that if we can. Like in your article that you wrote for Slate, you write specifically about a year after you graduated, a student broke ranks and said, hey, like this is bad. And wrote an op-ed for the Dartmouth student paper illuminating why. Can you explain like what that guy said and whether that was kind of the beginning of you rethinking here?

11:29I can definitely explain what he said. I think that I was already a little bit on the path and we can get to that. But he, Andrew Lose, he came to, I already said that I was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper. And so I had graduated. But I actually heard about this first before the newspaper even published it. Because the editor-in-chief came to me and was like, we have this op-ed from this guy. And I need to figure out how to fact check it. Because the allegations are, like, it's going to cause drama. She knew. It was like red hot. Everyone knew as soon as they touched it. 100 percent. Yes, it was red hot.

12:05And so she came to me when we talked through how we would vet it and talking to brothers who had graduated and so on. And what he wrote was, it is astonishing that we go to this college where at that point, Jim Young Kim was college president. He went on to be the president of the World Bank. He was a public health professor from Harvard before he came to Dartmouth. He was like in Paul Farmer's universe. Like he had a whole specific thing. And he came here. And like you said, with your public health brain, you look at this and you think, what is this?

12:36Susan Matthews: Like bad things are happening here. We should want to solve the bad things. Like remove all of your like emotional baggage with like a fraternity, a college, a thing you love, blah, blah, blah. She's like, we can all agree sexual assault is bad. We can all agree that people, you know, drinking to the point of like vomiting or vomiting blood or whatever, that's bad. We should want to stop that. And those things are happening in fraternity community. And they were happening in plain sight. So the things that Andrew Los, the student, wrote in his op-ed, the most memorable to me was swimming through a kiddie pool filled with feces and vomit.

13:06The other most memorable one is the vomlet, which is an omelet. Oh, my God. The vomlet will live with me forever. Yes. It will live with everyone forever. An omelet made of vomit. Those things were things that would be happening in basements. But, like, every fall you saw the boys pledging. They all had to do different things. Like, some of them were sort of mundane. Like, they had to grow mustaches and carry lunch boxes. But there was this mentality where it was very clear that you go through this process where you are marked, you are embarrassed, and then you are brought through to the other side where you will eventually do that to the next group.

13:42And we know this from like military training and all kinds of other groupthink. When you go through that process, it is dehumanizing and demoralizing and it creates a culture inside of the place where that happens. That I think is what sets up frats to be even more dangerous for the boys and the girls, for both genders.

14:04Susan Matthews: It also bonds you. A hundred percent. I talked to my 18-year-old son about this. He's like, well, this is a way that you quickly build bonds with other people by going through a horror together. And people have been asking, how could the Chi-Fi brothers have looked at those Snapchats and not done something? And the reason is that because they were so indoctrinated to just defend the brotherhood, to just look the other way, to just they had already probably seen things going on inside of that house that would be not something they would want their mothers or professors or anybody else to see. And not reporting as part of the culture.

14:47Yeah. So I think that that explains the psychological pull to just say, this is fine. Yeah.

14:54Susan Matthews: I mean, last week, just to bring it back to today, Cornell University's president said, more and more, we've seen a disturbing culture emerge in some of these fraternities. I want to pause on that with you because it stood out to me that the way he's framing things here in the wake of these awful allegations on his campus that he's being accused of doing way too little about. The way he's framing it as a new thing that's happening here, some kind of cultural change, I'm not sure that is fair. And I'm really, really disturbed by it. Yeah. I think that there have been some arguments that I think are interesting that pair the rise of pornography and different kinds of digital culture with what is happening inside of frats, but 100 % what was happening inside of frats was a problem to begin with.

15:57I mean, you look back at the history of many of these places. This is one of the things that I wrote about in my piece because you asked, like, when did you start to become disillusioned by this? And I think that one of the main things was we had these houses that, and by houses, I mean, literally physical houses. We used to call them physical plants all the time because it was so confusing to go back and forth between a Greek house and an actual house. But

16:23Susan Matthews: one of the things you point out in your article, which I think is really important, is like the frats provide housing for the university. They're doing a service for the university. A hundred percent. So on frat row, when I was a student, there were two houses that were dark. They were shuttered. Nobody lived there. And it's because they had been kicked off of campus in the 90s and early 2000s for hazing and sexual abuse of women. And like I said, I was the nerd on the newspaper. So we had in one of our offices, we had this wall of bound volumes of every single newspaper that the paper had published since the 1700s.

16:59And I would go through them for various reasons. But to flip through them and read through why these houses were banned was so chilling. And I did that because when I was a student, they were both re-recognized and brought back. And one of them was banned because they were circulating an internal newspaper that talked about brothers having sex with certain women, talked about that they had a peephole where they would watch this happen. Like the things that were published in this internal newspaper were bad enough that when it was seen by the outside world, they had no choice but to ban them, to de-recognize them.

17:37And it just took a cycle before they came back. And I think that this gets back to this whole question of like, is it the individual culture at one fret is bad? Is it a bad apple situation like what that Cornell professor is or what the Cornell president is trying to say? It's not that beta or zeta psi, these two frats that came back, were necessarily going to bring back specific traditions that were uniquely bad. In the 15 years since I graduated that I've been paying attention, things have ebbed and flowed between which houses are the popular houses, which houses are the houses that women are kind of like, you don't really want to go there.

18:18The house and the bouse, as my son has told me, the top house, the bottom house. Yes, it totally changes. It's not specific to any house. It's just the culture.

18:29Susan Matthews: Yeah. I mean, there is certainly something happening in fraternity culture. Like there's this 2007 study finding fraternity members commit three times as many sexual assaults as people who aren't fraternity members, which is kind of shocking. Like the idea that just this one indicator, which, yes, could be an indicator for other things about you. But like that this one characteristic seems to be associated with poor behavior writ large. Yeah, which I would say that the number one behavior that it's maybe pulling out more than any characteristic about you is binge drinking and drug use. And we know that those things correlate way more than than almost anything else.

19:12So here's a question.

19:15Susan Matthews: You say ban the frats. Do you think we should ban the sororities? Of course. So walk me through that. Yeah, I think so. Here's one thing that I want to make really clear, which is the reason why those rats were sitting empty houses on Dartmouth campus, 30 feet away from the library, where we had a housing crisis, where it's a small town, like they were building dorms out to the edge of where students could walk. The winter is really cold. There were buses. It's because the university did not own them. They were not in charge. The fraternities were in charge. And so they were just going to do whatever they were going to do.

19:54And the thing that actually you asked, by the time I graduated, what was I the most annoyed about? By the time I graduated, I was the most pissed about the distance and the difference between the sororities and the fraternities. What do you mean by when you say that? If you were a woman at Dartmouth, you had a totally different experience with Greek life than men had with fraternities. And that's not even because of what you were experiencing inside of the fraternity. When I was a student, there were probably 15 frats where each house owned their house, had tons of money, had this physical property, and had total autonomous independence from the college.

20:34The sororities, there were seven of them. None of them had their own houses. None of them had the established money that the frats had. And so how this played out is that when women were pledging a sorority, the houses, the classes, the pledge classes were twice as large. Instead of 30 kids, it was 60 kids because there were half as many. And in the frat, my husband, I said he was Greek, his best friends are all from his fraternity. My best friends were not. The women were not as kind of filtered into their houses because there wasn't the same cohesion. There wasn't the same ownership of the space.

21:15It wasn't the same social center of our lives as it was for the men. And for the men, it was the center of their lives because they had so much more institutional, not from the college, but from the frats, support throughout that whole process.

21:29Susan Matthews: Well, some might say that and say like, oh, we need to empower the sororities to be just as in charge as the frat houses. Yeah, I think that first of all, well, I think that I agree that that is a road to go down. And if I go down that road, the answer is there's a limited resource here that we're dealing with. So you could try to take some of the fraternities away from the men and give them to women. I don't think that that would go over really well. I actually think that making the houses co-ed is the first step in that process. And that is where I was basically when I graduated and within the five years after of just like, wait, why are we doing this at all?

22:11Why are the women struggling with this totally different landscape compared to the men? And why wouldn't we just like the college went co-ed 50 years ago? Why would we not make these institutions co-ed as well? Like in the newspaper, we talked about how it like two years after the college went co-ed, a woman was in charge of the newspaper. The secret societies integrated every single other club and thing was co-ed. Why on earth are you separating people out for Greek life?

22:45Susan Matthews: OK, just LOL to the fact that it's like the secret society at Dartmouth. I love that it's like, OK, these very Gilmore Girls. It is. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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24:59Susan Matthews: I guess some people I think would say, well, the sororities do an important thing, a much softer thing than the fraternities do. We should be empowering them, not getting rid of them. You know, it's really these frats that are the problem. What would you say to them? I think that there's a way in which when men come together, they do things that burst into the news in this horrific way. But I don't think that when women come together in these kinds of systems, it's all peaches and daisies either. There's messes in that situation, too. I mean, just in terms of our sorority culture was really different.

25:37But like Southern sorority culture and what they do to the girls who are trying to get into them. There's this story that I read in New York Mag a few weeks, maybe months ago, about how when they're pledging, these girls are trying to take Ozempic when they're like 19 years old. Like, I think that there are problems with sororities that aren't necessarily on par with these problems, but it's not good either. The violence is internalized, not externalized. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think that the sororities are fine. The frats aren't is an answer. I think that the Greek life becoming co-ed is a really interesting answer.

26:18I think that's what the Wesleyan campus did. Yeah, Michael Roth just wrote a really interesting op-ed for The Times in which I think that you can kind of read between the lines and see how he navigated this problem where the fraternities are kind of institutions that have power in and of themselves. that he talks about the fact that there are some fraternities who didn't go along with it and have to kind of operate underground and off campus. And then there are the fraternities who decided to go co-ed and they have a very different relationship to the campus and to, you know, being a central social influence in that space.

26:58So I think that going co-ed before, or as a last resort before taking them away, definitely is a better option. And I think that that's where I was about five years ago. And I think that that's because by the time I graduated, I was so mad about this difference in power. And I remember so clearly realizing, like, everybody talks about one of the things that was brought up to me about Cornell was like, wasn't there sexual assault training? Aren't there sober monitors at these parties? Like, aren't there these things that you can do? And if you haven't had a lot of experience of watching like at a frat house, the bouncer and the bartender and the DJ and the social chair, like every single aspect of creating a party environment, if that is all powered by the same brotherhood who has these incentives that we've talked about, it creates a space that they're not trying to make it dangerous.

28:00It just inherently is. If you're at a club, the people who are running the establishment as a business are not also going to be incentivized to be partying and drinking. But if you're at a fraternity, even the people who are the sober monitors or the sexual assault, you know, trained hall monitors as well, like those people are going to their college students. They're not paid to be doing this. They're going to end up partying with the people that they're trying to protect. It's a really, really difficult dynamic to ask them to responsibly take on that social infrastructure.

28:36Susan Matthews: OK, so we're at this interesting moment right now when it comes to the conversation about what happened at Cornell and Greek life and where we go from here. Like you've got New York State Attorney General Tish James doing her investigation. Then at Cornell, you've got this separate process going on. And the faculty senate is considering a resolution of no confidence in the school's administrators. In light of that, you're hearing people like Cornell's president speak out, basically make this argument, which will be very familiar, I think, that, okay, if we ban frats, if we do the Susan Matthews plan, it's just going to drive all of this bad behavior underground.

29:17Susan Matthews: background. What do you think of that argument? Yeah, I have a lot of empathy for that argument. I think about it because when I think back to my experience at Dartmouth, I think, wow, it would have been so much different. It would have been so much less fun. It would have been all of these things. And I've been thinking about that a lot recently because I feel like where I've come down is realizing when I think about taking away the frats, I think of all these things going away. But what if instead we think about what could exist in their place? And one of the things that I really think about is what would it have been like if I had been able to be friends with a group of girls and guys that was just like my high school friends throughout college?

30:07It would have felt really different. And I know how hard it is to, I think that students, particularly, you know, sophomores who have just pledged and seniors who are going to be in their senior spring. There are always going to be all of these reasons for college students to be like, just let me have this. Like, it's my turn. There's such an issue there. And I think that it's really, really hard. Dartmouth has tried for a really long time not to get rid of Greek life, but to supplement it with these kinds of housing communities. And I think that one of the real problems is that people are assigned to them and they're not self-selected.

30:51And so I think that what you have to do is you have to really pull back and include people in what the new system would be from the ground up. But it's really, really difficult because colleges are places where the students are cycling through every four years and they just want to have their experience when they're used to it. It's the other side of that is that it would maybe be six hard years and then you would get through it to the other side of it. I just think that - But you have to take the punch.

31:18Susan Matthews: Do you know what I mean? Like it's like so - A hundred percent. Chronicle of Higher Ed sort of looked at these comments from Cornell's president and like, will things go underground? Like let's look at places where they have gotten rid of frats, which is like Williams College, which, okay, much smaller place. I think there's a lot, and it like did it decades ago. So many, many factors that are different now. And things did go underground, but you had to really actually invest too in the students. You had to be like, okay, if we get rid of this thing, how are we investing in the students in order to make this a place that they want to be?

31:51Susan Matthews: And that requires asking a lot of questions. Instead of outsourcing your college culture to these organizations, you need to be like, oh, what is our college culture? What do we want it to be? And I think maybe the colleges aren't really used to asking themselves that question. I mean, one thing that I want to bring up in addition to Michael Roth, the Wesleyan president, when I was in college, I remember the Middlebury president at the time was really leading this push to lower the drinking age. And like, it is really crazy when we're talking about this and everyone's acknowledging what's happening in frats and the ketamine use and all this stuff that we're still like.

32:28But it's totally it totally makes sense that the drinking age is 21 years old and like students can't go out and get a beer at the local bar. Like when I mentioned that whole thing about the infrastructure of the party being totally by the people who are participating in the party, you know where that's not happening? At the local bar on Main Street, where like if the students, they're still going to drink, they're still going to do bad things. They're still going to mess up their college students. But if they're doing it in town, in public, in a place, there are just so many more guardrails that are there.

32:58And so I really feel like, yes, of course, you have to invest in the infrastructure and how are we going to create this college culture? I also thought I remember being so impressed by that Middlebury professor and being like, duh, this would make life so much better on college campuses. I have a friend who went to McGill, who when she read the Cornell story, she was just basically like, what? Because they didn't have that. They were in Canada. They could go out to a bar. They had total power and control over it. And I think that really what you're seeing, it's so interesting to bring up the divide between the faculty and the administration, because as a college newspaper nerd, that tension was there all the time.

33:37My father is a college professor. I hear so much about that tension. And I just have to tell you, the administrators aren't up for it. Like college administration right now in so many places is so weak and so invested in rankings and figuring out how to play the admission system of getting the lowest admission number possible. And all these things that I really, truly feel is not invested in figuring out what life on campus is like for students and how to make it the best possible.

34:09Susan Matthews: Yeah. I mean, we've kind of made college into this experience that is like the equivalent of like sending your kid into the woods and like seeing if they survive. Do you know what I mean? But we haven't really acknowledged that. We're still saying it's like about getting a four year degree, but it's like not. It's like for a certain group and class of parents. And I want to acknowledge that. It is like a way to like, oh, now you have a little freedom and you're trying things. It's my fun four years. And then you hear about the students who are like, wait, just don't eliminate the frats for my year.

34:42And we wonder where that mentality is coming from. Like we've positioned the whole thing as this wild experience that's going to define their life.

34:49Susan Matthews: Yeah. I mean, I can see both sides of the argument about banning frats, like the for and the against. You're going to make the affirmative case. I want to hear it, Mary. Well, no, it's not an affirmative case for frats. I would never build them from the ground up. I think you've really put your finger on something important there. But I think banning any behavior, it does drive it underground. And I also wonder, who can ban the frats? Sometimes the frats own their property. They can just move off campus. They are national organizations not affiliated with one college in particular. So it really gets into these sticky questions of like, if we were going to ban the frats, how are we even going to do it, right?

35:29Susan Matthews: And then I think they just have this infrastructure. There are probably like senators and congresspeople who are deeply connected to their fraternities. And it's going to be a hard slog to ban the frats, right? Here's what I think. I think a couple of things. First of all, I think it is useful to see what happened in Cornell in concert with other episodes of dehumanization and abuse at fraternities, like hazing. I would really like to see victims of sexual assault from fraternities find shared community with people who have been injured in hazing and have other beefs with fraternities because I think that their cause is the same.

36:13Susan Matthews: I really think that they are – they can do interesting things by making this a less gendered fight. It's about the dehumanization, like you said. So I think that, first of all. And then I also think like controlling behavior also comes down a lot of the times not from starting with a ban, but from like starting with financial control. Like I think about, you know, if what we want to prevent is the sexual assaults, right? We want to prevent or the hazing, the abuse. How do we do that? Like I think about car accidents. How do we get everyone to wear their seatbelts? Like insurers were involved. Do you know what I mean?

36:52Susan Matthews: thinking about the money levers you can pull. But it may be that you need to do all these things at once, too. That's the other thing, I think, which is like, maybe we just need to try it all. So that's, I guess, where I come down. Does any of that make sense to you? Yeah, I think that that idea of bringing the victims of these institutions together makes a lot of sense, because I think that one of the things where I feel very affected right now, in particular by the fact that this is the first case of this happening since my child was born. He's a boy. I've thought so much about what do I do if he gets to Dartmouth and it's the same?

37:31Like, what would I want him to do? That idea of it's a non-gendered problem that people go through these things and come out harmed. I think that that applies to the Cornell 7 themselves. Like, I do not necessarily think that these kids are broken and are awful and should necessarily be sent to prison. I'm not the law. I understand that there's a lot. There's a different thing there. But I think that there is a real case that these students, these members of this frat, it would be fascinating to see what they went through before they came to be participating in that Snapchat.

38:14Susan Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. But, man, it is so hard to look at those messages in that group chat and just think, how did you get here? Totally. How did you get to this place? If I was a mom of one of those children, I really don't. Children, I don't know. They're not children. They're men. But like. They're men. That's the problem. They're in this nether. They're in this in-between world. That's the problem with the way that we've positioned. College. They're guys. They're boys. They're in this in-between space. Yeah. Yeah. I just feel like. That there should be consequences. That's the problem you want to solve.

38:51Susan Matthews: I feel like when you talk. When you're talking. How did they get to the point where like. Yeah. Those messages were in a world of OK behavior, of non-reportable behavior. This is really where I feel like there is never going to be a moment at Cornell again where the public scrutiny and the embarrassment of what happened inside of their Greek houses is higher. Let's hope. And even now, it is not obvious that they're like, all right, this is the tipping point. Let's tear this thing down. Like they're not, they're still so far on the like, maybe we can slide through this and wild. That no one's like, yeah, we should just ban the frats.

39:29Susan Matthews: Especially because at Cornell, they've had like years of problems leading up to this at the fraternities. 100%. Susan, I'm really grateful for your time. Thanks for coming on the show and talking it out. Thank you as always, Mary. Susan Matthews is our executive editor at Slate. and that's the show what next is produced by evan campbell madeline thames du charme and patrick fort page osborne is the senior supervising producer of what next and what next tbd neil obel is our executive producer of podcasts here at slate ben richmond is the senior director of podcast operations and i'm mary harris go say hey over on blue sky i'm at mary harris thanks for listening catch you back here next time

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