True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities

John Hechinger, “True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities,”  Kindle Version, 2017, 254 pp.

The author spent over two years traveling across the country visiting fraternities trying to understand the jarring conflict between fraternity’s words and deeds with special attention to Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE).  Words drawing the author’s attention are such as those in The True Gentleman 123-word passage all members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity must memorize. The passage stresses propriety, self-control, frankness, sincerity, sympathy, humility, and respect for the rights and feelings of others.  The True Gentleman is ‘a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.’  Contrast those words with the SAE fraternity song that went viral on a recent video: “There will never be a nigger in SAE,…You can hang him from a tree”…etc.  And then there are the fatalities and injuries of pledges during hazing as well as sexual assault incidents at the alcohol-fueled parties at frat houses.  Today, social fraternities seem hobbled by their past.  With their history of segregation, racial hostility, and misogyny, these organizations embody many of the unresolved conflicts still plaguing the US (pg. 249).

(In NYT on 1/8/18 latest conviction incident reported, here’s link)

This book is about social fraternities, not Academic fraternities like Phi Beta Kappa which dispensed with discrimination long before social fraternities did.  Even women were admitted as early as the 1870s.

My Notes:

Pg. 6:  The Indiana University Foundation reports that Greeks, which comprise 19 percent of its database of alumni, made 60 percent of all donations.  (This is typical across the country).  Note: one in six men who attend a four-year college full-time belongs to a fraternity. (pg. 8)

Pg. 7:  Much has been written about fraternities’ misbehavior.  Insurance companies have rated fraternities just above toxic waste dumps because of claims related to drinking, hazing, and sexual assault.

Pg. 25:  In the modern era, drinking fueled the re-emergence of fraternities after their decline in the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s.  And, today, one fact is undeniable: fraternity men are the heaviest drinkers on college campuses.  Sorority women are not far behind.

Pg. 28:  Over the last five years, more than 130 chapters have been disciplined, nearly always because of behavior related to drinking.  That’s a remarkable figure considering that the number of chapters and provisional outposts, called colonies, peaked at 245 in 2014.

Pg. 56:  A running total of casualties counts at least one death a year at fraternities in the US from 1969 through 2016.  Almost all of the more than sixty fraternity-related deaths from 2005 through 2013 resulted from alcohol, hazing, or a combination of the two.

Pg. 115:  The first couple of months of school are a particularly vulnerable time for students with regard to heavy drinking.  Delaying rush makes a lot of sense.  But Princeton, Duke and Vanderbilt are among only eighty of eight hundred campuses with fraternities that require the organization to defer the recruitment of freshmen, typically for a semester or longer.

Pg. 120:  Note:  39 percent of senators in the 113^th US Congress, and one-fourth of US representatives, belonged to Greek organizations—as well as one-third of all Supreme Court justices and about 40 percent of US presidents. 

Pg. 155:  The hierarchical structure of fraternities (as well as almost anything), especially during pledging, strips recruits of their moral compass.  (Think Mai Lai in Vietnam).  Just as they don’t step in when witnessing violent hazing, they remain silent when confronted with racism. 

Pg. 218:  The political structure of most fraternities resembled the US before the Constitution when the federal government had little authority.  At SAE, each chapter functioned, by and large, autonomously.  The national organization could confer a charter – and suspend it.  It could offer guidance, but its national staff of thirty-nine was hardly in a position to police 15,000 undergraduates.  At national conventions held once every two years, a two-thirds majority had to approve a change.  Because only 1 percent of alumni were active volunteers, undergraduates ran the show (asylum might be a better word).

Pg. 238:  At Williams College, a man named John Edward Sawyer led one of the earliest campaigns against the excesses of Greek life.  In the 1950s, for example, Williams, then all male, banned freshman rushing.  In the 1960s, Sawyer as president offered attractive alternatives for living and dining by establishing residences for students.  By 1968 only 10 percent of upper-class students belonged to fraternities.  In 1970 the school ordered the end of all fraternities.  It is noteworthy that Williams paid no price for confronting fraternities.  In fact, Williams became the richest US liberal arts college with a $2.3 billion endowment. The attraction is the emphasis on academics and not on social life. (Some other Colleges have followed).