NEWS - AAUP

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NEWS - AAUP

Bloomberg
NEWS
Deadliest Frat’s
Icy ‘Torture’ of Pledges
Evokes Tarantino Films
By John Hechinger
David Glovin
Bloomberg News
December 30, 2013 – On a chilly March night,
Sigma Alpha Epsilon brothers ordered Justin
Stuart to recite the fraternity’s creed.
“The true gentleman,” said the 19-year-old
freshman, shivering in the backyard, “is the man
whose conduct proceeds from good will and an
acute sense of propriety, and whose self- control
is equal to all emergencies.”
It wasn’t easy to get the words out. Stuart
was naked, except for his underwear, and
standing in a trash can filled waist-deep with ice.
Fraternity members sprayed him with a hose and
poured buckets of water over his head.
Convinced that SAE would bring him social
success in college and then a Wall Street job,
the lanky recruit from suburban Maryland
endured the abuse.
During an eight-week initiation in 2012, SAE
brothers at Salisbury University in Maryland beat
Stuart with a paddle, forced pledges to drink until
they almost passed out and dressed them in
women’s clothing and diapers, Stuart said.
Fraternity members confined recruits for as long
as nine hours in a dark basement without food,
water or a bathroom, while blasting the same
German rock song at ear-splitting volume,
‘Alarming’ Account
Defying the fraternity code of secrecy, Stuart
offered a rare first-person account of hazing at
Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the largest and
best-known fraternities in the U.S. – and the
deadliest. His ordeal prompted Salisbury to
Copyright (c) 2013, Bloomberg, L.P.
Deadliest Frat’s
The Scarborough Student Leadership Center stands on the
Salisbury University campus in Salisbury, Maryland, U.S. in 2013.
The Center is a Greek life hub named after the Sigma Alpha
Epsilon donor and chapter founder, J. Michael Scarborough.
Photographer: David Glovin/Bloomberg
according to Stuart, another former pledge, and
the findings of the university’s disciplinary board.
“It honestly reminded me of Guantanamo
Bay,” Stuart said during five hours of interviews
with Bloomberg News. “It was almost like
torture.”
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suspend the chapter through the spring of 2014.
Stuart’s story and Salisbury’s investigation and
findings have never been made public.
The university’s disciplinary board determined
that the facts supported Stuart’s “alarming” account
and that the chapter violated Salisbury policies on
alcohol, hazing, and threats or acts of violence,
according to documents obtained by Bloomberg
News under an open-records request.
“The actions of the members of Sigma Alpha
Epsilon fraternity put the members of the pledge
class in harm’s way both physically and
emotionally,” the board found.
The Salisbury episode also shows how
difficult it is for colleges to prevent hazing, and
the extent to which alumni protect their
fraternities. Investment executive J. Michael
Scarborough, a founder of Salisbury’s SAE
‘Lived in Fear’
“I’ve lived in fear for a long time of something
happening,” said Shanahan, a Washington
lobbyist.
In a statement, SAE’s national fraternity
organization said it has “zero tolerance for
hazing,” and members who violate its rules “are
in no way representative of the fraternity.” The
chapter, was so upset over its suspension that he
withdrew a $2 million donation to the university.
infractions listed on its website represent a “low
percentage” of its more than 240 chapters and
Closed Chapters
Risking alumni wrath, universities have
disciplined more than 100 Sigma Alpha Epsilon
chapters since 2007, some repeatedly, according
to a list published on the organization’s website
as a result of a legal settlement. Colleges
suspended or closed at least 15 SAE chapters in
the past three years. SAE has had nine deaths
related to drinking, drugs and hazing since 2006,
more than any other Greek organization,
according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In
2011, a sophomore pre-medical student at
Cornell University died from alcohol poisoning
after being blindfolded and kidnapped by SAE
members in an induction ritual.
Reflecting SAE’s casualty rate, student
members pay among the highest rates for liability
insurance of any fraternity. Yet SAE has twice
voted down a proposal to restrict their access to
alcohol – a measure another national fraternity
credits with preventing injuries and deaths. SAE
chapters need to protect students by increasing
adult supervision, said Richard Shanahan, who
serves as a volunteer liaison between its houses
and alumni in Washington and Virginia.
14,000 college members, SAE said.
Frank Ginocchio, SAE’s general counsel,
said the students’ deaths nationwide result from
“a perfect storm,” rather than shortcomings in
oversight.
“We try, and we keep on trying,” Ginocchio
said. “I don’t think our procedures, our rules and
risk management are much different from any
other fraternity. We’ve all had some bad cases
and sad occurrences.”
There have been more than 60 fraternityrelated deaths since 2005, according to data
compiled by Bloomberg. Earlier this month, a
freshman pledging Pi Delta Psi at New York
City’s Baruch College died after being repeatedly
tackled in an initiation in the Pocono Mountains.
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Reforms Blocked
Fraternities have blocked efforts by legislators
and academic leaders to curb hazing, drinking and
other misbehavior. Their political action committee,
known as FratPAC, helped convince Frederica
Wilson, a U.S. Representative from Florida, not to
introduce an anti-hazing bill in Congress.
Their trade group, the Indianapolis-based
North-American Interfraternity Conference, has
opposed proposals at dozens of colleges to
postpone rushing of freshmen, who account for
about 40 percent of fraternity-related deaths.
Fraternity alumni, including major donors to
universities, often oppose restrictions on Greek
life. After the president and trustees of Trinity
College in Hartford proposed making fraternities
co-educational, Greek alumni withheld donations
to the school. In May, Trinity president James
Jones moved up his departure date by a year.
Influential Network
Sigma Alpha Epsilon has an influential alumni
network and a colorful history. Founded in 1856
at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, SAE
has its roots in the antebellum South. When the
Civil War began, almost all its members fought
for the Confederacy.
Its gothic-style headquarters in Evanston,
Illinois features priceless Tiffany stained glass
and a painting of U.S. President William McKinley
– an illustrious SAE alumnus, along with
organized crime fighter Eliot Ness and novelist
William Faulkner.
LinkedIn, a networking website for
professionals, lists almost 3,000 SAE alumni in
finance, more than any other industry. When Jeff
Librot, a former head of the University of
Delaware’s SAE chapter, applied for a Bank of
Montreal equities internship, a banker there sent
him an e-mail with SAE’s secret motto, “Phi
Alpha.” Librot was selected.
Among SAE’s Wall Street luminaries are T.
Boone Pickens, the Texas oilman-turned-investor,
and hedge fund managers David Einhorn of
Greenlight Capital and Paul Tudor Jones of Tudor
Investment Corp. Einhorn and Jones declined to
comment.
Campus Leaders
Pickens said members didn’t haze recruits
when he belonged to the fraternity at Oklahoma
State University in the late 1940s and early
1950s. His brothers – many returning World
War II veterans – rarely drank, he said.
He joined SAE because it was “the best,”
said Pickens, 85. “They were the leaders on
campus.”
These days, SAE leads in other ways. Unlike
other fraternities, it must report its infractions
online, as a result of a legal settlement with the
family of Carson Starkey. The 18- year-old
freshman at California Polytechnic State
University died in 2008 after downing beer, rum
and 151-proof liquor at an initiation ritual. The
Starkey family sued SAE and members for
negligence and settled for at least $2.45 million,
court records show.
‘Dangerous Traditions’
Excessive drinking “and other dangerous
traditions, continue, year after year” due to
“SAE’s flawed oversight and management of
chapter and member activities,” the lawsuit said.
Members of fraternities typically pay for
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liability insurance to cover accidents and other
mishaps. Because of SAE’s history, its members
pay a base fee of $340, which can increase or
decrease depending on each chapter’s record.
That’s among the highest rates of any fraternity,
according to Douglas Fierberg, the Washington
attorney who sued SAE in the Starkey case, and
current and former Greek officials.
By contrast, members of Oxford, Ohio-based
Phi Delta Theta pay a base fee of $85 apiece,
said Bob Biggs, its executive vice president. The
reason: in 2000, alarmed about drinking, the
fraternity banned alcohol in its chapter houses.
Since then, the fraternity has had no deaths
related to alcohol or hazing and fewer accidents
and insurance claims, even as membership
surged to 11,500 from 8,000, Biggs said.
“We’ve been able to articulate a message to
students,” Biggs said. “If you want a drinking
club experience, go somewhere else.”
lists on its website 29 chapters that ban alcohol
in chapter houses, some because of past
violations and others because their campuses are
dry. The fraternity said it provides anti-hazing
training to members, sponsors a hotline and tests
them on its rules.
‘Obscene Banner’
A public institution on Maryland’s Eastern
Shore, Salisbury has 8,600 students. About 8
percent belong to fraternities or sororities. In
2005, the university cited the SAE chapter for
hanging “an obscene banner” outside a house
where several sorority sisters lived, according to
university records.
In November 2010, two women complained
that date rape drugs were slipped into their
drinks at an SAE party, according to a campus
police report. The university ultimately found
insufficient evidence for those allegations but
cited the chapter for alcohol violations.
Justin Stuart didn’t know about SAE’s
Alcohol Ban
SAE’s leaders took notice. Both in 2011 and
this year, they considered banning alcohol from
chapter houses, inviting a representative of Phi
Delta Theta to make the case at one of its
biennial conventions.
“If you look at some of those tragic incidents,
it certainly might help” to ban alcohol at houses,
said Ginocchio, the SAE general counsel who
made the proposal. Though a majority supported
the plan, it failed to receive the necessary twothirds vote of students and alumni as opponents
argued that it would drive drinking underground.
In its statement, the SAE national said it
mandates alcohol-free housing for chapters that
violate “stringent regulations” on drinking. SAE
Team Player
“He was the ultimate team player,” said Colin
Thomson, head lacrosse coach at Thomas S.
Wootton High School in nearby Rockville. “Justin
Deadliest Frat’s
disciplinary record when he arrived at Salisbury in
2011, he said.
He grew up in Potomac, Maryland, and
attended Montgomery County’s highly rated
public schools. His father, Henry “Hal” Stuart, is
a real estate developer. In high school, Stuart
worked as a lifeguard at a community pool and
built houses for Habitat for Humanity. The 6 foot
two-inch-tall teenager played on the varsity
lacrosse and golf teams.
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has a good head on his shoulders.”
Stuart envisioned a career in finance, and
SAE’s prestige as a Wall Street pipeline attracted
him. He rushed SAE in February 2012 and was
summoned to a coveted interview at the
Scarborough Student Leadership Center, the
Greek life hub named after the SAE chapter
founder. During a videotaped appearance, Stuart
stood before fraternity brothers, who asked about
his major, his grade-point-average and why he
wanted to join.
“They made it seem like it was super
exclusive and that only the brightest are invited,”
Stuart said.
After getting his pledge invitation, Stuart visited
the student affairs office to sign a university
document. It noted that hazing violated school policy
and is, under Maryland law, a misdemeanor,
punishable by as much as six months in prison and a
$500 fine. “Consent of a student is not a defense,” it
said.
‘Pledge Educator’
Stuart took comfort in this policy, until his
pledging began. About 4 p.m. on a Thursday in
February, Stuart and about nine other pledges began
their eight-week initiation. SAE doesn’t have an
official chapter house, so brothers drove the recruits
from the Scarborough Center to a brown, woodshingled home on West Locust Street, about a mile
from the university.
William Espinoza – a senior, who, like Stuart,
was a former high school lacrosse player from
Montgomery County – acted as “pledge educator.”
He held out a baseball cap, asking pledges to
deposit their mobile phones and wallets, Stuart said.
Espinoza led pledges to the basement, its
A dark basement where Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity members confined
recruits for as long as nine hours without food, water or a bathroom, while blasting
the same German rock song at ear-splitting volumes is shown in an off-campus
house in Salisbury, Maryland, U.S. in 2013. SAE has had nine deaths related to
drinking, drugs and hazing since 2006, more than any other Greek organization,
according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Photographer: David Glovin/Bloomberg
windows covered with blankets and old clothes,
according to Stuart. In an endless loop, punctuated
by a few seconds of silence, a speaker blasted Du
Hast, a German metal song by the group Rammstein,
said Stuart and Max Kellner, another former recruit, a
marketing major from the Baltimore suburbs. The
song’s title is a pun on German words that can mean
both “have” and “hate.”
“Get Ready,” Stuart recalled Espinoza saying.
“This will be your favorite song by the end of the
night.”
Shattered Bottles
At 9 p.m., brothers ran down the stairs to the
basement and told pledges to put their backs
against the wall, with their heads down, Stuart
said. The older members screamed insults,
according to Stuart.
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“You’re a worthless piece of ****.” “I’ll make you
suck a ****.” “You’re a good-for-nothing
[homophobic slur],” Stuart quoted members saying
in a written account that he said he also gave
university officials.
Fraternity members shattered liquor bottles
against the wall, Stuart told campus police,
according to a police report. Members ripped shirts
off pledges and told them they couldn’t eat, including
a student on medication who required food at
regular intervals, Stuart told police.
At one point, an upperclassman spat in the face
of a pledge named Ryan Afifi, Stuart and Kellner
said.
Kellner, then a junior, recalled being confined in
the basement with Stuart and other pledges for eight
or nine hours.
Secret Handshake
“They justified it – that we all went through
this when we pledged,” said Kellner, 23, now a
senior at Towson University in Maryland. “It was
rough. It was very, very anxious in the basement.
You felt like you couldn’t leave.”
In the early morning, members led the
pledges upstairs, one by one, blindfolded, to the
house’s second floor, Kellner said. There, pledges
kneeled before a table where Espinoza and Sam
Kaubin, the chapter president, sat with six
candles and a fraternity flag, according to Stuart.
The recruits learned the secret SAE handshake,
with interlocking pinkies.
Then they were handed a sheaf of documents,
including a non-disclosure agreement, Stuart and
Kellner said.
“Shut up and sign,” Stuart heard someone say,
he told police.
Brothers removed Stuart’s blindfold and gave
him his pledge name, “Drop,” which they chose
because they considered him likely to quit.
Others were dubbed Pootie, Slappy, Meat,
Semen and Landfill, according to text messages
among pledges that Stuart saved and later sent
to Salisbury University.
Jungle Juice
Afterward, pledges were each ordered to chug
a pitcher of beer, Stuart and Kellner said. Stuart was
then taken to another house, where, urged on by
SAE members, he downed seven or eight drinks and
a liquor mix called “jungle juice,” he said.
“I had never been that drunk before,” said
Stuart, who hadn’t eaten for 10 hours.
Every Tuesday evening, SAE held pledge
classes in a science hall. Brothers covered a
window with white paper, Stuart and Kellner said.
As they tried to learn SAE history, members
yelled insults at pledges, including gay slurs,
Stuart told police.
Kellner soon withdrew from pledging
because he was a commuter student and didn’t
have time, he said.
Stuart considered leaving too but decided
against it. Members assured him that they had all
gone through the same crucible and the worst
was over. He was about to enjoy the benefits of
SAE membership, such as entrée to parties
where freshmen could meet sorority women and
access to Wall Street and Fortune 500
companies.
‘Worth Staying’
He worried that, if he left, he would end up
shunned and alone. “You feel like you have so
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much to lose – it’s worth staying,” he said. “I
thought it would pay off in the end.”
On weekends, the pledges were on call to
“sober drive” drunken brothers until as late as 4
a.m., Stuart said. After parties, the fraternity
required pledges to clean members’ houses,
according to Stuart and text messages. On the
fifth or sixth week, Stuart and other pledges were
ordered to stand in the trashcans filled with ice,
he said.
As spring break approached, pledges texted
each other, dreading what would come next.
“They want to get us drunk to f**k us up,” Kevin
Walbrecher, one of the pledges, texted on March
14. Walbrecher declined to comment.
The next day, the recruits again found
themselves confined in a basement, this time for
a ritual known as “family night,” in which they
were divided into groups with names such as
Thunderbird and Red Lady.
Scary Drive
Again, the German song blared in their ears,
Stuart said. He was then led upstairs, blindfolded,
and tossed into a car without a seatbelt, he said.
Tires screeching, the driver sped around curves and
made quick stops, he said.
“I thought I was going to die tonight,” he
later told police.
Back at the house, Stuart recalled being asked
to bend over. He heard clapping, thumping, and
chanting; a member took a running start and hit him
in the buttocks three times with a paddle as hard as
he could, Stuart said.
“It sounded like a punch, like skin was
cracking,” he said.
Stuart held back a scream, while his back
seized up for 20 seconds, leaving him briefly
unable to walk, he said. The paddling left bruises
that made it hurt to sit down the next day, he
said.
Members told pledges to dress in women’s
clothing and makeup or diapers, Stuart said: He
wore a skirt, leotard top and platinum blonde wig.
Then, they were given four or five shots of a
“secret drink,” made up of various liquors, and
driven to an off-campus party, he said.
Forced Drinking
“If you don’t drink this, you’re out,” members
told pledges at the party, handing them more
liquor, according to Stuart. He figured he had 10
drinks, fewer than some others.
“Guys should have gone to the hospital,”
Stuart said. “One guy was dry heaving for hours.
One guy was vomiting blood. It was the most
dangerous thing I’ve ever done.”
After the party, pledges commiserated in text
messages.
“They fed me a pint of Jack and Jose,” Chris
Durgin wrote. “Not to mention sake (saki) is the
grossest drink I’ve ever drank but I’m going to try
to get used to it.”
Durgin said he “got carried out and woke up
with a burn on my forehead.” Durgin did not
respond to requests for comment.
Walbrecher, the pledge who had earlier
warned about drinking, was especially graphic: “I
woke up in throw up and with a black eye and my
knuckles were all bruised and I was limping.”
Punching Holes
Espinoza, the pledge educator, berated the
younger students: “You raged at my house and
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some of you thought it was cool to punch holes
in my wall and you will be patching those f***ers
up.”
Espinoza, who graduated in 2012, referred
questions to the fraternity’s chapter adviser,
saying that “when I was there, none of this came
up.”
Other members wouldn’t address the hazing
allegations.
“Are you asking me that’s what happened?”
Daryl Spencer, an SAE brother and former wide
receiver on the Salisbury football team, said in an
interview. “Maybe you should join a fraternity and
find out. My memory is foggy.”
Dwight “Duke” Marshall, the volunteer alumni
adviser for SAE’s Salisbury chapter, said
members told him there was no hazing, and he
believes them.
“It did not happen,” said Marshall, 47, who
was chapter president as a Salisbury student and
Other pledges were also anxious. Later that
month, fellow SAE recruit Matthew Voigt texted
that a buddy told him: “We will be in the
basement tonight. Just prepare mentally.”
“Damn ... Let’s go guys at least they can’t kill
us,” replied pledge Ryan Afifi.
“Or rape us,” said Clifford Lample, another
aspiring member.
Voigt, Afifi and Lample didn’t return
messages, declined to comment or referred
questions to Marshall.
Dropping Out
For Stuart, leaving the brotherhood wasn’t
easy. When he missed events, members called,
texted and visited his room, according to a
campus police report. His father, a 6 foot-1- inch,
260-pound former high school football player,
Silent Witness
After family night, Stuart decided to quit SAE
and alert authorities. His desire to protect
pledges from harm outweighed his fear of
retaliation from fraternity members, he said.
On Friday, March 16, he sent an anonymous
e-mail about hazing to the campus police’s “silent
witness” website. The school tried unsuccessfully
to find out who sent the report, documents show.
By then, Stuart’s grades had fallen from As
to Cs, because of late nights at the fraternity. He
said he often couldn’t sleep as he worried about
his safety.
drove to the school and told his son that “if they
didn’t leave me alone, things were going to get
real,” Stuart told police.
Stuart looked up news accounts about
Cornell and other schools where students died
because of hazing. In May, he sent another report
to the “silent witness” website.
“I was hazed by the SAE (Sigma Alpha
Epsilon) fraternity this past semester,” he wrote.
“It was completely disgusting and you schools
should step up your regulation of this.”
Though his e-mail was anonymous, the
campus police tracked him down. At home for
summer vacation, Stuart told his story by phone.
“I perceived him to be credible and truthful,”
Salisbury University Police Lt. Brian Waller wrote
in his report. In June, Waller referred the matter
to the city police department, which has
jurisdiction off-campus.
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now runs an insurance agency. “The quality of
guys that are in there – they are outstanding
young men.”
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‘Magnifying Glass’
In an e-mail, urging the city police to take action,
he wrote, “There have been a number of allegations
involving this fraternity over the past few years, from
hazing to date-rape drugging to harassing a
neighbor because of his sexual orientation.
‘‘I fear that sooner or later there is going to
be a major incident, and our past efforts will be
under the magnifying glass.’’
The police investigation was brief. Two
pledges denied that hazing took place, according
to a city police report. Stuart’s mother, fearing
retaliation by fraternity members, told police she
wanted her son to drop the case. Stuart said he
decided it would be futile to move forward.
When Stuart returned for his sophomore
year, the university pressed forward with its own
investigation. Stuart met with the Salisbury
University disciplinary board, which includes
faculty and student representatives.
The board determined in October that the
evidence supported Stuart’s allegations. Among
“relevant facts” it established were that pledges
were “made to get into a bin of ice and required
to recite organizational information,” and they
were “kept in a basement on several occasions,”
blindfolded, yelled at and “made to drink.”
Disney Channel
One board member told fraternity leaders at
the hearing that their protests of innocence rang
hollow.
“What you said sounds like Disney Channel,
when what I’m thinking [is] more like Quentin
Tarantino,” the member said, according to Sigma
Alpha Epsilon’s later appeal.
“Not all of your members are True
Gentlemen,” another board member said,
echoing the fraternity’s creed.
The SAE chapter appealed the findings,
complaining that members weren’t allowed to
have lawyers at the hearing. Citing the Tarantino
13-Hour Hearings
Kellner, the recruit who corroborated Stuart’s
account of abuse in the basement, said he
appeared before the board too. In all, Salisbury
held 13 hours of hearings over three days, said
Dane Foust, the school’s vice president of
student affairs.
Stuart had been promised confidentiality, but
his name had leaked out, his father said. On
Sept. 28, Hal Stuart wrote to Salisbury University
President Janet Dudley-Eshbach, lamenting the
toll the investigation was taking on his son.
‘‘He essentially has been blackballed from
any social life, eats his meals alone and is
miserable,” Hal Stuart said. “I commend his
courage for even coming back this semester.”
Behavior Pattern
“Our findings and subsequent sanctioning
reflect the seriousness we view hazing and the
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and “True Gentlemen” comments, it contended
that board members were biased.
“The fraternity was given a fair and impartial
hearing,” Susan Griisser, the university’s general
counsel, said in an interview.
In November 2012, the university denied the
appeal and suspended SAE through the spring
of 2014, removing its recognition as a student
organization and barring it from campus. It will
then be on probation for another year. A handful
of students were also disciplined, Griisser said.
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founder of the SAE chapter. A 1976 graduate, he
recently sold Scarborough Capital Management,
an Annapolis, Maryland-based investment firm.
He gave $830,000 for Salisbury’s fraternity and
sorority center, which opened in 2001 and bears
his name.
In 2004, Scarborough agreed to return $2.1
million to customers and pay a $50,000 fine to
settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
civil allegations that he overcharged for mutual
funds. He said in an interview that he did nothing
wrong and settled because he couldn’t afford to
fight the charges.
danger it presents to our students,” the board
said in its decision.
Susan Lipkins, a psychologist in Port
Washington, New York, and author of a book on
hazing, said the Salisbury episode reflects a
behavior pattern. Older students often subject
younger ones to the same hazing they
experienced, and then ratchet it up a notch to
leave their own mark.
The university’s punishment of SAE was “not
enough,” though typical of college sanctions in
hazing cases, she said.
“It’s a slap on the wrist and won’t teach
much” to fraternity members, she said. The
school “should have held everybody in the entire
fraternity responsible.”
National SAE officials investigated and found
no wrongdoing, said Marshall, the chapter
Supreme Archon
From 2005 to 2007, Scarborough served as
SAE’s top national official, or Eminent Supreme
Archon. He sat on the board of the university’s
adviser. The parent organization declined to
discuss the case.
foundation from 1998 to 2011.
A staunch advocate for his fraternity,
White Shirts
Marshall minimized the chapter’s infractions.
He said Salisbury sanctioned it merely for
requiring new members to learn the fraternity’s
creed and for asking pledges to wear pins, khaki
pants and white shirts. SAE was also held
responsible for one episode of underage drinking
that wasn’t at a fraternity event, he said.
“I could not belong to an organization that
promoted hazing or bullying or whatever you
want to call it,” Marshall said.
Marshall’s characterization of the university’s
findings was “not accurate,” said Foust, the
Salisbury vice president.
The chapter’s suspension infuriated one
powerful Salisbury donor: Scarborough, the
Scarborough said the university had trampled
members’ rights. He said he didn’t know what
happened at the initiation, and hazing should be
punished.
Still, he canceled a $2 million pledge for a
stadium, he said.
“If they decide that’s the hill they want to die
on, then let them,” Scarborough said. Other SAE
alumni also stopped giving, he said.
Stuart and his father were angry, too. They
demanded the school disclose its findings.
Moving On
This past January, Jen Palancia Shipp, then
Salisbury’s general counsel, said she wanted to
hear Stuart’s concerns. He declined, saying he
was preparing to transfer to the University of
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Maryland at College Park and wanted to put the
investigation behind him.
“I just want to not deal with this anymore,”
Stuart told Shipp. “It’s done, ended, the fraternity
members can continue to lock people in a basement.
It doesn’t matter to me. I am just going to move on
and work on my degree at UMD.”
Shipp said she understood.
“I certainly do not want any other student to
endure the same thing as you,” she replied.
Two months later, Marshall, the SAE chapter
adviser, was arrested for drunk driving, court
records show. He had been out with friends and
had several drinks, he said. Marshall pleaded
guilty to driving while impaired and received
probation. Under Maryland law, his plea wasn’t
counted as a conviction.
Days after his arrest, Marshall told the
chapter’s brothers about it and stressed the
“importance of not drinking and driving,” he said.
‘Crippling Effect’
The SAE chapter is trying to rebound. On a
recent weekday at his insurance office in
Pocomoke City, 25 miles from Salisbury, Marshall
displayed a box of pledge manuals, which he said
national headquarters shipped to him to
distribute.
“We’re still recognized by our national office
as having a chapter in good standing,” he said.
The university’s sanctions, which bar the
chapter from campus, have had “a crippling
effect” on the fraternity, Marshall said. In
December, SAE lost 10 of its 32 members at
Salisbury’s midyear graduation. Still, brothers are
holding meetings at off-campus apartments and
trying to recruit, he said. Recruiting of any kind
would violate the chapter’s suspension,
according to Griisser, the general counsel.
SAE members don’t get enough credit for
their community service, Marshall said. The
fraternity’s volunteer and charitable work has
included raking neighbors’ leaves, roadway
cleanup and raising money to fight cancer.
“You mess up one time and everybody
remembers that one time,” Marshall said.
Basement Nightmares
Stuart, now 21 and a junior, keeps to himself
at the University of Maryland. He is living at home
and commuting to campus, and doesn’t go out
much on weekends. Still hoping for a financial
career, he’s joined an investment club.
As he drives by Greek houses on his way to
school, he ponders what colleges should do
about fraternities. They must step up oversight,
restrict alcohol, and hold fraternities and
members accountable for misbehavior, he said.
Even now, he has trouble trusting other
students, and has flashbacks to his experience as
an SAE pledge.
“I have dreams of the basement sometimes,”
he said. “I hear the yelling. It sounds like they’re
about to attack me. Then I wake up from my
nightmare.”
–Editors: Daniel Golden, Lisa Wolfson
Deadliest Frat’s
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Fraternities
Worse Than Animal House
Fail to Pay for Casualties
By David Glovin
Bloomberg News
March 28, 2013 – Old photographs adorn the
mantelpiece in Lee John Mynhardt’s living room. In
one, he’s standing beside his parents and sister. In
another, he’s all smiles as he wraps his arms around
some college buddies.
Today, Mynhardt, 28, is confined to a wheelchair,
a quadriplegic unable to move from the chest down,
burdened with medical expenses that at times have
topped $10,000 a month. As a senior at Elon
University in Elon, North Carolina, he broke his neck
when he was grabbed from behind and dragged out
of a keg party held by a chapter of one of the largest
national fraternities, Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity Inc.
Mynhardt says he is a casualty of the strenuous
efforts by national fraternities such as Lambda Chi to
avoid paying compensation for deaths and injuries at
their local chapters. After he sued, Lambda Chi
Alpha and its insurer won court rulings that they
weren’t liable for his plight.
“As soon as there’s an incident, national
fraternities start distancing themselves,” Mynhardt
said at his Charlotte, North Carolina, home. “It’s
irresponsible.”
National fraternities, which grant charters to
campus chapters and collect dues from
undergraduate members, have at least $170 million
This recent family photo shows Lee John Mynhardt with his
mother Charmaine. Mynhardt says he is a casualty of the
strenuous efforts by national fraternities to avoid paying
compensation for deaths and injuries at their local chapters.
Family Photo via Bloomberg
in annual revenue, along with valuable holdings
ranging from real estate to Tiffany windows. The
nonprofit organizations often protect their growing
wealth by insulating themselves from legal and
financial responsibility for a wave of alcohol and
hazing-related deaths and injuries.
Shielding Funds
Besieged by lawsuits alleging negligent
supervision, some of the biggest national
fraternities have limited insurance coverage they
provide to members, shielded funds in hard-totap foundations and cast blame on local chapters
with few or no assets. Rather than intensify
monitoring of branches, some fraternities have
ceded daily supervision to undergraduates.
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Such strategies are paying off. While at least
57 people have been killed or paralyzed since
2005 in incidents involving fraternities or their
members, the low-profile national bodies have
enjoyed increases of 13 percent in revenue and
29 percent in membership.
“It’s a curious business model,” said Peter
Lake, a professor at Stetson University College
of Law in Tampa, Florida, who specializes in
higher-education law. “You’re establishing a
national brand and franchising. And then when
your core customers are in a pinch, you’re turning
away.”
Deflecting Blame
James Ewbank, a lawyer who has
represented at least 10 national fraternities,
urged them at a conference last summer to
deflect blame when they are sued by bringing
cases against chapter members and colleges.
“Share the fun,” he said, according to an
outline of his remarks posted online by the
Fraternity Executives Association.
The comment was hyperbole, Ewbank said in
an interview.
While Cornell University in Ithaca, New York,
and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, have
begun cracking down on local chapters, many
schools have found it futile to prod national
fraternities to take control, said Brett Sokolow,
who has advised Lambda and other fraternities
on risk management.
“Colleges have been trying to get a handle
on these issues for a long time, and they haven’t
seen nationals step up so they figure why should
it change now,” Sokolow said.
The national fraternities’ success in avoiding
liability reinforces their “intransigence,” he said.
“They want to wash their hands of the problem
and say it’s their brothers’ fault, it’s their chapters’
fault. These are million-dollar organizations that
sponsor activities that are harmful.”
Local Chapters
There are at least 75 national fraternities with
branches on college campuses across the U.S.
Some have fewer than 10 chapters while others
have more than 200. Membership is almost all
male. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W.
Bush, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton all
belonged to fraternities.
Membership in national fraternities increased
to 327,260 in 2011 from 253,148 in 2005,
according to the North-American Interfraternity
Conference, a trade group. Revenue from dues
and other sources for national fraternities and
their related charitable groups rose to at least
$170 million in 2010 from about $150 million in
2005, Internal Revenue Service filings show.
Local chapters earned many tens of millions
more. Fraternities own and operate more than $3
billion in real estate, according to the Fraternal
Government Relations Coalition, a lobbying
group.
Reflecting a national surge in binge drinking
by college students, fraternity mayhem today can
be far more dangerous than the hijinks
celebrated in the 1978 movie “Animal House.”
Since 2005, 52 students died and five were
paralyzed in incidents linked to fraternities,
according to data compiled by Bloomberg from
lawsuits, news accounts and interviews. Nine
fraternities, including some of the largest, are
linked to 38 of the 57 cases, or two-thirds.
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Eight Deaths
Eight students died in both 2011 and 2012.
Those are the most fatalities in at least a decade,
according to Hank Nuwer, a professor at Franklin
College in Franklin, Indiana, and author of four books
on hazing. Two have died this year.
The risk of fraternity life is so great that only four
insurers cover college-age men living together in
chapter houses, said Ned Kirklin, who sells fraternity
insurance for a unit of Willis & Co. To make coverage
affordable, a group of fraternities self-insures part of
the risk.
At colleges, which value fraternities as a lure to
prospective students and breeding ground of
generous alumni, it often takes a death or serious
injury to spur discipline. California State University in
Chico temporarily suspended Greek life in
November after a senior pledge drank himself to
death.
Penn Death
National fraternities don’t always avoid liability.
A family photo shows Philip Dhanens with his mother and father
during Philip's Senior Night. Dhanens died of alcohol poisoning
after he and other freshmen were locked in a room last August at
a Theta Chi chapter at Fresno State University in California until
they finished bottles of liquor.
Source: Family Photo via Bloomberg
Association of Fraternal Leadership & Values in Fort
Collins, Colorado.
Some deaths and injuries, which took place offcampus or at unofficial events, shouldn’t be counted
as fraternity-related, the leaders said. Most national
fraternities haven’t had any fatal incidents at their
chapters since 2005.
After becoming intoxicated at a 2011 New Year’s
Eve party at the University of Pennsylvania’s Phi
Kappa Sigma House, 20-year-old Matthew Crozier
fell over a railing, hit his head and died. His parents
received a $3 million settlement from the national
fraternity, based in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania,
and from a related corporation that owned the
chapter house.
Greek life, with its secret rituals and traditions,
fosters leadership and brotherhood, fraternity leaders
said.
“Out of all the organizations on a college
campus, fraternities and sororities are founded on
the concept of high values and moral leadership,”
said Rick Barnes, a board member of the
Hands-Off Approach
National fraternities are not to blame when
members at faraway branches breach rules against
hazing and drinking, their executives said. Many
dispatch representatives to teach chapters about risk
management. They reinforce the lessons at annual
conventions and after fatalities and serious injuries.
Still, national fraternities often take a hands-off
approach to daily supervision. Rather than hire
graduate students or older adults as live-in advisers,
most rely on undergraduates to ensure that fraternity
rules are followed, said Charles Eberly, former
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Sigma Alpha Epsilon changed its bylaws in March 2011, a month
after the hazing death of Cornell University sophomore George
Desdunes at the SAE chapter there. SAE pledges kidnapped
Desdunes, blindfolded him, tied him up and forced him to drink so
much alcohol that he died, according to his family. SAE has been
associated with eight deaths since 2005.
Source: Facebook.com via Bloomberg
president of the Center for the Study of the College
Fraternity, based at Indiana University.
In 2009, Pennsylvania State University freshman
Joseph Dado died after drinking beer from an open
tub at an Alpha Tau Omega party. Even so, the
national fraternity’s lawyer recommended against
active supervision of local chapters in a 2012 article.
“The role of a national fraternal organization
should be predominately passive in its supervision
and involvement in the daily activities of local
chapters,” G. Coble Caperton, general counsel for
Alpha Tau Omega, wrote in the newsletter Fraternal
Law. The reason: Most courts won’t hold nationals
liable if they don’t take steps creating a legal duty to
supervise chapters.
Frats Punished
Caperton said in an interview that his fraternity
punishes chapters for violating rules and spends
“enormous” sums educating members.
“There’s no way we could have a person on-site
running these 135 chapters,” he said. “We are
anything but passive in preventing alcohol abuse,
drug abuse or hazing.”
Some national fraternities may be reluctant to
restrict drinking for fear of losing dues-paying
members. Indianapolis- based Theta Chi learned that
lesson after it joined a small group of fraternities that
prohibit alcohol in chapter houses.
“It was the best thing we ever did,” said Dave
Westol, former executive director of Theta Chi. “You
may have five knuckleheads who won’t join, and the
five who replace them” will stay out of trouble.
Alcohol-Free
Theta Chi membership stood at 5,911 in 1998,
when the fraternity voted to go alcohol-free. By
2003, when the ban took effect, it had fallen to
5,126. Westol left in 2006, with membership down
to 4,664. In 2010, the national board abandoned the
policy. With drinking permitted, membership has
rebounded to about 6,700 today.
Declining membership played no role in
reversing the alcohol-free policy, Theta Chi Executive
Director Michael Mayer said in an e-mail.
Philip Dhanens died of alcohol poisoning after
he and other freshmen were locked in a room last
August at a Theta Chi chapter at Fresno State
University in California until they finished bottles of
vodka and tequila.
The national fraternity should have monitored the
local chapter more closely, said his mother, Diane
Dhanens. She and her husband filed a lawsuit this
month against the national fraternity and the chapter.
‘Strict Guidelines’
Fraternity leaders say, “‘We’ll let you wear Theta
Fraternities
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Chi,’” she said. “But when something bad happens,
‘We’re out of here.’”
Theta Chi said in a statement that it revoked the
charter of the Fresno State chapter and that it has
“strict guidelines prohibiting underage alcohol
consumption.”
Some national fraternities have segregated
assets to avoid liability in high-profile cases. Based in
Evanston, Illinois, where its headquarters contains a
priceless collection of stained-glass Tiffany windows,
Sigma Alpha Epsilon has been associated with eight
deaths since 2005, the most of any fraternity. Most
recently, University of Idaho freshman Joseph
Wiederrick, who had been drinking at an SAE party
on a Saturday night in January, got lost on his way
back to his dorm. The 18- year-old wandered at
least five miles, stumbled off an embankment, and
froze to death under a bridge.
SAE changed its bylaws in March 2011, a
month after the hazing death of Cornell University
sophomore George Desdunes at the SAE chapter
there. SAE pledges kidnapped Desdunes,
blindfolded him, tied him up and forced him to drink
so much alcohol that he died, according to his family.
The national fraternity’s insurer, Liberty Corporate Capital Ltd.,
argued that the events at the house weren’t covered because
they violated Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity Inc. policies, including
rules barring kegs, underage drinking and public access to alcohol, and requiring professional security at parties.
Photographer: David Glovin/Bloomberg
Desdunes’s family.
Today, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Foundation and
the SAE Financial and Housing Corp., which
together earned $4.6 million in 2010 revenue, are
seeking dismissal from the lawsuit. They say they’re
separate entities from the national fraternity, which
had $5.5 million in revenue.
SAE lawyer Frank Ginocchio declined to
comment.
Recognition Withdrawn
Cornell withdrew recognition of the chapter,
which was convicted in a county court of violating
anti-hazing laws and fined $12,000, and the
Desdunes family sued Sigma Alpha Epsilon for $25
million. The case is pending.
SAE’s revised bylaws state that its related
charitable foundation and housing corporation are
“not part” of the national organization.
“They’re attempting to have these lines drawn
so it’s harder to get to those assets,” said Douglas
Fierberg, a Washington lawyer who represents
Africa Raised
Mynhardt, whose neck was broken at the Elon
fraternity party, visited the school for the first time in
2003, as a prospective student. Born in Phoenix, he
had moved as a child to Botswana, where his father
was a pilot. He attended boarding school in South
Africa and opted for college in the U.S. to study
business.
Elon, with its Georgian-style buildings,
expansive fields and innumerable oak trees on 500plus acres, appealed to him. Plus, it had a contingent
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of South Africans and offered rugby, which the sixfooter had played since childhood.
On a campus tour, his guide touted Elon’s
robust Greek life. Mynhardt went to a fraternity party,
where the 17-year-old was served beer.
“They’re telling us 40 percent of the campus
was Greek,” he recalled. “It was a huge selling
point.”
Greek Life
Greek life is ingrained at Elon, which dominates
a town of 9,500 in a region once populated by textile
mills. An up-and- coming university that draws threefourths of its students from outside North Carolina,
Elon is home to 23 fraternities and sororities. A
quarter of the 5,400 undergraduates are members,
according to the university.
“Almost all the parties on the weekend are
Greek related,” said Al Drago, a sophomore.
Elon promotes its Greek life, saying on its
website that “the fraternity and sorority community at
Elon has enhanced the lives of thousands of men
and women” and added “many valuable dimensions”
to the university.
The school’s bylaws state that students under
21 who consume alcohol will be punished and that
purview, said Dean of Students G. Smith Jackson.
“It’s private property,” Jackson said. “It’s not our
jurisdiction to go in and start confronting students.”
That’s why many Elon students go to parties at
off-campus residences rented by members of
various fraternities, and known by colorful nicknames,
such as “The Plantation,” “The Museum,” and “The
Bullpen.”
Mynhardt Injured
Mynhardt was injured at an off-campus party on
Feb. 3, 2007, at 211 North Lee, a one-story red
brick house with bushes in front and a barbecue grill
on the side. Three Lambda Chi brothers, including
John “Jack” Cassady, vice-president of the fraternity
chapter, shared the rental, known as “211,” which
had been passed for years from one group of
Lambda brothers to the next, according to court
records.
Elon’s Lambda chapter had a turbulent past.
Since 2005, Elon had cited it for breaching school
policy at on-campus and off-campus events, placed
it on probation and voiced concern about drug use
and hazing, court records show.
The chapter’s risk manager, a 20-year-old, was
responsible for enforcing the rules set by the national
fraternity, based in Indianapolis. Those rules state
that no chapter may provide unrestricted access to
alcohol and that chapter funds may not be used to
buy it. Around that time, each chapter member paid
annual dues of $400, including $65 to the national
organization and $93 to an insurance brokerage that
the national co-owned.
fraternity events on or off campus must comply. In
practice, it’s easier for Elon to enforce rules for oncampus fraternity and sorority houses, which it owns.
Private off-campus parties often fall outside its
Lambda’s Problems
Carolyn Whittier, Elon’s then director of Greek
Life, warned a Lambda national executive in August
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2006 that there were problems at the chapter,
including drug use.
“It is highly advised that the Grand High Zeta” –
the national’s board of directors – place the chapter
under alumni control, Whittier wrote. Lambda didn’t
follow her advice. It did send a representative to
meet with the Elon chapter that November.
Lambda, which had 2011 revenue of $7.5
million for the national and related foundation, has
had three deaths linked to chapter events since
2005. Tad Lichtenauer, a spokesman for Lambda,
declined to comment.
On the Friday night of the party, Mynhardt
started drinking at friends’ apartments, police
records show. Then he and some classmates drank
at two local bars. At one, Mynhardt met a
sophomore, Mary Kelly. They left the pub at 2 a.m.,
closing time, and joined the crowd at “211.”
Beer Pong
By then, more than 15 of the Lambda chapter’s
23 members had made their way to the keg party,
court records show. The next day was Lambda’s
“wing bowl” – a chicken-eating gala that was the
year’s top recruiting event – and potential recruits
had come by.
Partygoers danced and played beer pong in a
room bedecked with Lambda’s Greek letters and
signature cross with crescent. Sober brothers stood
ready to drive drunk ones home, according to court
records.
Mynhardt and Kelly soon locked themselves in a
bathroom, kissing, according to court records. After
several minutes, someone began banging on the
door. Mynhardt stepped out and said they were
leaving.
With that, Cassady’s friend Clinton Blackburn, a
University of Idaho freshman Joseph Wiederrick, who had been
drinking at a Sigma Alpha Epsilon party on a Saturday night in
January, got lost on his way back to his dorm. The 18-year-old
wandered at least five miles, stumbled off an embankment, and
froze to death under a bridge.
Source: Moscow, Idaho Police Department via Bloomberg
student at the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro who was visiting for the weekend,
grabbed Mynhardt in a full-nelson wrestling pose.
Blackburn later told police that he and Cassady
wanted to throw Mynhardt out because Cassady
needed to go to the bathroom and Mynhardt
wouldn’t unlock the door.
Left Paralyzed
Blackburn, who was drinking beer that night, put
his arms under Mynhardt’s arms and his hands
behind Mynhardt’s head, Kelly told police. Blackburn,
then 22, pushed Mynhardt’s head forward, according
to police reports.
“We’re leaving,” Mynhardt protested as he lost
control of his legs and collapsed to the floor.
Blackburn fell on top of him while someone else
kicked him, Cassady said, according to court
records. Kelly went to Mynhardt’s side.
“I can’t feel my legs,” Mynhardt exclaimed.
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Cassady, then a month shy of his 21st birthday,
had drunk about eight beers, according to court
documents. He and others grabbed Mynhardt by the
legs, dragged him through the kitchen and dumped
him outside, aggravating his injury. Kelly urged them
to bring him inside.
“Call 9-1-1,” Mynhardt shouted, cursing.
‘Terrible Accident’
When police arrived, a panicked Mynhardt
asked if he was paralyzed. Cassady told an officer
he was “worried” about his fraternity chapter,
according to a police report. Cassady and Blackburn
were arrested for serious assault. The charges were
dismissed in 2010 after Mynhardt chose not to
pursue them.
“It was a terrible, terrible accident,” Blackburn
said. “I just pray for Lee every day and hope he
comes out of this thing alright.”
Kelly declined to comment.
Mynhardt was flown to the UNC Medical
‘Known Risk’
Anticipating millions of dollars in lifelong medical
bills, Mynhardt filed suit in a North Carolina superior
court in 2008. He claimed that the university failed to
police a dangerous fraternity and that the Lambda
national ignored warnings about its troubled chapter.
He also sued the chapter, six of its members and
two other partygoers.
“Elon and the national fraternity ignored a known
risk,” said Michael Petty, one of Mynhardt’s lawyers.
“The university was very involved in its fraternities,
and Lambda should have been.”
A key issue in the case was whether the
fraternity sponsored the off-campus party. Cassady,
the local’s vice president, testified in a deposition that
it was an informal chapter party intended as a warmup for the next day’s “wing bowl” recruiting.
His lungs collapsed, almost killing him.
While he once contemplated suicide, “it’s not
something I would ever do,” he said. “You either put
up with it and do your best, or you give up. I was 21
turning 22 at the time, and I figured I had a lot more
going for me.”
Mynhardt spent five years as an inpatient and
outpatient at Shepherd Center, a rehabilitation
hospital in Atlanta. He learned to use his biceps,
which he can still control, to offset the paralysis of
his triceps. Eating, sleeping, controlling pain, using a
catheter to urinate – everything was new.
“To get that small bit of independence, you work
harder than anything you’ve ever worked at in your
life,” he said.
Underage Drinking
Lambda argued that it had no day-to-day
control over the Elon chapter and no role in
organizing a party where its rules were broken. Its
lawyers cited Lambda’s extensive risk- management
rules and said the national organization had
previously sent delegates to brief members on them.
Judge Howard Manning dismissed Mynhardt’s
claims against Elon and the Lambda national in
2011, and his ruling was upheld on appeal last May.
The fraternity hadn’t assumed a “duty to protect” the
chapter or its members, the appeals judges said.
“We want to encourage universities and Greek
organizations to adopt policies to curb underage
drinking and drinking-related injuries,” the judges
said. That “does not make a university or Greek
organization an insurer of every student, member or
guest.”
Courts in 12 other states have issued similar
Fraternities
Center in Chapel Hill, where he underwent surgery.
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rulings clearing nationals of liability for local
wrongdoing, Lambda said in court documents.
Insurance Broker
Mynhardt’s lawsuit still had life. Because
Cassady had testified that the party was a fraternity
event, a judge allowed him to pursue his case
against the chapter itself. If Mynhardt were to win, he
hoped to collect from Lambda’s insurance company,
which covered the chapters and individual members.
Instead, the national fraternity’s insurer, Liberty
Corporate Capital Ltd., sought to walk away from the
tragedy. It filed suit, seeking permission not to cover
the chapter or several members. Liberty is
increasingly filing and winning such cases, court
records show.
Lambda chapters and members can’t choose
saying we cover you unless you’re bad,” Stempel
said.
Liberty Corporate argued that the events at
“211” weren’t covered because they violated
Lambda policies, including rules barring kegs,
underage drinking and public access to alcohol, and
requiring professional security at parties.
“It’s terrible when someone is injured, but it
doesn’t mean we should be held liable” if the
national fraternity isn’t negligent, said Jon Pavey,
former chairman of James R. Favor.
A federal judge in Greensboro, North Carolina,
agreed, ruling in August that Liberty need not
provide coverage for the chapter or members. Since
the chapter has virtually no assets, the decision
meant Mynhardt couldn’t collect damages from it
even if he won his case, said Joseph Williford, the
their insurer. The fraternity requires them to buy
chapter’s lawyer.
insurance through James R. Favor & Co., a
brokerage based in Aurora, Colorado, that is owned
by Lambda and other national organizations. Favor
places the insurance with Liberty.
Dubious Benefit
The restricted overage is of dubious benefit to
chapters and their members, said Jeffrey Stempel,
who teaches insurance law at the William S. Boyd
School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas and reviewed the Lambda policy.
“This strikes me as being perilously close to
Some Settlements
Mynhardt appealed the ruling. He reached
settlements with half a dozen students, including
Cassady, who were covered under their parents’
homeowners’ insurance. Mynhardt, who Williford
said was seeking as much as $20 million,
collected less than $2 million from the parents’
policies.
Tapping the parents’ insurance “is particularly
distasteful when the national fraternity requires every
single member to contribute to the purchase of
liability insurance that is very unlikely ever to pay out
a dime,” said Richard Pinto, Cassady’s lawyer.
According to court records, Mynhardt dismissed
his appeal after the insurer, Liberty, agreed to a
confidential settlement. Liberty’s lawyer, Nolan
Burkhouse, acknowledged it made a five- figure
payment before declining further comment.
Fraternities
That coverage has narrowed in scope. In 1996,
Lambda reduced coverage for chapters and
members to “end the subsidization of inappropriate
conduct,” James R. Favor, the brokerage’s late
founder, said in a 2012 affidavit in Mynhardt’s case.
As a result, Lambda “has controlled its rising cost of
insurance premiums.”
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‘Horrible Result’
“It’s a horrible, horrible result,” said Petty, who
declined to comment on the settlement amounts.
Mynhardt’s medical and rehabilitation costs,
including onetime expenses such as a $70,000
specially outfitted van, have already exceeded $1
million, Mynhardt said. The family has dipped into
savings to pay costs not covered by the insurance
settlements. “Lee’s health comes first,” said his
father, Louis Mynhardt. Despite Mynhardt’s
misfortune, off-campus frat parties still dominate
Elon’s social scene. At midnight one recent Saturday,
girls in short skirts and guys in tropical shirts braved
the 44- degree temperature to gather at a house
rented by members of one fraternity. Elon’s studentrun “Safe Ride” van ferried some guests to the door.
The keg was out back and the dancing inside, with a
Aide Dependent
Mynhardt moved into a ranch house in Charlotte
last year near Carolinas Medical Center, where he
had been hospitalized before. He has friends nearby
and an aide living with him full- time. Another visits
part-time. Every morning, an aide sits him up in bed,
moves him to his wheelchair, transports him to the
shower, dresses him and helps with dozens of
activities he can’t do alone.
Seeking some measure of independence,
Mynhardt is now in his first year at Charlotte School
of Law. Unable to use his fingers, he takes notes
with a stylus attached to his palm and a touch-pad
computer.
“I believe a lot of positive things can come out of
fraternities,” he said. “But if they’re not run correctly,
things are going to get out of control.”
strobe light pulsing.
Only members, friends and women were
welcome, said a fraternity brother, beer cup in hand.
Anyone else, he said, should find another party.
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Freshman Force-Fed
Cat Food Shows Frats
Thwart Hazing Warnings
By David Glovin
John Hechinger
Bloomberg News
November 18, 2013 – In 2011, a fraternitysponsored team of experts alerted Arizona State
University to “widespread” hazing and “high-risk”
drinking at its Greek houses. The warning didn’t
save Jack Culolias.
The 19-year-old freshman disappeared in
November 2012 after a fraternity party. Culolias had
told friends that Sigma Alpha Epsilon members
forced him to shave his head and eat cat food as
part of his initiation and that he expected to be tied
to a flagpole and locked in a garage during “Hell
Week.” Sixteen days later, searchers found him
drowned accidentally in a river, with his blood
alcohol three times the legal limit.
“He was scared,” said Vince Silva, a high
school classmate. “He left a voice message for
his step mom. ‘Hey, I’m not going to be able to
use the phone a while. I love you.’ That was the
last thing we heard from him.”
Culolias’s death illustrates the failure of a
2005 initiative by presidents of the University of
Virginia and nine other colleges to clean up
Greek life. The heart of their plan: in-depth
reviews of chapter houses that would protect
students by shutting down the worst fraternities.
Instead, fraternities watered down the new
Students on the campus of Arizona State University, where a
fraternity-sponsored team of experts in 2011 found "widespread"
hazing and "high-risk" drinking at its Greek houses.
Photographer: Bloomberg
program so that it lacked the enforcement power
that the presidents envisioned. Almost a decade
later, the findings of widespread hazing and
dangerous drinking have had little impact
nationwide. Some universities and Greek
organizations still aren’t doing enough to protect
students, according to several college presidents
and even the head of a major fraternity.
Sleep Deprivation
Educators and fraternity officials conducting
the reviews have uncovered hazing at almost
two-thirds of the 61 colleges whose reports were
obtained by Bloomberg News. They include wellregarded private institutions such as Elon
Freshman Force-Fed
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University in North Carolina and premier public
schools such as the College of William & Mary in
Virginia and Binghamton University in New York.
Students suffered such abuses as sleep
deprivation and the forced eating of raw chicken.
Reviewers found excessive drinking at half of
the colleges, such as prestigious Duke University.
At one-third, including Arizona State, they found
both hazing and drinking. They urged schools to
create anti-hazing hotlines, cooperate with police
and bar owners to provide safe rides for students
and assign faculty advisers to fraternity chapters.
The reports lacked teeth because they didn’t
name offending chapters or call for penalties.
Rejecting the college presidents’ proposal to
scrutinize all chapters, fraternities made the
program voluntary, so that reviewers have
evaluated fewer than one out of 10 campuses
with Greek organizations.
Tequila Shots
While the voluntary reviews have sparked
Since the universities own the reports, “when
we realized they were publicly accessible through
our website, we corrected the issue,” said Peter
Smithhisler, conference president.
Breaking Away
As fraternities boost membership on college
campuses, the reports undercut the frequent
public comments by national Greek groups that
hazing is an aberration. Fraternities are reluctant
to discipline chapters, while universities are afraid
to alienate alumni, according to several college
presidents and some Greek leaders.
“If we don’t act on them, it’s a waste of time,”
Brian Warren, chief executive officer of Richmond,
Virginia-based Sigma Phi Epsilon, said of the
reports. “I’m not seeing any follow-up.”
Sigma Phi Epsilon, one of the largest
fraternities, with more than 15,000 undergraduates
and 200 houses, is considering breaking away from
the North-American Interfraternity Conference,
Warren said. Among other concerns, Sigma Phi
changes at some colleges, other schools have
ignored findings or taken half- measures that
failed to prevent recurring violations. Arizona
State closed Culolias’s fraternity, which had a
history of alcohol violations, only after he died
and another member who downed 20 shots of
tequila was hospitalized.
Bloomberg News obtained copies of reports
at some public universities through open-records
requests and reviewed reports on other public
and private colleges on the website of the NorthAmerican Interfraternity Conference, the main
industry trade group. After being asked about
them, the conference blocked public access to
the reports.
Epsilon is upset that the trade group isn’t holding
fraternities accountable for ignoring the reports, he
said. His fraternity has fought hazing by banning
initiation rites.
Freshman Force-Fed
Hazing Culture
“Fraternities were just suspicious that what
we were really about was getting rid of
fraternities,” said Robert Bottoms, former
president of DePauw University in Greencastle,
Indiana, who was part of the original group of
college leaders. “Frankly, I didn’t think we had
good cooperation from the nationals [parent
Greek organizations].”
Without disciplinary powers, the
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investigators’ reports have failed to uproot hazing
traditions at some campuses, including William &
Mary, the second-oldest U.S. university after
Harvard and the birthplace of the nation’s
fraternities.
Investigators visiting the Williamsburg,
Virginia, campus in 2009 found a “culture of
hazing” that included forced drinking and public
humiliation of new fraternity and sorority
members.
Returning this year, examiners found that
hazing remained a “a long-standing practice” at
the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, which had
forced pledges to run for six hours at night,
according to a William & Mary report.
Arizona State University campus.
Fraternity membership increased to 327,260
in 2011 from 253,148 in 2005. Almost threefourths of U.S. fraternity and sorority members
have been hazed, according to a 2008 study by
University of Maine professors. The Interfraternity
Conference helped pay for the study.
Smithhisler, head of the Indianapolis-based
conference, which represents 75 national fraternities,
said the reports have helped dozens of colleges and
universities improve Greek life. The reports also
found that members of Greek organizations are
campus leaders, often have above-average grades
and organize charitable drives.
“The reports identify a whole lot of good
stuff,” Smithhisler said.
An ‘Abomination’
Calling hazing an “abomination” that the
conference wants to eradicate, Smithhisler said
it’s the “exception” and “not the rule” at
fraternities. All fraternities have anti-hazing and
responsible-drinking programs, and they do a
better job combating hazing than other student
groups, such as athletic teams, he said. Even
when the reports find hazing at a campus, it may
be happening at only a few houses, he said.
The conference has no authority over
fraternity chapters or universities, Smithhisler
said. Most national fraternities that belong to the
conference require chapters to meet minimum
standards through annual accreditation and
sometimes close them when there are “no other
options,” he said.
The reports paint a disturbing picture of
hazing practices across the U.S. At Elon
University, with more than 6,000 students,
initiation included “sleep deprivation, wearing
uniforms, not being allowed to eat, personal
Freshman Force-Fed
60 Deaths
Such behavior has put lives at risk. Since
2005, when the presidents issued their call,
there have been at least 60 fraternity-related
deaths, most involving alcohol and hazing,
according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
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servitude, sleeping in strange/potentially
dangerous locations and eating strange or
inappropriate items,” according to a 2010 report.
to underage students at Saturday morning
tailgates before football games, reviewers found.
Some “fraternity men target freshman women
through high- risk drinking events that can result
in potential sexual intercourse,” the Duke report
said.
The reports also examined sororities, where
they found fewer problems. The National
Panhellenic Conference, which represents most
of the large women’s groups, bans alcohol from
chapter houses and almost all have live-in
advisers. Since 2005, there have been three
sorority-related drinking and hazing deaths,
Seven fraternity and sorority organizations,
including the Interfraternity Conference, produce
the reports as part of the “Fraternity & Sorority
Coalition Assessment Project.”
Raw Chicken
At 18,000-student University of Nevada at
Reno, at least 10 pledges were treated for food
poisoning in 2007 after being forced to eat raw
chicken – an incident cited in a 2010 report.
Initiates also had the Greek letter Omega etched
on their buttocks with dry ice. The university
identified the fraternity as Alpha Tau Omega.
At Auburn University in Alabama, a public
institution of 25,000, new members stumbled
through campus, apparently because they’d been
awake for days, according to a 2008 report.
“Freshmen expect to be hazed,” investigators
said they were told. “Hazing is part of the Auburn
tradition.”
At Binghamton University, a 15,000-student
campus of the State University of New York,
$8,000 Reports
Based at the Interfraternity Conference’s
investigators last year identified “a culture of fear,
offices in Indianapolis, the project dispatches
confusion and silence” about hazing at “most, if
not all” programs for pledges.
In an e-mail to Binghamton, obtained under a
public-records request, an unnamed former
pledge of Zeta Beta Tau complained of
“waterboarding, physical exercise in nothing but
my boxers, cold showers, crawling around on
concrete and more.”
Targeting Women
At Duke University in Durham, North
Carolina, one of the nation’s most selective
colleges, the “abuse of alcohol is central to the
fraternity/sorority experience,” according to a
2010 report. Fraternities routinely served alcohol
teams of educators and industry officials to
campuses to scrutinize Greek life, typically in
response to school requests. Schools pay
$4,000 to $8,000 for the reports. The
investigators examine university data and
interview students, faculty and administrators.
Presidents of 10 colleges – including the
University of Virginia, Bucknell University and
DePauw University – initiated the reviews in
2005. Warning of a “widening gap between the
rhetoric of Greek chapters and the reality of their
practices,” they aimed to “transform” Greek
culture by fighting alcohol abuse and
encouraging more emphasis on academics.
Their plan – endorsed by representatives of
Freshman Force-Fed
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higher education associations and the liquor and
fraternity industries – called for outside
evaluations of all fraternity chapters, as well as
minimum grade-point averages for members.
Negative reviews would be used to place on
probation or shut down chapters.
No Names
That didn’t happen. Meeting periodically for
more than a year, Greek groups rejected making
the reviews mandatory, according to Ronald
Binder, former president of the Association of
Fraternity/Sorority Advisors in Fort Collins,
Colorado, which represents college
administrators and others who work with Greek
organizations. They also chose not to review all
8,000 chapters, saying it would have been too
The site of the old Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at Arizona State
University. In June, Arizona State University revoked Sigma Alpha
Epsilon's charter after a series of drinking-related violations.
costly and cumbersome, Binder said.
Instead, the reports assessed campus Greek
culture broadly without naming offending
chapters – an approach Binder said would foster
he would step down early. The president
resigned after 10 years because “he had
completed the work he set out,” said Jenny
Holland, a Trinity College spokeswoman.
“It’s just a very large task to take on an entire
campuswide change. Investigators have visited
fraternity system,” said Warren, a former
only about 70 of 800 colleges with fraternities
and sororities.
Colleges have also balked at reining in
fraternities, said David Warren, head of the
National Association of Independent Colleges
and Universities in Washington, and a member of
the original presidents’ group that proposed the
reviews. Some presidents fear for their jobs
because of the power of fraternity alumni.
president of Ohio Wesleyan University.
Administrators at universities where hazing
was uncovered said that the reports had spurred
them to action.
In April, William & Mary closed Lambda Chi
Alpha, the chapter with the six-hour run. The
fraternity said it was working to return “as soon
as possible.” Virginia Ambler, a vice president at
the school, said the reviews helped unearth
“some of this very hidden and dangerous
behavior” and change William & Mary’s culture.
Co-Ed Fraternities
In Hartford, Connecticut, Trinity College’s
president, who had angered some alumni donors
when he and the board mandated that fraternities
and sororities go co-ed, announced this year that
Greek Summit
Elon convened a summit of Greek leaders
and sent teams to an institute dedicated to
Freshman Force-Fed
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university’s director of fraternity and sorority life,
blamed on “a very small percentage” of students.
Duke instituted a hazing hotline and
stepped-up enforcement to create a “very
different” culture from what was described in the
“antiquated” report, said Larry Moneta, vice
president for student affairs.
Jack Culolias, a fraternity pledge who died at Arizona State
University in 2012, prepares for his senior prom in Orange County, California.
Source: Grace Culolias
fighting hazing, said Smith Jackson, vice
president for student life. The school found no
evidence of “life-threatening or degrading sorts
of behavior,” said Jackson, who called hazing
“the exception, rather than the norm.”
After the raw-chicken episode, the University
of Nevada kicked Alpha Tau Omega off campus
for five years, said Marcelo Vazquez, associate
dean of students.
Since returning, the fraternity has worked
with its national organization to root out hazing,
said Daniel Coffey, an Alpha Tau Omega
member.
“It was clear the chapter had lost its way,”
BB Guns
Still, problems have persisted at many
schools, even after the reports flagged dangers –
nowhere more so than at Arizona State
University, one of the largest public institutions in
the U.S., with more than 70,000 students on its
Tempe campus.
In 2010, fraternity brothers at one chapter
shot pledges with BB guns, according to
documents released under an open- records
request. At another, a drunken 17-year-old
freshman left an off-campus fraternity party and
slammed her Ford Expedition into an oncoming
car, killing two people, according to police and
court records.
Culolias, the Arizona State freshman who
drowned in 2012, had chosen to pledge Sigma
Alpha Epsilon, one of the largest fraternities with
chapters on almost 230 campuses in the U.S.
and Canada. Its Arizona State chapter had a
history of alcohol violations.
said Coffey, a 21-year-old junior.
down on hazing, said Jon Waggoner, interim vice
president for student affairs, who called
“students’ health and safety our top priority.”
Binghamton briefly shut down its more than
50 Greek chapters last year after receiving
reports of hazing, which L.C. Coghill, the
Vodka Bottles
In 2006, members forced pledges to drink,
sending one to the hospital, records show. In
September 2011, brothers meeting inside a
university classroom passed around vodka
bottles with the words “Down on your knees”
scribbled across them. The chapter was placed
Freshman Force-Fed
The industry report helped Auburn crack
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on probation for two months.
In October 2011, six fraternity industry
investigators, led by Kyle Pendleton, a former
assistant dean of students at Purdue University,
visited the campus and documented
“widespread” hazing.
Fraternities at Arizona State open and close
“fairly frequently” for bad behavior, even as their
national fraternities have taken a “hands-off
approach,” the examiners found.
“Alcohol and drugs seem to be prevalent in
many social aspects of the fraternity and sorority
experience at ASU,” they wrote. “High-risk and
high-visibility drinking, including a heavy
concentration of off-campus activities,
contributes to this perception.”
Red Shoe
The report was prescient, especially about
the dangers of off-campus parties. Culolias, from
Orange County, California, attended an offcampus party at a restaurant hosted by sororities
June, Arizona State revoked Sigma Alpha
Epsilon’s charter.
“The university has zero tolerance for actions
that put students at risk,” spokeswoman Sharon
Keeler said in an e-mail.
‘True Gentlemen’
Robert Valenza, a chapter president before
Arizona State shut the fraternity, said it shouldn’t
be blamed for drinking.
“People will find alcohol, people will be
underage,” he said. “It’s just part of the college
experience.”
Sigma Alpha Epsilon has had nine deaths,
including Culolias’s, related to drinking, drugs
and hazing since 2006, more than any other
fraternity.
“Some of our members or former members
have acted in ways that are inconsistent with our
mission and creed,” Brandon Weghorst, a
national Sigma Alpha Epsilon spokesman, said in
an e-mailed statement. “The overwhelming
and fraternities before he went missing in
November 2012.
Searching for her son, his mother found one
of his red Vans skateboarding shoes near a river.
The coroner determined that his drowning was
an accident caused by heavy drinking and
hypothermia.
After Culolias’s death, Arizona State placed
Sigma Alpha Epsilon on suspension. Then, this
past May, a Sigma Alpha Epsilon member was
hospitalized after he downed about 20 tequila
shots in an off-campus drinking game, according
to police and university records. The 20-year-old
student had turned blue from a blood-alcohol
level about six times the legal limit, police said. In
majority of our members act as true gentlemen.”
Arizona State “values the numerous
contributions of the Greek community,” Keeler
said. Most members follow campus rules while
maintaining above-average grade-point averages,
holding student leadership positions and raising
more than $250,000 in charitable donations over
‘Free Society’
Responding to the report, Arizona State
began registering social events, trained chapter
leaders about alcohol and hazing, and set up a
new disciplinary board, Keeler said. The school is
also expanding housing options to encourage
Freshman Force-Fed
the past year, she said.
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more fraternity and sorority members to live on
campus.
While Ira Fulton, who belonged to Delta
Sigma Phi as an Arizona State undergraduate,
supports the new housing plan, it will be a hard
sell to other fraternity alumni, he said.
Greek alumni give the university “all kinds of
hell” because they “all want their houses,” said
Fulton, founder of Tempe, Arizona-based Fulton
Homes and a member of the Arizona State
University Foundation’s board of directors.
“They’ll say, ‘This is America. Kids want to
drink. That’s their privilege. This is a free society.
They did what we did when we went to college.’”
Freshman Force-Fed
–Editors: Dan Golden, Chris Staiti
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Mother of Golf Prodigy
in Hazing Death
Defied by FratPAC
By David Glovin
Bloomberg News
July 24, 2013 – Harrison Kowiak was 19 years
old when he died after schoolmates pummeled
him on a pitch-black field in Hickory, North
Carolina. It was part of a fraternity hazing.
Determined to protect other students,
Kowiak’s mother Lianne devoted herself to
fighting hazing. She thought she had a powerful
ally in U.S. Representative Frederica Wilson, who
calls herself the “Haze Buster” and backed
Florida’s tough anti- hazing law as a member of
the state legislature in 2005.
Standing beside Wilson at a Capitol Hill
news conference in September, Kowiak helped
display a 10-foot-long banner headed “Hazing
Kills,” and depicting a cemetery. As Wilson
vowed to deny financial aid to students who
engage in hazing, Kowiak applauded. What
Kowiak didn’t know was that, behind the scenes,
the fraternity industry’s political arm, known as
“FratPAC,” had been pressing Wilson to back off.
Today, 19 months after Wilson first promised an
anti-hazing bill, she hasn’t filed one.
The industry’s lobbying is “disgusting,”
Kowiak said in an interview. “What are the
priorities here?” They “should be to stop hazing
so none of our youth have to go through it.”
59 Deaths
“Their opposition is very influential,” said
Diane Watson, a former Democratic member of
Congress from California, who sponsored an
unsuccessful 2003 bill that would have denied
federal financial aid for one year to students
sanctioned for hazing. Even though FratPAC
hadn’t yet been established, individual
Lianne Kowiak, center in pink, stands beside U.S. Representative
Frederica Wilson, a Democrat from Florida, in blue, who vowed to
introduce legislation to deny financial aid to students who engage
in hazing, but hasn't yet done so.
Photographer: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images
Even as deaths and injuries proliferate at
their local chapters, traditional college fraternities
resist a federal role in punishing hazing,
contending that Wilson’s proposal would infringe
on student rights and that existing state criminal
laws are sufficient.
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fraternities, schools and education groups “were
able to stop the progress of the bill,” she said.
Harrison Kowiak was one of 59 students who
died in incidents involving fraternities since 2005,
about half of them alcohol- related, according to
data compiled by Bloomberg. Six others were
paralyzed. Ten students died in 2012, the most
fatalities in at least a decade.
At the same time, fraternity membership and
revenue are surging. The 101 fraternities and
sororities in the industry’s trade groups had
630,052 members in 2012, up 25 percent from
503,875 in 2007. National fraternities and their
charitable foundations generated $170 million in
revenue in 2010, mostly from student dues, up
from about $150 million in 2005. Fraternity
foundations collectively held $534 million in 2010.
Frat Fire
One of FratPAC’s top priorities is a tax break
for fraternities. Representative Wilson became a
co-sponsor of the industry’s tax bill in April 2012,
Virginia Beach, Virginia, lawyer then on the board
of the North-American Interfraternity Conference,
or NIC, an industry trade group.
FratPAC Origin
In 2005, fraternity and sorority leaders
advised by Patton Boggs election-law attorneys
created the Fraternity and Sorority Political
Action Committee, nicknamed “FratPAC” on its
Twitter page.
FratPAC raised $506,852 for the 20112012 election cycle. Among its donors were
executives from companies that fraternities and
sororities hire to raise money for them; brokers
from insurers that sell liability policies to Greek
institutions; and lawyers who defend the groups
in negligence and wrongful-death lawsuits.
Insurance-industry donors in 2011-2012
included FratPAC president Cindy Stellhorn and
her husband, who collectively gave $20,000.
Stellhorn is an executive at Indianapolis-based
MJ Insurance Inc. FratPAC also took in $20,000
from Ned Kirklin, who sells liability insurance to
fraternities and sororities for a unit of Willis &
Co., and his spouse. He declined to comment.
Kelley Bergstrom, president of Bergstrom
Investment Management LLC, a Kenilworth,
around the same time FratPAC was lobbying
against her hazing proposal.
The roots of the tax legislation, and of
fraternities’ growing Washington influence, trace
back to a 1996 fraternity- house fire at the
University of North Carolina that killed five
students. Afterwards, fraternity leaders decided
that they needed a federal law that would let
them use funds in their charitable foundations to
outfit chapter houses with fire sprinklers. In 2001,
the industry engaged Patton Boggs LLP, a
Washington law and lobbying firm whose clients
have included Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
“Before that, I don’t think we ever had a
Washington presence,” said Carlton Bennett, a
Strong Policies
Since fraternities and universities have strong
anti-hazing policies, federal legislation isn’t
needed, Bergstrom said.
At his national fraternity, Pi Kappa Phi, hazing
“is a basis for dismissing a chapter,” he said.
Illinois-based firm that invests family assets, gave
$10,000 to FratPAC. Bergstrom is also chairman
of the University of Florida’s fundraising arm.
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Kevin O’Neill, Patton Boggs’s deputy
chairman of public policy, helped start FratPAC in
2005 and became its president. He was a
Lambda Chi Alpha brother and the Orangeman
mascot at Syracuse University. A Republican
from Virginia, O’Neill ran unsuccessfully for
Congress in 2007.
In 2011, in an effort to raise their
Washington profile, FratPAC and two industry
groups – NIC and the National Panhellenic
Conference, which represents sororities –
combined to form the Fraternal Government
Relations Coalition. FratPAC today calls itself the
largest political action committee focused solely
on college students and higher education.
FratPAC’S activity isn’t limited to Congress.
It has also lobbied against U.S. Education
Department guidelines for investigating sexual
assaults on campus.
Rights Threatened?
In 2011, when the Education Department
told colleges to require less evidence before
responding to allegations of sexual assault,
fraternity leaders were among those who met
with department officials to complain that the
new policy threatened student rights, according
to an industry memo reviewed by Bloomberg
News. The guidelines remain in place,
department spokesman Jim Bradshaw said.
FratPAC also fought the attempt at federal
anti-hazing legislation backed by Lianne Kowiak
and, as Kowiak thought, Wilson, a Florida
Democrat.
Harrison Kowiak, a New Jersey native whose
family moved to Florida in his teens, aspired to a
career that would mix business with his favorite
A family photo provided by Lianne Kowiak shows her son
Harrison Kowiak, center, who was one of 59 students who died in
incidents involving fraternities since 2005, about half of them
alcohol-related, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Source: Lianne Kowiak via Bloomberg
sport, golf. He’d taken up the game only a few
years earlier and had become a scratch golfer
and captain of his high school team, his mother
said. A college sophomore, he was attending
Lenoir-Rhyne University on a golf and academic
scholarship. His trophies still line the shelves of
his Tampa, Florida, home and a signed photo of
professional golfers Ben Crane and Lee Janzen
sits on his dresser. His golf glove rests on a
cherry-wood table by the front door.
‘Sacred’ Rock
In November 2008, members of the Theta Chi
fraternity at Lenoir-Rhyne, a liberal arts college
affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church, took
Harrison to a field at night and told him to traverse a
gantlet of brothers in pursuit of their “sacred” rock,
said Lianne Kowiak, 53, a former account director for
a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary.
As he ran, Harrison, weighing 165 pounds, was
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One of the most prominent hazing deaths was that of Robert
Champion, 26, a drum major in the marching band of Florida A&M
University. According to his parents’ lawsuit, band members in
November 2011 severely punched and kicked Champion on a
chartered bus following a performance.
Photographer: Joseph Brown III/The Tampa Tribune via AP Photo
beaten by fraternity brothers, some 100 pounds
heavier, who were lurking in the darkness, she said.
He died of a brain hemorrhage.
At first, fraternity members told Kowiak that
Harrison died from injuries in a football game. A
Theta Chi official said it was from “a team-building
enterprise,” said her husband, Brian Kowiak, 55.
Only later, as part of a lawsuit filed in 2009 against
Lenoir-Rhyne and Theta Chi, did they learn that the
gantlet-running ritual, known as “bulldogging,” had
been an initiation tradition for years during Theta
Chi’s “Hell Week.”
No one was arrested. Prosecutors found “no
basis for criminal charges,” said Eric Farr, a
spokesman for the Catawba County District
Attorney.
“zero tolerance” for hazing. Michael Mayer,
executive director of Indianapolis-based Theta
Chi, declined to comment. The Kowiaks reached
confidential settlements with the school and
fraternity, which denied wrongdoing.
After Harrison’s death, “for the first two or
three years, we were just zombies,” said Lianne
Kowiak. Then, she began advocating against
hazing, and spoke to student audiences at
Cornell University and elsewhere.
“I’m not going to let my son die in vain,” she
said.
She and her husband wanted a federal law
that would impose stern penalties for hazing and
require disclosure of incidents.
“There are no public records,” Brian Kowiak,
a material sciences engineer, said in an interview.
“It’s unbelievable that not more is being done,
and there’s so much resistance. You hear every
month, someone lost their life, someone is taken
to the hospital, someone is burned.”
‘Just Zombies’
Peter Kendall, a Lenoir-Rhyne vice president,
said through a spokesman that the school has
Florida A&M
One fraternity leader agrees with the Kowiaks.
A federal law would send a message that hazing
will be punished, said Juan Guardia, former chair
of the National Association of Latino Fraternal
Organizations, which comprises 20 fraternities and
sororities. “There’s been too many hazing cases.”
One of the most prominent hazing deaths was
that of Robert Champion, 26, a drum major in the
marching band of Florida A&M University, a
historically black college in Tallahassee. According
to his parents’ lawsuit, band members in
November 2011 severely punched and kicked
Champion on a chartered bus following a
performance. Fourteen people were charged with
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crimes including manslaughter. Most of the cases
are pending.
Last summer, Lianne Kowiak got in touch with
Wilson, who had begun promising federal
legislation after Champion’s death. A former
elementary school principal who entered
Congress in January 2011, Wilson received a
modest $1,000 donation from FratPAC that
September. Known for wearing flamboyant
cowboy hats, the 70-year-old Wilson belongs to
the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and used to be a
regional director.
Haze Buster
The self-proclaimed haze buster stated in a
2012 press release that she “played a key role” in
winning passage of Florida’s tough anti-hazing law
in 2005. However, Adam Hasner, the sponsor of
the law and former majority leader of Florida’s
House of Representatives, said in an interview that
Wilson “was not a participant” in pushing the bill
to near-unanimous passage. Hasner, a
Fitting In
At the congresswoman’s invitation, Kowiak and
her daughter, Emma, now 15, joined Wilson at the
Capitol Hill news conference in September.
“When did it become a tradition to beat each
other and torture each other for the purpose of fitting
into an institution?” Wilson asked at the news
conference. “The time for Congress to address it is
now.”
Kowiak wasn’t aware that FratPAC had been
working to dissuade the congresswoman against
filing the bill. Eight months earlier, FratPAC executive
director O’Neill dispatched a confidential
memorandum to colleagues saying he would try to
“make changes” to her plan.
O’Neill explained in his Jan. 19, 2012, memo
that Wilson wanted a federal law because she
thought there were too few state prosecutions for
hazing, with its “culture of silence that makes it
difficult for victims and witnesses to come forward.”
Republican, said that Wilson’s advocacy of a
federal law may have been intended to capitalize
on publicity about Champion’s death in Florida.
Wilson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A month after Champion’s death, Wilson
declared that she’d introduce federal legislation in
January 2012. When she missed that deadline,
she reiterated her pledge the following May and
September.
Besides denying financial aid to students
convicted in court or punished by their school for
hazing, Wilson proposed creating a federal antihazing advisory committee. Hank Nuwer, author of
books on hazing, counts 77 hazing deaths since
1990.
State Issue
O’Neill disagreed. Wilson’s proposal would
unfairly target students on financial aid, who would
“face a severe penalty for conduct well below the
standard needed for criminal prosecution,” he wrote.
University tribunals weighing hazing allegations might
not provide students with a lawyer or other legal
protections.
Hazing cases belong “at the state level,” he
added.
Six states lack anti-hazing laws, and at least
seven others have statutes that don’t make it a crime
in the absence of injuries, said Cindy Tesch, a
University of Maine researcher. There’s no uniform
definition of hazing among states or national
database of incidents.
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The U.S. Education Department has no position
on the need for a federal hazing law, spokeswoman
Jane Glickman said.
Leaders from FratPAC and the other national
groups expressed their concerns to Wilson and her
staff in March 2012, Stellhorn, FratPAC’s president,
said in telephone interviews. Most of the
conversation focused on hazing, said Stellhorn, who
attended the meeting.
Lobbying Intensifies
Afterward, O’Neill maintained “significant”
contact with Wilson’s office, Stellhorn said. He put
other critics, including college administrators, in
contact with Wilson.
“We have been aggressively working with the
congressional leader to develop a more favorable
approach,” FratPAC and the other groups told their
members in a mid-2012 memo. “For the moment,
we believe that effort has been successful and
federal hazing legislation is not likely to be
introduced in 2012.”
As recently as May, fraternities reiterated their
opposition to a federal hazing law in an internal
document reviewed by Bloomberg News.
“This legislation would result in more problems
than it solves,” FratPAC and its two companion
groups wrote.
Stellhorn said in an interview that her industry
has strong anti-hazing programs and that states
should tackle hazing through stringent criminal laws.
“There are already good laws in place,” she
said.
who haze, even if there hasn’t been a judicial
finding of wrongdoing, Stellhorn said.
“It’s a huge stretch to say we as an
organization fought that legislation,” she said.
Wilson also heard from other opponents to
her plan. Florida A&M said it would unfairly target
minority students, who rely more heavily on
financial aid, according to Tola Thompson, the
school’s director of governmental relations. A
task force of minority educators and clergy
formed after the A&M hazing death, and led by
Tallahassee Reverend R.B. Holmes, said
community advocacy, and not a federal law,
would stop hazing.
On April 25, 2012, the National Association
for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, which
represents historically black colleges, told Wilson
it was “concerned” that a preliminary draft of the
bill “would single out” hazing for harsher
penalties than other offenses.
‘Good Laws’
Fraternity and sorority leaders disagreed with
Wilson’s plan to deny financial aid to students
Lawmaker’s Inaction
Supporters of anti-hazing legislation reached
out to Wilson as well. Susan Lipkins, a New York
psychologist and author of a book on hazing,
wrote to Wilson after the congresswoman
pledged to introduce a bill. Seven years earlier,
Lipkins had teamed with a group called Mothers
Against School Hazing in calling for a federal
anti-hazing law that would include a database of
incidents. Lipkins said she couldn’t get a meeting
with lawmakers in 2005 and didn’t hear back
from Wilson last year.
After the news conference, Kowiak grew
increasingly puzzled by Wilson’s inaction. She
called Wilson’s office repeatedly and was told the
bill remained a priority for the congresswoman.
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As fall turned to winter, an aide told Kowiak that
Wilson was weighing different approaches.
Lately, when Kowiak has phoned Wilson’s office,
she hasn’t heard back.
Wilson never introduced her anti-hazing bill.
Wilson “apparently reconsidered” filing the
anti-hazing bill, Stellhorn said. “From our
standpoint, we’ve been successful in having her
take a look at some of the wording” of her
proposal. “We’ve stood as a voice of reason.”
‘Some Hiccups’
Wilson’s website continues to feature a
photograph of her and the Kowiaks holding the
“Hazing Kills” banner. She said she remains
committed to filing a bill. Fraternities “didn’t block
it,” she said in a brief interview last month. She
said she plans to offer a bill when the Robert
Champion lawsuit concludes. That may take
years, Champion lawyer Christopher Chestnut
said.
“There are some hiccups in the bill in my
mind as it relates to penalties,” Wilson said,
without elaborating.
While she’s pulled back on the anti-hazing
proposal, Wilson is a co-sponsor of the bill to
give fraternities a tax break to renovate chapter
houses. It benefits college students, she said,
alluding to the industry’s claim that they can live
U.S. Representative Frederica Wilson, a Democrat from Florida,
center in red, the self-proclaimed "Haze Buster", is a co-sponsor
of a bill to give fraternities a tax break to renovate chapter houses.
Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images
more cheaply in chapter houses than in dorms.
“Anything to help with tuition,” Wilson said.
Four-and-a-half years after her only son’s
death, Lianne Kowiak still finds comfort in talking
to his photo in the dining room of her home, and
she preserves his bedroom as it looked when he
was alive.
“What’s it going to take?” Kowiak asked
about Congressional action. “My God, my son’s
life was taken away.”
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Wall Street Feeder
Trinity Sees Leader Quit
Amid Frat Fight
By David Glovin
Bloomberg News
May 6, 2013 – The dive that a drunk Alexander
Okano took into a shallow pool at Psi Upsilon
house, paralyzing him from the chest down,
helped spur reforms to Trinity College’s fraternity
culture that faculty members applauded.
Alumni of Psi Upsilon and other fraternities
are another story – and, amid their complaints,
Trinity President James Jones said today that he
would be leaving in 2014, a year earlier than
planned. His statement came hours before a
meeting of alumni and students who oppose
Trinity’s mandate that fraternities and sororities go
co-ed by September.
“We’re going to be pushing back,” Claude
Brouillard, a real estate investor, said in April, urging
students to join a new organization that threatens to
challenge Trinity’s initiative in court. “There are a lot of
parents and a lot of alumni who are mad, who are
not going to be funding Trinity.”
Drinking, partying and even injuries and
deaths have led to increased scrutiny of
fraternities on many campuses, even as Greek
Trinity College President James Jones, who became president in
2004, oversaw the largest capital campaign in the college’s
history, started the renovation of its buildings and grounds and
expanded the school’s study-abroad programs, Trinity said.
Source: Trinity College via Bloomberg
news accounts and interviews. Eight students
died in both 2011 and 2012, the most fatalities
in at least a decade.
Okano, then a 20-year-old junior at the
Hartford, Connecticut, college, broke his neck on
Oct. 11, 2008, during Tropical, an annual
blowout with live music, kegs of beer and
hundreds of revelers. He sued Trinity.
life enjoys renewed popularity. Since 2005, 52
students died and six were paralyzed in incidents
involving fraternities or their members, according
to data compiled by Bloomberg from lawsuits,
Sweeping Changes
Last Oct. 17, 12 days after the college
settled the case, its board announced sweeping
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changes to social life. Worried that Trinity’s party
reputation and alcohol abuse were hurting its
academic standing, trustees established a new
housing system and required each fraternity and
sorority to maintain a 3.2 grade-point average
and go co-ed.
Since then, Trinity has been engulfed in a
battle with some of its most active alumni donors.
Many graduates who belong to fraternities, such
as Hans Becherer, former chairman of Moline,
Illinois-based Deere & Co., the world’s largest
agricultural- equipment company, have stopped
contributing. Trinity recently finished last in a
competition with three rival New England
colleges for donations.
At tonight’s meeting, Greg Lukianoff,
executive director of Philadelphia-based
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, told
more than 100 students to seek attention and
encourage parents and alumni to stop donating
to the college.
“Universities hate bad publicity,” Lukianoff
said. “Make your case.”
Alumni Association Executive Committee April 29
that he was expecting Bloomberg News to publish
an article about the college’s efforts to curb
fraternities and the “potential impact on alumni
giving.” He promised to let the association know
about the article as soon as it was published.
Efforts to rein in Greek houses nationwide face
formidable obstacles, from lost donations to potential
litigation. They run into resistance not only from
undergraduate members of local chapters, but also
from the chapters’ increasingly prosperous national
organizations and wealthy, well-connected alumni.
College Donors
Fraternity and sorority alumni are more likely to
give to their colleges and are larger lifetime donors
than other graduates, according to a 2007 report by
the Council for Advancement and Support of
Education, a Washington-based fundraisers’ group.
Antagonizing fraternity alumni, who are often as
loyal to their chapter as to their school, may be
especially dicey at a time of unpredictable market
returns and pressure to restrain tuition increases,
said Kris Kindelsperger, a senior consultant at
Johnson Grossnicle and Associates, a Greenwood,
Indiana-based fundraiser.
“The risk is that you alienate people in every
generation, going back to the oldest generation”
of alumni, said Kindelsperger.
Jones’s Contract
Jones, in his retirement e-mail, didn’t refer to the
meeting or other concerns raised by alumni or
students, saying instead that much of the work he
set out to do has been completed or is under way.
The college said in a statement that Jones, two years
ago, “graciously accepted our request” to stay until
2015, three years after his contract ended. Board
Chairman Paul Raether, a partner at New Yorkbased KKR & Co. and a member of Psi Upsilon, said
today that he would step down with Jones.
Reflecting his concern about fallout among
fraternity alumni, Jones notified Trinity’s National
Donations Drop
Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and
Denison University in Granville, Ohio, saw dropoffs in contributors after curbing frats. Franklin &
Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
which barred fraternities from campus in the
1980s, reinstated them in 2004. One reason
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was that then-President John Fry “wanted the
money,” said David Stameshkin, a former
associate dean of students. Donations jumped
from $11.3 million in 2004 to $16.4 million in
2007. Fry declined to comment.
Fraternities enjoyed an increase in
membership to 327,260 in 2011 from 253,148
in 2005, according to the North-American
Interfraternity Conference, a trade group. Even in
the northeast, where Greek life had fallen out of
favor, fraternity and sorority membership is on the
rise at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New
Hampshire; Union College in Schenectady, New
York; Lehigh University in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania; and Wesleyan University in
Middletown, Connecticut.
Founded in 1823, Trinity has 2,200 students
and a $57,580- per-year price tag. Trinity is
renowned for its squash team, which has been
national champion 14 of the past 15 years, and
its pipeline to Wall Street. One in eight members
of the classes of 2003 and 2004 was working as
a financial manager or analyst last year,
according to the college.
Many graduates who belong to fraternities, including Hans
Becherer, former chairman of Deere & Co., the world’s largest
agricultural-equipment company, have stopped contributing.
Source: Deere & Co. via Bloomberg
in the Greek system, fraternities and sororities
dominate the social life.
Alexander Okano, who grew up in Los
Angeles, was captain of Trinity’s water polo team
and a member of Psi Upsilon. The chapter
regularly held parties in its basement on
Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Alcohol left
over from the parties would be imbibed later, a
member, T.J. Tarca, later testified.
Noted Alumni
Trinity alumni include David Gottesman, a
board member at Omaha, Nebraska-based
Berkshire Hathaway Inc., and Peter Kraus,
chairman of AllianceBernstein Holding LP in New
York, along with journalist George Will and
playwright Edward Albee. Fraternities like Alpha
Delta Phi run networking events featuring
graduates from Wall Street firms such as Piper
Jaffray Cos., based in Minneapolis, and Royce
Fund in New York.
While only 18 percent of Trinity students are
‘Dozens’ Drunk
Alcohol was abundant at the Tropical bash,
Psi Upsilon’s biggest party of the year. While only
students legally old enough to drink were
supposed to be given bracelets entitling them to
beer, the chapter handed them out to under-age
brothers too.
“People were drunk,” the chapter’s thenpresident, Joshua Biren, testified in a deposition.
“Certainly dozens.”
For the party, fraternity pledges and a college
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buildings- and-grounds worker dug a pool less
than four feet deep in the backyard. Okano had a
blood alcohol content of .10 when he flung off
his sunglasses and shirt, lunged into the pool
head-first and cracked his vertebrae. Tarca saved
his life by pulling him out of the pool.
“My arms and legs immediately went limp,”
Okano said in a 2008 e-mail to friends that
recounted how he was unable to lift his head
from the water. “45 or so seconds later my world
went black.”
After surgery and months of rehabilitation,
Okano can walk and has recovered “very well,”
his lawyer, Neil Sutton, said. Okano, who
returned to Trinity and graduated in 2011, sued
the college, the national fraternity and the chapter
for creating a hazard.
waited to seek help for fear the hazing would be
exposed, according to the lawsuit. The college
later banned Sigma Nu from campus and the
fraternity parent suspended it.
according to court records. Thomas Fox, Psi
Missed Year
Earlier that year, the chapter had received the
national Sigma Nu award for outstanding recruitment
strategies, according to Trinity’s student newspaper.
R. Bradley Beacham, executive director of Lexington,
Virginia-based Sigma Nu, declined to comment.
Cappello, who declined to comment, missed a
year of school. He agreed to a confidential
settlement with the chapter and five members on
May 2, said his lawyer, John Houlihan.
Reflecting a national trend toward binge
drinking, the number of Trinity students transported
to hospitals because of excessive alcohol rose from
about a dozen in fall 2009 to 40 two years later,
according to Dean of Students Fred Alford.
Trinity’s rambunctious fraternity culture has
Upsilon’s executive director, declined to say how
affected its academic quality, some administrators
much his Indianapolis-based national paid.
Okano, who had demanded $1.1 million from
Trinity, reached a confidential settlement with the
college.
Eighteen months after Okano’s injury, another
Trinity student was seriously hurt at a fraternity.
During an initiation period known as Hell Week in
April 2010, the brothers at Sigma Nu told their
three pledges not to leave the house except for
classes, and ordered them to finish a keg of beer.
One pledge, Andrew Cappello, was kicked
out of the house for using his mobile phone,
according to his 2011 lawsuit in Superior Court
in Hartford. Intoxicated, he fell down and suffered
brain and spinal injuries. Fraternity members
and faculty members say.
“It’s very frustrating when a student says I can’t
get a paper done on time, or I didn’t come to class,
because I was pledging,” said philosophy professor
Maurice Wade, adding emphasis to the last word.
“We’d like for students to have the kind of social life
outside the classroom that’s not wholly party-centric.
And we’d like what happens at nights and weekends
not be inconsistent with academic values.”
Wall Street Feeder
Hell Week
The chapter paid $550,000 to settle,
Test Scores
In 2004, when President Jones took the
helm, Trinity was 22nd of about 240 schools in
U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of national
liberal-arts colleges, which weighs financial
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resources, selectivity, alumni giving and other
metrics.
Since then, test scores of entering freshmen
have fallen, more students are transferring to
other colleges, and growth of the school’s $422
million endowment has lagged. Burdened by
“terrible” financial “negligence” of earlier
administrators, school officials must cut $6
million from a debt-laden budget, Gary Reger, a
history professor, wrote in a December e-mail to
colleagues after hearing a private presentation
from Jones.
Today, U.S. News ranks Trinity 38th, second
lowest in the New England Small College
Athletic Conference, well behind fellow members
Amherst, Williams and Wesleyan. Four of 11
NESCAC schools have fraternities.
‘At Risk’
In a 2011 paper on Trinity’s future, President
The Psi Upsilon house stands at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Trinity’s rambunctious fraternity culture has affected its
academic quality, some administrators and faculty members say.
Photographer: Douglas Healey/Bloomberg
levels of intellectual engagement” are a turn-off
for the academically- oriented applicants it’s
seeking, especially as competition for students
intensifies, Baltimore-based Neustadt Creative
Marketing found.
Jones wrote that the school’s social life was too
centered on a Greek system that selects
members based on “economic privilege or
physical appearance.” He called fraternities and
sororities “the last remaining vestige of an antimeritocratic structure on campus.”
Jones urged a renewed emphasis on
academics and changes to social life. “If steps
are not taken at Trinity, and in the not-too-distant
future, I fervently believe that Trinity will be at
risk,” wrote Jones, who declined to comment for
this article.
A 2012 marketing study commissioned by
Trinity reinforced Jones’s message. While the
school has an established reputation in “affluent
markets” for small classes and dedicated
professors, its “hedonistic” culture and “lower
45 Percent
In January 2012, Trinity set new limits on the
number of events with alcohol that student groups
may host and the amount of alcohol that may be
served. Then on Oct. 17, the board said it had
adopted broader changes proposed by its
committee on social community, including dramatic
reform of fraternities and sororities.
Greek houses must start recruiting coeducational pledge classes, initiation periods are
eliminated, and pledges must have at least a 3.0
grade point average in the prior semester. Each
fraternity and sorority must draw at least 45 percent
of its members from the opposite sex by Oct. 1,
2016.
Trinity must “stem the loss of students and
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in rankings to other causes, including Hartford’s
crime and poverty; a student suffered a near-fatal
beating immediately outside of campus last year.
They say that the committee’s finding that Greek
students are academically inferior omitted betterperforming chapters and that the college’s true aim
is to acquire the chapter houses.
Fraternity alumni – who are “somewhat more
likely” than other graduates to donate to the college,
according to a 2005 Trinity report – retaliated by
shutting their wallets. While the college waited until
Trinity College is renowned for its squash team, which has been
national champion 14 of the past 15 years, and its pipeline to
Wall Street. One in eight members of the classes of 2003 and
2004 was working as a financial manager or analyst last year,
according to the college.
Photographer: George Ruhe/AP Photo
it had completed a six-year, $369 million campaign
before announcing the co-education mandate, the
initiative has hurt annual giving.
Done Contributing
This year, Trinity lost by a three-to-one margin in
avoid further slippage in our reputational
standing” said the committee, which reported
that fraternity members are more likely to drink
and use drugs and have lower grades.
The board’s action outraged undergraduate
and alumni members and national fraternities. An
online petition urging Trinity to repeal the coeducation mandate has 4,380 signatures.
“My fraternity won’t exist,” said Sonjay Singh,
president of the local Pi Kappa Alpha chapter.
March Madness, a race for donations from recent
alumni against Bates, Colby and Connecticut
colleges. In recent years, Trinity has won or come
close. Separately, Trinity as of April 29 had raised
Wallets Closed
Justin Buck, executive vice president of Pi
Kappa Alpha, based in Memphis, Tennessee,
backed Singh. “This mandate looks to establish
barriers to the natural process by which people
build friendships,” he wrote Jones in October.
Fraternity alumni attribute the college’s decline
only $5.9 million of the $9 million it seeks for fiscal
2013, which ends June 30.
“I’ve been contributing for many years; I’m not
going to anymore,” said former Deere Chairman
Becherer, a 1957 Trinity graduate and member of
St. Anthony Hall, Trinity’s oldest and most exclusive
fraternity. “It’s a very nice liberal view that Jimmy
Jones is pushing – that everybody is going to be
happy in a new social organization. I think people
like to join with similar-minded kids.”
David Hughes, a stock analyst, has also
stopped giving. A 1987 alumnus and former
president of St. Anthony Hall, Hughes met his wife,
a sorority sister, at Trinity. His uncle, grandfather and
great-grandfather were all members of “The Hall,”
and he feels a kinship to them through his
Wall Street Feeder
“We can’t accept girls” under the rules of the
fraternity’s national parent.
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brotherhood.
“A great experience, to be accepted,” he said.
down the fraternities and take their assets,” he
said.
Fundraising Targets
While she acknowledges that fundraising
“took a dip” from the alumni protest, Mary Jo
Keating, who as secretary of the college is the
president’s deputy, said she is “pretty positive”
that Trinity will meet its targets. Other colleges
that reformed fraternity culture took a “hit but
they’ve come back and they’re doing fine,” she
said.
The leadership changes aren’t related to
tonight’s meeting, Keating said.
Robert Bibow, a London-based managing
director for private equity firm Genii Capital, has
formed the Foundation for Student Freedom of
Association Inc., which plans to raise donations
for a possible lawsuit claiming that Trinity’s plan
violates its promise to honor students’
constitutional right of association.
“You are on the front lines,” Bibow told
‘Crazy’ Claim
Fraternities are overreacting, Keating said. “If
we wanted to get rid of them, we would have,”
she said. They “are not viewed as the enemy.”
The alumni claim that Trinity wants to seize
control of privately-owned fraternity houses is
“crazy,” she said.
Fraternity alumni at Trinity are prepared for a
long fight. At homecoming in November, they
packed a meeting to complain about the coeducational decree.
“We are going to be moving ahead,” insisted
Raether, the board chairman.
That spurred alumnus Henry Bruce, parent of
a recent graduate, to invoke a line from the 1978
movie “Animal House,” in which John Belushi
exhorts Delta House members to fight back.
“Over? Over? – it’s not over until we say it’s
over,” Bruce said.
undergraduate fraternity and sorority members at
the April meeting on campus, encouraging them
to join his foundation. Trinity wants to “close
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Fraternities Scuttle
Recruiting Ban Prompted
by Drinking Deaths
By John Hechinger
David Glovin
Bloomberg News
October 15, 2013 – After a freshman died from
downing beer, rum and 151-proof liquor in an
initiation ritual, California Polytechnic State
University in 2010 banned fraternities from
recruiting newly arrived students.
Right away, the North-American
Interfraternity Conference, which represents 75
national fraternities, jumped in. The Indianapolisbased trade group e-mailed and met with Cal
Poly administrators, paid for a study that
opposed the ban and spurred a three-year
campaign by student leaders. It won, and the
school lifted the restriction this year. One
freshman, Charlie Ross, couldn’t be happier
about the opportunity to join a fraternity right
away instead of waiting three months.
“You’ve got a group of guys who watch out
for you when you’re drinking,” Ross, 18, said
after unpacking his bags at freshman orientation
on the San Luis Obispo campus.
The university’s turnabout shows how the
Interfraternity Conference is blocking an approach
that some higher education leaders say can save
lives: postponing recruitment of freshmen, who
account for a disproportionate number of fraternityrelated deaths. The conference has opposed
The Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity house stands near campus of
California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly
SLO) in San Luis Obispo, California, U.S.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
proposals at dozens of colleges to delay recruiting
by a semester or a year.
“These organizations were putting our freshmen
at risk,” said Shirley Tilghman, former president of
Princeton University, which prohibited fraternity
recruiting of freshmen, starting in the fall of 2012.
“There is so much vulnerability in that first week, that
first month as a freshman on a college campus – of
feeling lost. It leads to all kinds of decisions that you
would not make if you had a little more time to find
your way.”
Freshmen Deaths
Princeton students who belonged to
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fraternities, especially freshmen, were more likely
to be hospitalized because of drinking, said
Tilghman, who stepped down as president in
June. Of 60 fraternity-related deaths nationwide
since 2005, 24, or 40 percent, were of freshmen,
Universities often are susceptible to the
Interfraternity Conference’s pressure to recruit
freshmen because Greek life appeals to
applicants and many alumni donors remain loyal
to their fraternities. Only 80 of about 800 U.S.
campuses with fraternities defer recruiting,
according to the conference.
Fraternity membership surged to 327,260 in
2011 from 253,148 in 2005. National fraternities
and affiliated foundations generated $185 million
in student dues and other revenue in 20102011, up 24 percent from 2005-2006, tax
records show.
The group has stepped up advocacy on
campuses, especially against recruiting
restrictions. With its encouragement, fraternity
leaders at Case Western Reserve University in
Cleveland rejected a 2011 plan to defer
recruiting freshmen. At the University of Colorado
at Boulder, the conference backed fraternities’
decision to operate without university recognition,
reducing their access to campus facilities, rather
than accept deferred recruitment and live-in
advisers.
Binge Drinking
White male fraternity members drink more
Lawsuit Threat
“The NIC was not supportive” of university
rules, said Deb Coffin, Colorado vice chancellor
for student affairs.
The University of Central Florida this year
lifted a recruitment moratorium, which had been
prompted by excessive drinking at fraternities and
sororities, after the Interfraternity Conference
threatened to sue the school for violating
students’ freedom-of-association rights. The
heavily than any other group on campus, and
published research suggests that the youngest
students are most likely to engage in binge
drinking, according to Aaron White, program
director for college and underage drinking
prevention research at the National Institute on
Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
“The first couple of months of school are a
particularly vulnerable time for students with
regard to heavy drinking,” White said. “Delaying
rush makes a lot of sense.”
Founded in 1909, the Interfraternity
Conference joined the industry’s political arm,
known as FratPAC, in fighting against a federal
anti-hazing bill last year.
national group’s threat didn’t influence the
university, said Maribeth Ehasz, a Central Florida
vice president.
Of the 24 fraternity-related freshman deaths
since 2005, 15 occurred during and after
recruiting events, including hazing and initiation
rituals.
At Northern Illinois University in DeKalb,
freshman David Bogenberger died last year of
alcohol poisoning after a fraternity initiation rite
known as “Mom and Dad’s Night.” With other
pledges, Bogenberger moved from room to room
at the chapter house answering questions from
members and downing vodka before passing out,
court records show.
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Fraternity Measures
Fraternities have taken steps to protect
students, including banning alcohol at recruiting
events and supporting sanctions against
violators, said Peter Smithhisler, president of the
Interfraternity Conference.
While drinking deaths at fraternities are
“heartbreaking,” many students drink too much,
not just at fraternities, he said. Keeping out
freshmen merely puts a “Band-Aid” on a broader
campus problem, he said. It also deprives
freshmen of opportunities at fraternities for
leadership, career networking and charitable
work, he said.
“It would be a travesty if the fraternity
experience were not available for the
development of these young men,” Smithhisler
said. “We believe in the fraternity experience and
its ability to really transform an undergraduate
into better men, better citizens, better doctors,
teachers, engineers.”
Fraternities’ Lifeblood
If colleges are allowed to restrict recruitment
for a semester or a year, they could next extend
the delay through sophomore year, or even shut
down fraternities, as some liberal arts institutions
have done, he said.
“Recruitment is the lifeblood for every
chapter,” Smithhisler said.
Carson Starkey, whose death prompted the
Cal Poly ban, hadn’t planned on joining a
fraternity until he arrived at the public university of
19,000 on the central California coast. One out
of six undergraduates there participate in Greek
life.
The clean-cut, curly-haired 18-year-old from
Scott and Julia Starkey hold a photograph of their son, Carson,
who died at age 18 of alcohol poisoning during a fraternity
initiation ritual at California Polytechnic State University in San
Luis Obispo, California. The Starkeys founded Aware Awake
Alive, a nonprofit group that raises awareness about excessive
drinking. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
Austin, Texas, knew no one on campus, and the
opportunity to bond with fraternity brothers soon
appealed to him. He chose to pledge Sigma
Alpha Epsilon, one of the largest fraternities, with
chapters on almost 230 campuses in the U.S.
and Canada.
‘Drink Up’
While it included other activities such as a
scavenger hunt, much of Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s
initiation revolved around alcohol. After
Thanksgiving, fraternity members summoned
Starkey and 16 other pledges to the garage of
an off-campus house for “Brown Bag Night.”
Tarps covered couches to protect them from
vomit, according to court testimony. Pledges sat
in a circle, with a trash can at the center.
At 10:30 p.m., each pledge was given a
brown bag with cans and bottles of alcohol.
“Drink up, finish by midnight,” said one
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At freshman orientation last month, students explore the campus
of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo,
California. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
upperclassman, according to court testimony.
Starkey’s bag had two 24-ounce cans of
Steel Reserve beer, a 16-ounce can of Sparks
alcoholic energy drink, and a fifth of rum he was
to split with another pledge, one of several Sigma
Alpha Epsilon brothers who bought the liquor
testified. Pledges also shared a bottle of 151proof Everclear, which is 75.5 percent alcohol.
Starkey’s mother, Julia.
Starkey died on Dec. 2, 2008, 71 days after
starting college. He had a blood-alcohol content
of 0.44, or about five times the legal limit,
according to court testimony.
Four fraternity brothers pleaded no contest
to misdemeanor charges related to hazing. They
were sentenced to jail terms ranging from 30 to
120 days.
The Starkeys sued Sigma Alpha Epsilon and
several members for negligence, settling for at
least $2.45 million, court records show.
Sigma Alpha Epsilon is committed to
“providing a meaningful, beneficial and safe
experience” for all members, the national
fraternity said in a statement.
Cal Poly barred Sigma Alpha Epsilon from
campus until 2033 and considered eliminating
fraternities. Instead, it stepped up oversight and
decided in 2010 to delay freshman recruiting
until January, the school’s second quarter.
Starkey in a car and removed his Sigma Alpha
Epsilon pin, so that doctors wouldn’t know he
was at a fraternity event. Then they changed their
minds. Rather than go to the hospital, they
brought him back in the house and left him on a
dirty mattress, according to court records and
‘Huge Pushback’
Soon after the policy was announced, “there
was a huge pushback” from the fraternity
industry, said Stephan Lamb, then the university’s
associate director of student life.
Smithhisler and other Interfraternity
Conference executives visited the school in 2010
to ask administrators to rescind deferred
recruitment.
“The hand-wringing has started” among
fraternity leaders about Cal Poly’s limits on
recruitment, Smithhisler wrote in a Jan. 12, 2011,
e-mail to Lamb obtained through a request to the
university under California’s open-records law.
The next month, the trade group sent
As members chanted “Puke and Rally,” Starkey
emptied his bag in 20 minutes, court records
show.
Dirty Mattress
After Starkey passed out, fraternity brothers
debated whether to drive him to a hospital less
than a mile away, members testified. They placed
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industry experts to Cal Poly to conduct an indepth assessment of the school’s Greek system,
according to university records. Typically,
universities request such an evaluation and pay
an $8,000 fee. In this instance, the conference
covered the cost.
Stealing, Drinking
The report was hardly flattering. The
assessment, prepared by fraternity executives,
college administrators and a social worker, called
Cal Poly’s recruitment “dehumanizing and
superficial” and said alcohol was “a, and perhaps
THE, defining factor” of Greek life.
“Hazing occurs in the men’s chapters,
particularly physical/strength endurance, stealing
and drinking,” it said. “Alcohol plays a major role
in the Cal Poly fraternity/sorority experience,
especially within fraternity life.”
Still, the report called for an end to deferred
recruitment because it runs “counter to a
student’s right to choose.” The policy unfairly
required fraternities, but not sororities, to
postpone rush, according to the assessment.
The national group worked through students,
too. Andy Farrell, who headed Cal Poly’s student
fraternity group in 2010, said Smithhisler took
him aside and “made it clear that the
[Interfraternity Conference] stand is that deferred
recruitment should not exist.”
against deferred recruitment.
“We’d send them drafts of each section,” said
Jason Colombini, then a campus fraternity leader and
now student body president. “They would tell us
things to look into.” Colombini said he acted on his
own initiative, not the Interfraternity Conference’s.
Turnover at the top of Cal Poly aided the
fraternity cause. Jeffrey Armstrong, who became Cal
Poly’s president in 2011, and Keith Humphrey, vice
president for student affairs, sympathized with
students’ pleas, Colombini said. Unlike their
predecessors, Armstrong and Humphrey had been
in fraternities, and Armstrong met his wife through
his membership in Alpha Gamma Rho.
In June, Cal Poly announced it would abolish
deferred recruiting at its 17 fraternities. In return,
fraternity members agreed to register their parties,
undergo alcohol education and submit to periodic
reviews. About $100,000 in higher fees from
fraternity members will fund a new university position
monitoring Greek life.
Fighting Rules
National fraternities urged their Cal Poly
chapters to fight the new rule, said Michael
Franceschi, another student leader at the time. When
students organized, the conference supplied them
with research and helped edit a paper arguing
‘More Control’
The university didn’t bow to fraternity pressure,
Humphrey said. It simply wanted fraternity and
sorority recruitment on the same schedule. Deferred
recruiting isn’t a “silver bullet,” Armstrong said.
“We’re going to gain a lot more control” through
the agreement with fraternity members, Armstrong
said. “There will be a lot more accountability.”
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A picture of Carson Starkey appears on materials from Aware
Awake Alive, a nonprofit group his parents founded to fight
alcohol poisoning. Starkey, a freshman at California Polytechnic
State University in San Luis Obispo, California, died on Dec. 2,
2008, 71 days after starting college. He had a blood-alcohol
content of 0.44, or about five times the legal limit.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
The Interfraternity Conference assured the
university that fraternities had shown “higher alcohol
awareness.” Humphrey agreed, saying that students
are taking alcohol safety more seriously.
“We’re entering a different day,” he said.
Still, the number of people transported to the
underage partygoers went to the hospital with
alcohol poisoning, according to university
records.
The university suspended Lambda Chi
activities. Lambda Chi Alpha said it hadn’t
organized any parties after the fundraiser, records
show. Graham Garland, president of its Cal Poly
chapter, declined to comment. The university later
lifted the suspension because an investigation
didn’t support allegations against the fraternity,
Humphrey said.
In an editorial this month, the student paper,
the Mustang News, said fraternities haven’t
changed their behavior since Starkey’s death,
and the administration made a mistake in letting
them recruit freshman right away.
“Cal Poly is opening the door for more
trouble,” the editorial said.
Parents Troubled
Carson Starkey’s parents, while pleased with
Lambda Cabana
Since 2011, the university has disciplined
nine fraternities, in most cases for alleged
alcohol-related violations. After Lambda Chi
Alpha’s “Lambda Cabana” beach volleyball
tournament and charity fundraiser in April, three
the alcohol education program, opposed ending
deferred recruitment. They run a nonprofit group
to raise awareness about alcohol poisoning.
“I find it troubling that they [fraternities]
would be advocating against our efforts to try to
save lives,” said Julia Starkey, 52.
Her son would be alive if recruitment came
later, she said.
“I’m 200 percent sure he wouldn’t have
joined,” she said. “His core group of friends were
outside the fraternity, but that didn’t happen the
first weeks of school.”
Fraternities are putting revenue ahead of
safety, said his father, Scott Starkey, 54.
“If you defer the recruitment of your
members, you’re deferring income, I get that,” he
hospital by Cal Poly police because of alcohol
doubled to 35, in 2012-2013, from 2008, the
year Starkey died. The statistics don’t indicate
how many belonged to fraternities. The increase
shows that students are more willing to call for
help, said Martin Bragg, Cal Poly’s director of
health and counseling services.
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said. “We’re business people. But I also feel
there’s a human side.”
Welcoming Freshmen
On a crisp late summer day during freshman
orientation last month at Cal Poly, posters near
dormitory entrances urged students to wear
black wristbands with the name of the Starkeys’
charity: “Aware Awake Alive.”
“Take care of yourself,” read the posters.
“Take care of your friends.”
Freshmen were divided over the new rush
policy. Adam Massini, 18, from La Quinta,
California, said it would be better to delay
recruitment.
“Freshmen haven’t had much experience with
drinking and don’t know their limits,” said
Massini, who is considering joining a fraternity to
perform community service.
Waiting isn’t going to stop freshmen from
drinking heavily, said Grant Caraway, a former
star high school football quarterback from
Granite Bay, California.
“Some guys are going to be stupid, no
matter what,” Caraway said.
With formal recruiting weeks away, a banner
hung outside the Lambda Chi Alpha house. In
bold, block letters, it greeted freshmen:
“Welcoming You the Right Way Since 1979.”
While deferred recruiting gave freshmen
more time to choose a fraternity, Lambda Chi
now has no choice but to pursue them right
away, said Joe Hare, 21, its vice president.
“If all the fraternities do it, we can’t wait,” he
said. “It’s social suicide.”
–Editors: Dan Golden, Chris Staiti
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Freshmen Are More Likely to Die in Fraternity Rituals
Bloomberg News identified 60 fraternity-related deaths in the U.S. since 2005. Of the 60, 24 were freshmen. Most of the
freshmen died from alcohol abuse or after initiation rituals.
PU B LISH E D OCT. 15, 2013
Fraternity-related deaths in the U.S. since 2005
Listed chronologically by year of death
2005
’06
’07
Freshman
’08
All others
’09
’10
’11
’12
’13
U. of Idaho
Boston U.
Utah State
Northern Colorado
San Francisco State
California State — Fresno
Pennsylvania State
Northern Illinois
Illinois Wesleyan
U. of Kansas
Lafayette
Rider
U. of Delaware
Wabash College
Vincennes
California Polytechnic State — San Luis Obispo
Clemson
U. of Mississippi
Arizona State
U. of Texas
Baylor
Stephen F. Austin
Note: Deaths occurred at chapter houses on- or off-campus or elsewhere before or after fraternity events. In many cases a student death has led to
litigation in which the college and/or fraternity deny responsibility.
Source: Lawsuits and college officials
G RAPH IC: DAVI D G LOVI N / B LOOM B E RG N EWS & ALEX TR I B OU / B LOOM B E RG VISUAL DATA
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NEWS
Fraternities Tap Congress
for Tax Break
Without Hazing Penalties
By David Glovin
Bloomberg News
July 25, 2013 – About 40 percent of U.S. senators,
and 25 percent of U.S. representatives, belonged to
fraternities or sororities in college. On April 24, more
than a dozen of these grateful alumni extolled Greek
life at an annual $500-a- plate dinner in a
Washington hotel ballroom for “FratPAC,” the
industry’s political arm.
One by one, they took the podium and praised
fraternities for teaching them loyalty, leadership, and
practical skills.
“We learned to tap a keg,” declared
Representative Steven Palazzo, a Mississippi
Republican and Sigma Chi brother, who then yelled
a cheer as hundreds of FratPAC donors applauded.
Many of the legislators also pledged support for
FratPAC’s pet legislation: a multi-million-dollar tax
break to let fraternities and sororities use charitable
donations to renovate and help build chapter
houses.
“This time, we think we can get it done,” said
Ohio Republican Steve Stivers, a Delta Upsilon
alumnus, adding, “We need more Greeks in
The Chi Tau fraternity house is seen in Chico, California in this
Feb. 2005 file photo. Matthew Carrington died from heart failure
and seizures after being forced to do pushups in raw sewage
while fans blasted cold air on him in a basement at the fraternity
house at California State University, Chico.
Photographer: Randall Benton/Sacramento Bee via AP Photo
as the tax break, FratPAC and two companion
groups told fraternity leaders in a Jan. 10, 2011,
memo.
Besides pushing the tax bill, FratPAC, as the
Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee
calls itself on its Twitter page, has helped dissuade
U.S. Representative Frederica Wilson from filing
federal anti-hazing legislation. Wilson, a Democrat, is
co-sponsoring the tax proposal with six senators and
more than 50 other representatives.
Congress.”
While fraternities used to limit their political
activity to fending off potential threats, they’re
“playing offense today” by promoting initiatives such
Hazing Death
Debbie Smith, whose 21-year-old son died
in 2005 from heart failure and seizures after a
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hazing ritual, is “dumbfounded” by the industry’s
lobbying for a tax break and against national
hazing penalties, she said.
Smith’s son, Matthew Carrington, collapsed
after being forced to do pushups in raw sewage
while fans blasted cold air on him in a basement
at Chi Tau fraternity at California State University
in Chico. After his death, her advocacy spurred
the California legislature to enact “Matt’s Law,”
toughening hazing penalties.
“Why do fraternities need government help?”
Smith asked. “They want to build more houses
for hazing? I don’t think so. They need to learn
safety first.”
according to an internal industry memorandum
reviewed by Bloomberg News.
In 2003, the tax bill passed the House. Two
years later, fraternities and sororities established
FratPAC, which has contributed $818,000 to
political campaigns, primarily to Republicans. It
has made some of its largest contributions to key
backers of its tax initiative, and to members of the
House Ways and Means committee, where the
bill is pending.
‘Substandard Housing’
It has given $29,500 to Representative Paul
Ryan, the 2012 Republican vice presidential
nominee and chairman of the House Budget
Committee, and $24,500 to Pete Sessions,
chairman of the House Rules Committee. Ryan, a
member of Delta Tau Delta at Miami University in
Fraternities’ Comeback
Attracting undergraduates with aggressive
recruiting and the prospect of jobs at Wall Street
firms and other fields dominated by Greek
alumni, fraternities are making a comeback on
college campuses.
Meanwhile the toll from hazing and binge
drinking is mounting. The 101 fraternities and
sororities in the industry’s trade groups had
630,052 members in 2012, up 25 percent from
503,875 in 2007. Since 2005, 59 students have
died in incidents involving fraternities, about half
of them alcohol-related, according to data
compiled by Bloomberg. Ten students died in
2012, the most fatalities in at least a decade.
A 1996 fraternity house fire at the University
of North Carolina that killed five students spurred
the industry’s drive for the tax break. They
decided that they needed a federal law to let
them tap funds in their charitable foundations to
outfit chapter houses with fire sprinklers. About
half of all fraternity houses lack sprinklers,
Network Support
As a congressman from North Dakota and
member of the Ways and Means committee, Rick
Berg co-sponsored the tax bill. FratPAC
contributed $10,000 to his 2012 campaign for
the U.S. Senate. He lost.
Ohio, previously sponsored FratPAC’s tax- break
legislation. Sessions, a longtime supporter of the
bill, is now the sponsor.
The bill improves housing for college
students “so that they avoid problems that we
have seen across the country where there are
electrical fires and substandard housing,”
Sessions said in an interview. He added that he
“served proudly” as a member of Pi Kappa Alpha
at Southwestern University in Georgetown,
Texas.
Ryan declined to comment.
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“The organization is much more than their
financial support,” said Berg, a member of the
Farmhouse International Fraternity. “There’s a
network there.”
Of the 81 House and Senate incumbents to
whom FratPAC contributed in the last election
cycle, 54, or two-thirds, sponsored or cosponsored the tax bill, according to FratPAC. It
also donated to 17 first-time candidates.
FratPAC doesn’t donate to candidates just
because they support the tax break, said Kevin
O’Neill, a lobbyist at Washington-based Patton
Boggs LLP and FratPAC’s executive director. He
was a fundraiser for the Bush-Cheney re-election
campaign in 2004 and ran unsuccessfully for
Congress as a Republican in 2007.
It “looks at a variety of factors,” he said in an
e- mailed statement. “Good government needs
more fraternity/ sorority alumni who can help us
tackle the major challenges confronting our
nation.”
U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, a member of Delta Tau Delta at
Miami University in Ohio, previously sponsored the Fraternity and
Sorority Political Action Committee's tax-break legislation.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
been president of the Alpha Epsilon Pi chapter at
Ohio State University, he said. He co-sponsored the
legislation in 2009.
“The way they’re targeting is a logical way to
do it,” Klein said in a telephone interview. “If you
happen to have been in a fraternity or sorority in
college, and you lived in one of these houses,
they make it a health and safety issue.”
Fraternity Freshmen
FratPAC is seeking to send more fraternity
and sorority alumni to Congress. Freshman
Republicans Robert Pittenger, a member of
Kappa Alpha Order and a University of Texas
graduate, and Brad Wenstrup, who joined Sigma
Alpha Epsilon at the University of Cincinnati,
spoke at the ballroom dinner.
“We invest” in open Congressional seats,
O’Neill told the gathering.
FratPAC emphasizes alumni ties in its lobbying,
said former U.S. Representative Ron Klein, a Florida
Democrat who received $5,000 from the group in
2010. The national fraternity groups that came to
see him about the tax bill reminded him that he had
Warm Memories
Another fraternity alumnus, former Senate
Majority Leader Trent Lott, co-sponsored the bill
in 2007. Lott, who had been president of the
Sigma Nu chapter at the University of
Mississippi, had such warm memories that he
awarded jobs and favors to fraternity brothers,
according to Curtis Wilkie, author of “The Fall of
the House of Zeus.” Lott, who resigned from the
Senate in December 2007, declined to comment.
Representative Palazzo, also a Mississippi
Republican, is currently a co-sponsor. He denies
having made the keg reference, according to his
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such restrictions by allowing fraternity and
sorority foundations to use tax- deductible gifts
to “provide, improve, operate or maintain”
chapter housing. Fraternity foundations
collectively held $534 million in 2010. Other
groups that provide housing to college students
would also benefit from the bill, its advocates say.
Donations are needed for fire sprinklers and
other repairs, said Eve Riley, former chairwoman
of the National Panhellenic Conference, or NPC,
an Indianapolis-based group representing 26
Former U.S. Representative Ron Klein, a Democrat from Florida,
said the Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee
emphasizes alumni ties in its lobbying.
Photographer: Jay Premack/Bloomberg
spokeswoman, Laura Chambers.
The tax proposal has gained bipartisan
support. Last term, it had 169 House sponsors
and co-sponsors, including 105 Republicans and
64 Democrats, and 22 sponsors and cosponsors in the Senate, including 15
Republicans and seven Democrats. Formally
known as the Collegiate Housing and
Infrastructure Act, it would cost taxpayers $148
million over 10 years, according to a 2007
estimate by the Joint Committee on Taxation.
sororities.
“They’re trying to get the houses up to
code,” she said. “It’s not for building houses.”
‘Student Safety’
The tax benefit is primarily for “safety for
students,” Cindy Stellhorn, FratPAC’s president
Eliminate Restrictions
Under IRS interpretation of existing law,
donations to fraternities’ charitable foundations
may be used “to build or improve” libraries or
computer rooms within fraternity houses, not for
sleeping or “recreational areas,” which the
Internal Revenue Service deems “incidental” to
schooling.
The bill, which fraternity leaders say is
endorsed by dozens of colleges, would eliminate
and an insurance executive, said in an interview.
The bill has other benefits for Greek
institutions. It would probably increase gifts to
fraternity foundations, and help “leverage private
funds” to build new housing, according to the
industry’s April 2011 lobbying guide.
Some colleges, such as Clemson University
in South Carolina, have endorsed the tax break.
Clemson has a “robust Greek community,” said
Katy Bayless, its director of federal relations.
Clemson has also hired O’Neill to lobby for
federal funding.
On June 8, 2011, O’Neill and another Patton
Boggs lobbyist met with a staff member of the
House Ways and Means Committee to explain
the legislation, according to a memorandum by
FratPAC and two companion groups, the NPC
and the North American Interfraternity
Conference. Fraternities and their allies said they
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hope the bill will be part of comprehensive tax
reform that Ways and Means Chairman Dave
Camp is promising.
“We’re hoping” it will pass this year, FratPAC
president Stellhorn said. “We had great
receptions when we were on the Hill in April.”
Undergraduate Members
Preceding the April 24 ballroom dinner,
hundreds of undergraduate fraternity and sorority
members descended on Capitol Hill to lobby for
the tax bill. In their best suits or dresses, armed
with talking points, maps and schedules, they
moved in small groups from one lawmaker’s
office to the next for meetings arranged by
O’Neill’s firm.
The conversations sometimes began with
legislators reminiscing about their own fraternity
days. Some students posed with members of
Congress for photos and posted them on
FratPAC’s Twitter page.
Mike Rodmaker, a student at the University of
Cincinnati and president of its Interfraternity
Council, said he pitched the tax break to Senator
Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, who wasn’t in
a fraternity. Portman’s spokeswoman, Caitlin
1996 fraternity house fire at the University of North Carolina that
killed five students spurred the industry’s drive for the tax break.
About half of all fraternity houses lack sprinklers, according to an
internal industry memorandum reviewed by Bloomberg News.
Photographer: Joe Weiss/Durhan Herald-Sun via AP Photo By David Glovin
Dunn, said he is reviewing the legislation.
“He was definitely receptive,” Rodmaker
said. “We’re the second largest landlord behind
colleges and universities.”
–With assistance from Niharika Acharya in
Washington
–Editors: Daniel Golden, Cecile Daurat
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Secret Handshakes
Greet Frat Brothers
as Wall Street Women Trail
By Max Abelson
Zeke Faux
Bloomberg News
December 23, 2013 – Conor Hails, head of the
University of Pennsylvania’s Sigma Chi chapter,
was in a Philadelphia hotel ballroom last month for
a Barclays Plc recruiting reception. A friend pointed
out a banker from their fraternity. Hails, 20,
approached with a secret handshake.
“We exchanged a grip, and he said, ‘Every
Sigma Chi gets a business card,’” Hails recalled.
“We’re trying to create Sigma Chi on Wall Street, a
little fraternity on Wall Street.”
As students vie for 2014 internships in an
industry where 22-year-olds can make more than
$100,000 a year, interviews with three dozen
fraternity members showed a network whose
Wall Street alumni guide resumes to the tops of
stacks, reveal interview questions with
recommended answers, offer applicants secret
mottoes and support chapters facing
crackdowns.
That’s one reason men continue to dominate
on Wall Street, where no woman has run a big
bank. General Motors Co. announced Dec. 10 it
would make Mary Barra the auto industry’s first
female chief executive officer, the same day
research firm Catalyst Inc. showed women
holding about one in eight executive roles in U.S.
finance.
The fraternity pipeline helps undergraduates
beat odds three times steeper than Princeton
University’s record-low acceptance rate, with
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. choosing 350
investment-banking interns this year from 17,000
applicants.
Penn’s Alpha Epsilon Pi, which gave up its
charter in 2012 to escape sanctions for hazing,
got a member into Morgan Stanley for the fourth
year in a row. Dartmouth College’s Alpha Delta,
an inspiration for the 1978 comedy “Animal
House,” sent someone to the New York-based
firm from the fifth consecutive class days after a
New Hampshire court reprimanded the chapter
for providing alcohol to someone underage,
filings show.
‘Male Dominated’
Fraternities retain influence in the face of
scrutiny by parents, politicians and police for binge
drinking, hazing and at least 60 deaths in the U.S.
since 2005. A freshman at Baruch College in New
York died this month after suffering a blow to the
head during a Pi Delta Psi hazing ritual, according
to Monroe County, Pennsylvania, District Attorney
Secret Handshakes
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David Christine.
The largest U.S. banks say they are
meritocracies and run diversity programs to shift
an industry that once only let women onto the
New York Stock Exchange floor as clerks during
wartime shortages. Goldman Sachs added 10
women last year to a partnership that had one
when CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein was elected to it
in 1988.
“There obviously has been much progress
since 20 years ago,” said Siegfried von Bonin,
head of Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta chapter. “But
the reality is that it’s still very much a maledominated culture.”
Alpha Deltas
Fraternity inboxes help show why. One of the
recruiting e- mails to Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta
arrived last month from an alumnus working in a
unit of Wells Fargo & Co., the largest U.S.
mortgage lender.
The e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by
connections.
Spokesmen for the three banks, Barclays,
Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo declined to
comment.
Secret Motto
When alumni don’t reach out, fraternity
members know how to find them. Von Bonin, 21,
asked two at one of the world’s largest banks for
interview advice, he said. They taught him to
describe the benefits of the firm’s U.S. growth, fastpaced environment and training program.
“They really gave me valuable advice,” said von
Bonin, who got the internship this year. A job offer
came later.
Students and graduates on Wall Street said
they didn’t see much wrong with a fraternity path to
finance. Even applicants with the right handshake
need to show drive, dedication and diligence, they
said, and many kinds of groups foster bankers, just
as houses spawn surgeons and senators.
The network sometimes works so well that it
Bloomberg News, was his best chance at
reaching the college’s top men for next year’s
analyst class in a San Francisco office that has
had Dartmouth grads for eight straight years and
Alpha Deltas for four, he wrote. Students could
e-mail their resumes to him directly, he added,
and they’d go to the top of the pile.
Fraternity members who went to work for
Goldman Sachs, Citigroup Inc. and Bank of
America Corp. said they were sent back to
campus on recruiting trips, where they could tap
people from their houses for interviews ahead of
other candidates, some more qualified. One said
he would sometimes invent endorsements to
send to bosses that didn’t mention fraternity
can help accidentally. Jeff Librot, a former head of
the University of Delaware’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon
chapter, wasn’t looking to use its connections
when he applied for a Bank of Montreal equities
internship, he said. A banker there sent him an email with the frat’s secret motto, “Phi Alpha.” Librot
Secret Handshakes
was picked.
Drinking Buddies
That national fraternity has sent almost 3,000
men into finance, according to resumes on
LinkedIn, which shows no other industry employing
more than 1,800. One of its most successful
members, 59-year-old billionaire hedge-fund
manager Paul Tudor Jones, apologized in May after
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telling University of Virginia students that
motherhood keeps women from being focused
traders.
Research by Lauren Rivera, an associate
professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg
School of Management, has shown bankers
preferring fraternity heads or other potential
drinking buddies to candidates with better grades.
“People like people who are like themselves,”
said Rivera, who interviewed 120 professionals
involved in hiring graduates for banking, law and
consulting jobs.
College women don’t always grasp that men
their age are assembling connections that can
matter more than schoolwork, said Erica O’Malley,
who heads a diversity program at Grant Thornton
LLP. She quizzed her children’s friends as they
passed through her home near Chicago over the
Thanksgiving break.
‘Mom, Stop’
“My daughter will be like, ‘Mom, stop,’” said
O’Malley, who also heads an audit practice at the
accounting firm. “They don’t really understand it.”
Her company issued a report in March
showing the U.S. with the eighth-lowest proportion
of female business leaders out of 44 countries.
Some of the students who could help boost that
ranking find themselves struggling to land work
after college.
“I wish I did have more networks,” said Emily
Hendrix, who plans to graduate in May after three
years at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. “It
would maybe make finding a job a little easier, a
little less stressful.”
A resume that includes the honor council,
cross-country team and Kappa Kappa Gamma
sorority along with internships for the CME Group
Inc., owner of the world’s largest futures exchange,
and Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch unit seems
robust enough to land one. Without job offers for
next year, or strong leads from friends, she’s been
compiling potential options into a spreadsheet
listing 123 companies she’d like to work for.
Winning Women
Even as women make up the majority of the
industry’s support staff, filling 24,000 of 32,000
administrative positions at Citigroup according to
its diversity report last year, they hold few of its top
spots. Just two are on the firm’s operating
committee with 22 men. The 11 Goldman Sachs
executive officers and top dozen at Morgan Stanley
include one woman each.
Evolution comes slowly, according to Jeff
Urwin, head of investment banking at JPMorgan
Chase & Co. The firm’s Winning Women program
has led to about 13 additional hires each year
since 2004.
“You tend to think of an institution in a
structured way, but it’s actually a big organic entity,”
Urwin said. “Driving any kind of change that gets at
the culture in an organism is hard because it tends
to return to the original form, if you don’t maintain
that consistent pressure to drive that change.”
JPMorgan employs 140 Sigma Phi Epsilon
members, according to an article on job
preparation in the fraternity’s magazine this year. It
shows only Bank of America and Wells Fargo
employing more.
Grand Smudge
Fraternities have become so good at filling
Wall Street’s openings that firms can hire several
Secret Handshakes
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alumni for each woman. There are at least four
members among 14 associates at San Franciscobased private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC,
according to resumes posted to LinkedIn. Two of
the 14 are female. Fraternity brothers outnumber
women four to one in the analyst program at Peter
J. Solomon Co., a New York investment bank
founded by the former Lehman Brothers Holdings
Inc. vice chairman. Spokeswomen for both
companies declined to comment.
When those men and women make it to the top,
Wall Street’s bosses have a secret society all their
own with parties in Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel.
Kappa Beta Phi, founded before 1929’s stockmarket crash, throws an annual bash where bankers
and billionaires in tuxedos are entertained by
neophytes who sometimes don ladies dresses and
pumps. Officers called Grand Swipe, Grand
Smudge and Grand Loaf lead revelers who’ve
included former Goldman Sachs head Sidney J.
Weinberg, American International Group Inc. CEO
Robert Benmosche and Mary Schapiro, who ran the
Securities and Exchange Commission until last year.
condemning the school’s efforts, Trinity President
James Jones decided to resign a year earlier than
planned.
Dissolving ZBT
Patrick Laterza, who works in wealth
management for Citigroup, went to Binghamton
University last year to try to preserve Zeta Beta
Tau’s chapter there, e-mails obtained through
public-records requests show. It lost recognition
from the fraternity’s national organization and from
the school, a State University of New York campus.
A pledge complained he had been waterboarded,
the e-mails show.
“The situation with the chapter that was there
was from my understanding a financial one,” said
Laterza, who manages $130 million according to
his LinkedIn page. “We found out later that there
were more issues which were then discussed, and
in the end the fraternity was dissolved.”
The most valuable thing fraternities do to
prepare their own for Wall Street isn’t controversial
or secretive, according to some of the men who
went from one to the other.
“It’s going to help you assimilate,” said Theta
Chi alum Christopher Albrecht, who joined
Deutsche Bank AG after graduating from Lehigh
Cohen’s Pledge
The fraternity pipeline works in reverse, too,
when those titans return to campus bearing gifts as
large as billionaire Steven Cohen’s $2 million
pledge to Penn’s Zeta Beta Tau. His SAC Capital
Advisors LP pleaded guilty last month to insidertrading charges.
Donors rebelled when Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut, made fraternities go co-ed
after a drunk student broke his neck in a shallow
Psi Upsilon pool, Bloomberg News reported in
May. With a private-equity veteran, real estate
investor and stock analyst among grads
Mock Interview
Matthew Benson, a senior at Penn, recalled
last month how he was led through a mock
interview in January by an older Alpha Epsilon Pi
member while sitting near cabinets lined with
empty whiskey bottles. The fraternity, now known
as Apes, moved off campus in 2012 instead of
Secret Handshakes
University in 2007. Colleagues “want to hire people
and bring up people you can get along with.”
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complying with sanctions that followed hazing
claims, according to a university official.
The senior timing Benson’s answers and telling
him to smile more is now an analyst for a
multibillion-dollar buyout firm. Benson landed an
internship with a merger adviser, then a job offer for
next year. He’s already doling out advice to younger
fraternity members, including one preparing for a
venture- capital interview.
“I was helping him craft his story,” he said.
“The kids are actually very proactive.”
–With assistance from David Glovin in New York
and John Hechinger in Boston
–Editors: Robert Friedman, Dan Golden
Secret Handshakes
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Frat Men Decline in NFL
as College Coaches Frown
on Going Greek
By John Helyar
Dan Golden
Bloomberg News
December 19, 2013 – Freshman Brendan
Douglas emerged this season as a promising
runner on the University of Georgia football team,
with 376 yards and three touchdowns. One
cause of his success: he decided not to rush a
fraternity.
Soon after arriving on campus, Douglas
accepted a bid from Kappa Alpha, where
hometown friends belonged. He changed his
mind and also rejected an offer of honorary
membership after realizing that coaches want
players to avoid fraternities, teammates and
family members said. Going Greek might have
kept Douglas on the bench, said teammate
Arthur Lynch of the University of Georgia Bulldogs makes a catch
for a first quarter touchdown against the South Carolina Gamecocks at Sanford Stadium on September 7, 2013 in Athens,
Georgia. Photographer: Scott Cunningham/Getty Images
happened though he doesn’t recall it. Douglas
declined to comment.
Once joined at the hip pad, fraternities and
sports have grown apart, especially at Georgia
and other universities in top leagues such as the
Southeastern Conference. This shift is at odds
with the growth spurt in fraternities, whose
membership increased 29 percent to 327,260
from 2005-06 to 2011-12.
While Greek life camaraderie appeals to
athletes, coaches with power over their playing
time and scholarships often frown on it. Just three
of 254 players chosen in the National Football
League draft last May were fraternity members,
according to the North-American Interfraternity
Conference in Indianapolis. Its annual census of
fraternity alumni in the NFL shows a 19 percent
decline since 2003, to 52 players.
Dillard Pinkston. “He didn’t know what he was
getting into,” Pinkston said.
Offensive coordinator Mike Bobo underlined
the message one day in practice, according to
Douglas’s brother. “Oh, we’ve got a KA in the
backfield,” Bobo cracked, Denis Douglas said
Brendan told him. Bobo said through a Georgia
spokesman that the incident could have
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Controlled Lives
With millions of dollars in broadcast and
other revenue at stake, as well as their own jobs,
coaches at big-time sports programs control their
players’ lives around the clock, imposing yearround training and close academic monitoring.
That strict regimen is the antithesis of a fraternity
culture often marked by excessive drinking and
even mayhem. Since 2005, there have been at
least 60 fraternity-related deaths, most involving
alcohol and hazing, according to data compiled
by Bloomberg.
“One of the coaches’ main concerns is
fraternities’ reputation for parties,” said former
Georgia outfielder Austin Wheeler, who left the
baseball team after the 2012 season and is now
a Sigma Chi member. “I was expected to be 100
percent baseball.”
Epitomizing coaches’ concerns, Texas A&M
quarterback Johnny Manziel, the 2012 Heisman
Trophy winner, was thrown out of a fraternity
party at rival University of Texas in July, as
Longhorns fans heckled and threw beer at him.
Players Suspended
In 2012, Appalachian State University in
Boone, North Carolina, suspended three football
players from school for eight semesters after
finding they took part in a sexual assault following
a 2011 fraternity party, according to Associate
Vice Chancellor Hank Foreman.
Appalachian State won three consecutive
national championships in its football division
from 2005-2007 and is moving up to the top
echelon next year.
Coaches also see fraternities as competing
for players’ loyalties and a distraction from
practice, said Murray Sperber, whose book “Beer
and Circus” chronicles the relationship between
sports and Greek life.
“What’s changed it is the professionalization
of college sports; coaches say you have to have
100 percent commitment to your sport,” said
Sperber, a visiting professor at the University of
California at Berkeley Graduate School of
Education. “The split started to happen a number
of years ago; it didn’t reach its full flower until
now.”
‘Inaccurate Stereotypes’
Fraternities covet athletes as members
because their campus renown helps recruit other
pledges, and they dislike being declared out of
bounds by coaches. Students who join
fraternities are more likely to serve their
communities and to graduate, according to the
Interfraternity Conference.
Student leaders and Greek advisers are
concerned that many coaches have “inaccurate
stereotypes” about fraternity life “as an exercise
in fun and games, punctuated by hazing and
drinking,” according to an internal April 2009
position paper of the Interfraternity Conference.
The report adds that a coach’s anti-Greek
policies may be driven by career ambitions: “A
winning record leads to success in employment
and he wants nothing to interfere.”
For coaches, employment success can be
lucrative. Georgia football coach Mark Richt is
guaranteed a minimum $3.2 million in annual
compensation, plus performance bonuses.
Georgia athletics director Greg McGarity
said coaches are just trying to keep players in
good academic standing. Students at Georgia
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must take at least 12 credit hours of courses a
semester to remain eligible for sports. They
practice as much as 20 hours a week in season
– the NCAA-mandated maximum – and keep
training hard in the off-season.
‘Good Razzing’
“Especially freshman year, when does that
leave you time to rush?” said McGarity, a former
tennis coach at Georgia. “If a young person
asked us (about fraternities), we’d turn it back on
them: ’If you can find time to squeeze in a
fraternity, so be it.’”
David Perno, Georgia head baseball coach
from 2002 through the 2013 season, initially had
a written rule forbidding players from joining
fraternities. That evolved into an unwritten one
enforced by players who’d give “a pretty good
razzing” to teammates expressing interest in
rushing, Perno said.
“You don’t have time to be a frat boy and
compete,” said Perno, who was dismissed as
coach in May following a losing season. “There’s
nothing good that could come out of trying to
juggle all that.”
Brendan Douglas of the University of Georgia Bulldogs watches
from the sideline during a game against the Vanderbilt Commodores on October 19, 2013 in Nashville, Tennessee.
Photographer: Frederick Breedon/Getty Images
the player. Stricklin declined to comment.
At Ivy League universities and private liberal
arts colleges, which don’t have big broadcast
contracts and put less pressure on coaches to
win, athletics and Greek life remain intertwined,
said Brad Blank, a Florida-based sports agent
who belonged to a football fraternity at Brown
University. About half of the members of the
2013 Yale University varsity lacrosse team,
winner of the Ivy League championship, belonged
to Alpha Delta Phi.
‘Guilty by Association’
Perno’s successor, Scott Stricklin, cut a
promising player whose penchant for hanging out
on fraternity row pegged him as unsuitable, even
though he didn’t actually go Greek, according to
Perno and several members of the team.
The player, who transferred to another
college, “just wanted to spend time with his
friends,” said one teammate. “Word got around
that he was rushing. It was guilty by association.”
Perno and the teammates declined to identify
regarded basketball team since 1989, reaching
Frat Athletes
Similarly, at Davidson College, a prestigious
liberal arts institution in North Carolina, 65
percent of varsity football players belong to Phi
Delta Theta, said Sherrod Davis, a former wide
receiver and Phi Delta chapter president who
graduated in 2013. Head Coach Paul Nichols
also was a Phi Delta member at Davidson.
Bob McKillop has coached Davidson’s highly
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the Elite Eight in 2008. During his tenure, no player
had joined a fraternity until early this year, when three
members of his squad asked McKillop if they could
pledge Phi Delta.
The coach “told us he had no problem with us
joining the fraternity as long as basketball was our
number one family,” said Tyler Kalinoski, a junior
guard. “Anything with basketball comes before the
fraternity.”
McKillop approved the request and said he’s
“delighted” with the results: “They’ve really integrated
themselves into the entire college community much
more than I’ve seen before.”
Intermingled History
College sports trace their roots to fraternities,
which organized the first intercollegiate football
games and awarded the first athletic scholarships,
according to Sperber.
“A lot of the early coaches came out of the
at Auburn University in the early 1950s, where he
played football and basketball, Dooley presided over
jocks’ separation from Greeks at Georgia as football
coach and then athletic director from 1964 until he
retired in 2004.
Freshman Ban
Dooley, now 81, said he only outright barred
freshmen from fraternities.
“There’s so much adjustment in that first year; it’s
too much, especially for football, which is a fall sport.
After that it was if they could handle it.”
The NCAA prohibited player-only dorms in
1991, yet athletes didn’t flow back into fraternities.
Too much money was pouring into college sports to
ease control of the athletes, according to historian
Sperber. The NCAA basketball tournament’s fees for
broadcast rights rose fivefold over 20 years to $750
million in a 14-year deal that began in 2011.
The Southeastern Conference, which includes
fraternity system,” he said.
The hero of a popular 1953 novel, “Corpus of
Georgia, will team with sports cable network ESPN
Joe Bailey,” by Oakley Hall, is a second string
University of California at Berkeley halfback at the
just before World War II, who lives in a fraternity.
Football-playing brothers were entitled to double
portions at fraternity meals, and a fraternity alumnus
provided jobs for them, according to the novel.
That symbiotic relationship between sports
teams and Greeks was the norm until the 1960s,
according to Sperber. Then coaches began having
athletes-only dorms built in an effort to sequester
their players from the era’s political and sexual
revolutions.
At Georgia, football players were herded into a
dorm known as “the Dooley Hilton,” in honor of
coach Vince Dooley. A fraternity scholarship athlete
SEC’s broadcast revenues by 50 percent, to more
than $300 million a year, said Virginia-based sports
business consultant John Mansell.
to launch the SEC Network in 2014. It will boost the
Game Days
Fraternities still cheer for the coaches and
athletes that spurn them. At state universities
throughout the South, blocks of seats are reserved
for Greek houses. Two fraternities at the University of
Alabama and one at in-state rival Auburn have had
their seating privileges suspended in recent seasons
over hazing incidents.
On game days at the University of Georgia in
Athens, fraternity tailgate parties, featuring beer,
chasers and other alcoholic drinks, begin just after
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dawn and end just prior to kickoff. Then the Greeks,
clad in red and black sportswear, except for new
pledges in blazers and ties, enter 92,746-seat
Sanford Stadium and occupy four sections on the
upper-deck set aside for the 26 fraternities.
They root for a Bulldogs team that this season
had no one on scholarship who belonged to a
fraternity, players said. At least two walk-ons, tight
end Cole Trolinger and outside linebacker Dillard
Pinkston, did join Sigma Chi. Because walk- ons pay
their own way, and rarely become first-stringers, they
don’t have to worry about jeopardizing financial aid
or regular playing time.
Lifelong Friendships
Coaches “don’t want your focus taken away
from football,” said Trolinger, 20. “Being a walk-on,
they can’t really have way too much influence on
me.”
“We just decided to broaden our horizons,” said
Pinkston, 19, whose brother and father were both in
fraternities. “If we can be in a fraternity and play
football, why not do it? Why not make friendships
that can last your entire life?”
Preston Mobley, a walk-on and Georgia’s
second-string center last year, gave up football for
fraternity life. Although coaches told him repeatedly
that the team was his family, the south Georgia
farmboy didn’t feel close to most of his teammates.
“The players come from everywhere,” Mobley
said. “They weren’t people you could sit down and
talk about deer hunting or duck hunting or how the
crops are doing.”
Early this year, he joined Alpha Gamma Rho,
where most members were rural Georgians like
himself, and quit the Bulldogs after spring practice.
‘Why Pay?’
A lot of players “think about joining fraternities,
but they talk themselves out of it,” Mobley said.
One player who backed off was tight end Arthur
Lynch, a scholarship player and preseason secondteam All-America.
After becoming friends with several Chi Phi
members, Lynch hung out at their house while sitting
out his sophomore season with an injury. He
considered joining because “it’s another aspect of
college and these were my friends,” he said in a
post-game interview in a media room beneath the
stands, still wearing his soaking-wet uniform after a
rainy victory.
Lynch, a senior, said he decided against rushing
not because of coaches’ pressure but economics:
“Why should I pay dues when I’m going to hang out
with them anyway?”
Brendan Douglas, the 5-foot-11-inch, 202pound freshman running back, also reversed field,
even though his brother Denis had joined Kappa
Alpha at Georgia Southern University and touted
fraternity life. Their father, Patrick Douglas, a former
defensive back at Georgia and assistant coach at
Georgia Southern, cautioned Brendan against
joining a fraternity.
Football players “are involved in a fraternity,” said
the elder Douglas, now an Augusta, Georgia,
stockbroker. “It’s just not a Greek one.”
–With assistance from David Glovin in New York
–Editors: Gary, Putka, Lisa Wolfson
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Dartmouth Leader
Tied to Animal House
Vows Tolerance Amid Outcry
By John Lauerman
Michael McDonald
Bloomberg News
September 4, 2013 – Less than two years after
Dartmouth College’s new President, Philip
Hanlon, graduated in 1977, the school got so fed
up with fraternity hijinks it gave the groups 12
months to end all racist, sexist and alcoholabusing antics or face banishment.
Now Hanlon, who as a student belonged to the
Hanover, New Hampshire-based college fraternity
that inspired the 1978 movie “Animal House,” is
inheriting a campus roiled by a federal probe into
student sexual harassment and once again grappling
with a fraternity-dominated social scene considered
by many to be toxic to women and minorities.
Since Hanlon took over in June, his old fraternity
has been fined for serving alcohol to minors,
apologized for co-hosting a “Crips and Bloods
Party” and had a member admit to urinating from a
second-story balcony onto a woman below.
“Let me make very, very clear that harmful,
unsafe behavior, whether it’s high-risk drinking,
sexual assault or hazing, has no place on a
college campus, any college campus,” Hanlon,
provost at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor the previous three years, said in a phone
interview. “I’m committed to Dartmouth being a
leader and finding ways to improve campus
Dartmouth College President Philip Hanlon, who as a student
belonged to the fraternity that inspired the 1978 movie “Animal
House,” returned in June as college president after scaling the
ranks of academia the past three decades.
Photograph: Dartmouth College via Bloomberg
student life.”
Hanlon faces a quandary shared by many
college presidents as they seek to tame fraternal
organizations. Membership in 101 national
fraternities and sororities increased 25 percent
through 2012 from 2007, according to industry
groups, including the North-American
Interfraternity Council. Meanwhile, 59 people,
most of them students, have died since 2005 in
incidents involving the brotherhoods.
Reported Assaults
Dartmouth reported 22 sexual assaults in
2010, the highest campus rate per capita in the
Ivy League, according to Education Department
data. While that number fell to 15 in 2011, the
Dartmouth Leader
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latest year available, Dartmouth still ranked
second in sexual assaults per capita, behind
Princeton University in New Jersey, among the
group of eight elite schools in the northeast U.S.
The reported attacks at Dartmouth compared
with other colleges aren’t an accurate indicator of
the prevalence of assault on the campus, and
may have been boosted by the college’s efforts
to encourage students to report, said Charlotte
Johnson, dean of Dartmouth College.
The Greek houses at Dartmouth and other
colleges have powerful alumni ties, and efforts to
regulate them have prompted strong opposition
and flagging donations. President James Jones of
Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, who
recently battled with parents and students over
forcing fraternities and sororities to go co-ed,
amid several other controversies, moved up his
resignation a year early to 2014.
Complaints Filed
Two of Hanlon’s predecessors at Dartmouth
during an event for accepted students. The
school later canceled classes for a “day of
reflection,” and not long after, a freshman was
arrested and charged with raping a female
student in her dormitory room.
Safe Campus?
Hanlon needs to confront questions about
Dartmouth’s reputation, said Mark Davis, a 1981
graduate and president of Dartmouth’s Alumni
Council.
“Is this a safe campus? Is this a welcoming
campus?” Davis said. “It will be high on his list to
ask these questions.”
Hanlon has made it clear that he wants a
campus welcome to all. His older brother, Greg,
was gay and died of AIDS in the 1980s. Hanlon
said that Greg’s experiences have strengthened
his commitment to making Dartmouth inclusive.
Last month, Hanlon revoked the appointment of
Reverend James Tengatenga to the Tucker
Foundation, an ethics center, citing earlier
were forced to back down after their efforts to
reform the Greek system met with disapproval.
Compounding Hanlon’s challenge is that
colleges across the U.S. are under heightened
scrutiny for failures to adequately address sexual
violence and harassment. In the past year,
students at Dartmouth and at least six other
schools have filed complaints with the U.S.
Education Department saying universities aren’t
doing enough to prevent and investigate campus
assaults and abuse.
In April, students at Dartmouth said they
received Internet death threats after staging a
protest of the school’s response to sexual assault
and harassment of gay and transgender people
Greek Life
“I don’t think you can connect those dots as
easily as some people may think or want,”
Spelios, who wasn’t in a fraternity himself, said in
a telephone interview. “I don’t see them as the
huge juggernaut that some portray them as.”
Instances of alleged sexual abuse at
Dartmouth aren’t always linked to the
Dartmouth Leader
remarks the Anglican bishop had made about
homosexuality.
Dartmouth’s fraternities don’t put students at
higher risk of sexual assault, said Lou Spelios, a
1995 graduate who will become president of the
Alumni Council next year.
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brotherhoods. It’s difficult to disassociate the two
because Greek life is so pervasive at the college.
Just as they were parodied in “Animal House,”
the private societies dominate the social life, with
almost two- thirds of sophomores, juniors and
seniors belonging to fraternities or sororities.
Hanlon said that his fraternity experiences
were positive.
“My closest friends in life and the most
enduring relationships are the ones I made here
at Dartmouth and many of them are my fraternity
brothers,” he said. “That motivates me to make
fraternities and all our other student organizations
the best they can possibly be.”
Dartmouth has centralized resources for
victims of sexual assault and is adding a
residence hall for lesbian, gay and transgender
students, said Johnson, who as dean oversees
student affairs.
Prevention Program
The college instituted a sexual assault
Compounding Hanlon’s challenge is that colleges across the U.S.
are coming under unprecedented scrutiny for failures to
adequately address sexual violence and harassment.
Source: Dartmouth College via Bloomberg
students and powerful alumni. David McLaughlin,
Dartmouth’s president from 1981 to 1987,
recalled in a 1990s oral history of the college
that he wanted to reform the system but couldn’t.
prevention program, the Dartmouth Bystander
Initiative, emphasizing the role of the whole
community – men and women – in recognizing
and averting potential attacks. The Greek system
has created an interfraternity network on sexual
assault, Hanlon said.
Another campus program has helped reduce
binge drinking, which has been linked to sexual
assaults, said Justin Anderson, a spokesman for
the college.
Some top schools, such as Williams College
in Williamstown, Massachusetts, have abolished
fraternities because of their impact on social life.
At Dartmouth, efforts to restructure or abolish
fraternities have run into fierce opposition from
Failed Efforts
“I used to go into every fraternity house and
the condition of some of those houses was really
awful; I mean, it was unsanitary. It was unsafe,”
McLaughlin, who died in 2004, said in the oral
history. “I really came to the conclusion that
probably the fraternities needed to be eliminated
and that the whole system should be
redesigned.”
McLaughlin said he couldn’t get support
from the trustees, who refrained from challenging
the conservative Dartmouth Review newspaper
and the politically conservative alumni.
A similar fate befell president James Wright,
who, one year after taking office in 1998,
unveiled an initiative that would force all houses
in the Greek system to be co-educational.
Dartmouth Leader
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Wright, who had the support of General
Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey
Immelt, a college alumnus and trustee, was
undone by the aggressive campaigning of
students who protested outside his home and
alumni who took to the courts to challenge his
proposals to change the school’s governance.
Wright stepped down in 2009, having failed in
his reform efforts. He didn’t respond to requests
for an interview.
Alumni of Dartmouth, founded in 1769, also
include former U.S. Treasury secretaries Timothy
Geithner and Henry Paulson, and EBay Inc.
Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe.
Campus Co-Eds
When Hanlon arrived on campus as a
student in 1973, Dartmouth was divided over a
decision the year before to let women enroll in
what was for more than two centuries an all-male
bastion. The most virulent opponents were the
fraternities, said Nicholas Syrett, who wrote “The
and overall experience on campus,” Anderson
said.
Minority Presence
At the time, Dartmouth was considered
relatively friendly to minorities among Ivy League
colleges, and some of its fraternity chapters that
accepted blacks had fought with their national
organizations over the practice. Louis C.
Roudanez, the son of a French merchant and a
free woman of color, earned medical degrees at
the University of Paris and Dartmouth before the
Civil War and went on to found a black daily
newspaper in New Orleans. While one of
Dartmouth’s historical goals has been the
education of Native Americans, controversy has
arisen around its earlier use of the nickname
“Indians” for sports teams.
Hanlon studied math and in his second
semester joined Alpha Delta, the house whose
antics inspired the screenplay for National
Lampoon’s “Animal House.” When Hanlon joined
Company He Keeps: A History of White College
Fraternities.”
Subtle echoes of that opposition remain, said
Callista Womick, a senior studying art who said
she was sexually assaulted by an upperclassman
in her freshman year. Students stamp their feet
when singing the words “lest the old traditions
fail” from the Dartmouth alma mater song. Some
students refuse to stamp because they say it
began as a protest against admitting women.
“Most students don’t even know why they’re
doing it,” Womick said.
Dartmouth’s diversity and its admittance of
women for more than 40 years are “two
developments that have improved the educational
AD, as the frat is known, it was nothing like the
movie portrayal, said George Bullerjahn, a lifelong
friend who pledged at the same time. To the
extent there were hijinks, the future president of
Dartmouth Leader
Dartmouth – who went by the nickname “Juan
Carlos” because of the mustache he still wears –
was the voice of reason.
Cool-Headed
“If they remade ‘Animal House’ he might be
the narrator – the cool-headed observer who
describes everything in a cool and witty way,”
said Bullerjahn, a biology professor at Bowling
Green University in Ohio. “He was always part of
the scene. It shows how gifted he is. He was
4
Bloomberg
NEWS
able to balance everything.”
Hanlon graduated in 1977 and went to the
California Institute of Technology, earning his
doctorate in mathematics in 1981. After
postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, he joined the University of
Michigan faculty in 1986, becoming provost in
2010.
In that post, he supported programs to
prevent sexual assault and aid victims, said Holly
Rider-Milkovich, director of the university’s Sexual
Assault Prevention and Awareness Center. When
a $73,000 grant from the Justice Department
expired in 2011, he not only made sure the
center’s budget remained steady, he expanded it,
she said.
Makeover Overdue
“He’s committed to best practices, to
approaches to sexual assault that have been
proven scientifically,” Rider-Milkovich said. “He
parents, Struble was invited to a party held by a
Dartmouth fraternity, where a male student raped
her at the age of 16, she said. She never
reported the assault, thinking that the episode
had occurred by some fault of her own, and later
enrolled in the school, she said.
“You think ‘I met my best friend there, and I
love the place but it was still rotten,’” said
Struble, who last year helped form
DartmouthChange, a group of alumni, faculty and
students to push for more action to prevent
sexual assaults at the college. “That conflict is
tough.”
Anna Winham, a Dartmouth senior, was
sexually assaulted last year by a male student
she met at a fraternity party, she said. While the
male student was a freshman at the time and
ineligible to pledge, he had been hanging out
with fraternity members the same evening, she
said.
“Ultimately, we need to change the
was interested in how we knew that the work
we’re doing is effective.”
Dartmouth’s culture is overdue for a dramatic
makeover, said Susan Struble, a 1993 graduate.
On a 1987 tour of college campuses with her
environment so that sexual assault is unusual,”
Dartmouth Leader
Winham said.
–Editors: Lisa Wolfson, Chris Staiti
5

NEWS - AAUP

Transcription

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