So say lots of people today, with the double whammy of the Baruch College and the Penn State death squads. Turns out “fraternities … embody some of the worst behaviors of American men.”
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Nothing like ridding ourselves of them will happen. Ever. Nothing remotely like ridding ourselves of them will happen. Fraternities are structural to American capitalism. Fraternities are where boys get psychopathologized in ways useful to Goldman Sachs. Frats are where youthful “superficial charm, conning, and manipulative behavior, lack of empathy and remorse, and a willingness to take risks” is matured and deepened in a communal setting. Watch Last Days of Lehman Brothers. (That’s brothers, see.). Crash Kappa Beta Phi’s drag show. Frat culture’s ultimate reward, in our time, is the American presidency. We won’t get rid of fraternities because fraternities is us.
May 16th, 2017 at 4:35PM
I’m not a frat supporter, but honestly, I can find way more crime and depravity on a regular basis in the non-college-kid-occupied rental houses in my own neighborhood than the typical fraternity (of which, by the way, we have several within a few blocks of us). There is a rental house a block over that probably should have a revolving door on it so that the police don’t need to batter the door down so much. Besides the usual drug-dealing/manufacture, the residents have included robbers, arsonists, and assaulters of various sorts.
May 16th, 2017 at 5:33PM
tp: I take the point – there’s plenty of lurid non-frat stuff going on. But the non-frat hideousness lacks the money/organization/brotherhood of the frats and is therefore, atrocity for atrocity, less likely to rack up the same body count.
May 16th, 2017 at 6:22PM
theprof, frats are part of the institutional lives of “higher”ed.
and this seems like a difference that makes a difference, no?
May 16th, 2017 at 6:33PM
dmf, yep. There was a shoot-’em-up near our Podunk Tech a while back. There was little to distinguish this shoot-’em-up from many others except that it was at a frat house. There’s an association there in the public mind.
May 17th, 2017 at 12:23PM
Has anyone else noticed that “see you way clear” in Our President’s request that the FBI director back off on Flynn?
It started with Otter making a similar request to Dean Wormer.
And you’ll probably see something similar, say, with a member of a country club making an informal request to the Chief Steward.
But yes, when the President of the United States makes such a request, informal or not, to the sitting Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that takes on a different color. Fraternity tradition or not.