Yuck.

Kate Manne, a ban-the-frats person who teaches at Cornell.

… this article. About frats, of course.

I was a Zeta decades ago: 1. The ‘charity’ ‘work was a joke, 2. Lots of alcohol poisoning, 3. Study groups …maybe, but the more effective groups were formed in the classes, 4. Leadership? I was VP of the House and I was on the ‘Panhellenic Council’ – waste of time (lots of pearl clutching but not much else)… Oh, and I was raped at Frat parties, got an STD, crushing hangovers, lots of ‘DUI-ing’…. Big 10 school, graduated Summa but by the time I went to Law School, a lifetime pattern of alcohol dependency had set in. Sober now, feel much better!

UD likes the zingy quirky energy of this comment – it’s a superquick, highly representative life summary, ain’t it?

Michelle Cottle, NYT.

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‘The fact that these young men engage[d] in this behavior, talked about it the way they did, treated it as some big fun game … The thing I’m trying to say is, these aren’t exceptional young men, right?

In a lot of ways, they’re just ordinary young men. And the fact that this didn’t seem to be remarkable to these ordinary young men is, I think, evidence of the actual state of American culture as it relates to the treatment and dignity of women, and as it relates to how serious[ly] we take sexual assault and sexual violence.’

Jamelle Bouie, NYT.

Suddenly, finally, everyone’s talking about fraternities. Good moment to revisit my post about a wonderful essay by Laura Kipnis.

LOL. An insanely obvious shocked to find that gambling is going on in here moment has occurred at U Arizona in regard to its ahem fraternities. They’re shutting them all down! Turns out they’re bad bad bad bad bad!

And why now (that first link includes not only sadomasochism at UA, but at several other fraternal Arizona hotspots)? Why act against them now? Fraternities have been DÉGUEULASSE iniquity dens since the establishment of American universities. The drill is the schools look the other way cuz boys will be boys and ain’t that great.

Current events at UA are of course about carnal esclavage far above Cayuga’s waters, as in poor Cornell has been – God knows why – designated the school where it all breaks out on a national scale, where schools like UA get all scared, where the cocks hit the fan and the prez gets fired and huge protests roil the campus etc. Lots of other frat-run schools might have been nominated for this award, but my guess is that their non-Ivy status has allowed them to sleaze by…

The question is whether, given the massive news coverage of the Cornell gang rape, all the other drunk druggy cocksmen striding this great land’s schools will have to keep it in their pants for awhile.

… but the law school he was planning to attend has rescinded his admission anyway.

The volunteerism of university frat houses is always inspiring, be it car washes for St Jude’s, or packages for Somalia… or, uh, Cocania…

[C]utting and bagging cocaine was, for some pledges, an indoctrination into the Delta Upsilon and Sigma Chi fraternities.

We’re speaking of storied Penn State, the only American university whose president went to jail — in 2021, for endangering the welfare of children. (You know. The Jerry Sandusky thing.). The school with a frat that famously killed a pledge, for which the frat’s prez and vice prez went to prison. In 2021, half the frats at Penn State were on suspension.

This latest drug distribution thing rivals Pusher U San Diego State; but SDSU’s criminal class stashed a big arsenal of guns in the frat houses, and we don’t yet know about Penn State’s weaponry, so we’ll see who comes out on top.

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Update: More yummy details as the story, er, cracks wide open.

This just in: Instructional technology makes you illiterate. Warmblooded actual human beings teaching you in small tech-free classes make you literate.

Two of their football heroes got drunk and started screaming at each other in a Dewey Beach parking lot. At 3 AM.

One’s a thief.

Both lied about their identities.

Police said both suspects attempted to flee on foot as officers continued their investigation. During the attempted detention, a struggle broke out and one suspect allegedly interfered with officers trying to take the other into custody. Officers reported that one suspect was stopped after a Taser was deployed, while the second continued resisting arrest before being restrained with assistance from a bystander. Both were charged with disorderly conduct, felony resisting arrest with force or violence, offensive touching of a law enforcement officer, providing false information to police, and two counts of underage possession or consumption of alcohol.

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And this one was just a few days ago. Poor Whitman.

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UD thanks her sister for the link.

When other Florida cities decide they’re deathed-out by it all – when they finally close their doors to the bloodiest, trashiest, weekenders in America – the few scummy holdouts, like Daytona Beach, get everyone. Guns go off all over the place, and lots of people get shot up. It’s a death-business model, and it really seems to be working.

Asked by police if he’d thrown many glass bottles off his spring break rental’s balcony, LSU student Aiden Baker replied “I threw every one of those bottles, every single bit of trash you see out here on the road.”

Florida police arrested him; the witty sheriff released a statement: “Time to geaux!”

Sing it.

A year later, while I was a grad student in California, I learned that the student had shot himself. I felt terrible. So I swore that I’d never again ignore a potential suicide. 

George Chang, a Berkeley prof, recalling his student days at Princeton, wishes he’d said something to someone when a fellow student turned out to have a closet full of guns. That he felt compelled to show people.

The thing is, whether you think this behavior betokens suicide or not (most of us wouldn’t read it that way – maybe we’d want to see it as some form of boasting? intimidation?), you might very well consider it evidence of some mental disturbance… It’s pretty effing weird for an undergraduate to stuff his dorm closet full of almost certainly illegal guns and invite his friends to see them. Like almost asking someone to do something.

This was decades ago, long before scads of campuses became mass murder sites; these days, someone would have screamed about it.

But anyway — with the likely suicide of another Princeton student in the news, there is indeed the question whether anyone noticed anything lethally wrong with Lauren Blackburn. This photo of him, taken I think shortly before his disappearance, shows him with a desperate expression on his face… But it’s almost always asking too much for people to intuit the worst in ordinary daily encounters with people they know. Respect for privacy, the knowledge that almost everyone experiences some depressive episodes and gets over them, a larger American (and campus) culture in which personal freedom matters a lot, maybe a certain fear of a person exhibiting extreme emotions — these and other motives persuade us to stay silent. And of course even if we speak up to the person or to a school authority, there’s no guarantee anything will happen.

And Blackburn was a junior; although seriously out of his element at an east coast Ivy, he got as far as his junior year. If he’d been a freshman, his sudden desperation probably would have set off alarms about his failing to fit in; but he got through three years. He was close to graduation.

They’re searching a local lake for him. There’s no evidence he was drunk; his last reported location was the library.

Watching this local news report about him when he was still home in Indiana deepens the sadness.

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Update: His body has been found in the lake.

How do you get a decade-long suspension?
Michigan State is not inclined to say.
What did you do to get that long a sanction?
A murder or two?  Fraternity rape?  Gun play?

Maybe you hazed your freshmen til you killed them.
Made them drink gin until they passed away.
Maybe you bashed their heads in til concussion.
With hazing there's just so very many ways!

You can identify some of this nation’s scummiest universities by their unwavering tolerance of the most psychotically sadistic fraternities imaginable. Readers of this blog already know the University of Central Florida as one of academia’s bottommost dwellers; but did you know that Sigma Chi at UCF has now been credibly accused of running over its pledges?

Fraternity brothers at Sigma Chi allegedly hit pledges with a car as part of a hazing ritual now under investigation by the University of Central Florida, according to an incident report obtained by the Orlando Sentinel late Wednesday.

A sorority member whose house sits next door to Sigma Chi’s told police she heard yelling, saw a car strike a young man and then heard someone shout “help!” and “my bones, my bones, they’re broken,” the report said.

Hoo boy. They are looking at another two-week suspension.