But you owe it to yourself to put today’s national news about Washington State University in context. With its $120 million athletics debt, its beloved twisted (ex-)football coach, its strikingly violent athletes, its indifference to actual education, and a whole lot of other shit, WSU is arguably at the moment America’s most scandalous campus.
Add ineptitude/corruption in local law enforcement, and you get the scandal everyone’s covering today – not merely another death by alcohol/neglect of some poor teenager just trying to join a fraternity, but the fact that it took almost two years for criminal charges to be filed.
Which means the serious – amply justified – charge of hazing had to be dropped.
The kid’s family is not happy, and you also owe it to yourself to read their full statement, which reviews the long vicious history of this fraternity.
The family makes the reasonable suggestion that the butcher’s bill for each fraternity should be public knowledge before yet another family lets its clueless nineteen year old enter these abattoirs.
We’ll be seeing a lot of these valedictories: Bloomsburg University has just shut down its entire Greek system. Typical reason: A dead freshman and a big ol’ lawsuit.
It’s always embarrassing when an institution founded on hyper-exclusivity, on the imposition of degrading, sometimes fatal, initiation requirements on desperate wannabes, begins to be shunned. It’s like that painful scene from Apollo 13 where NASA is breathlessly beaming capsule footage to no one cuz the nation has lost interest in the whole space thing. Only here it’s like What if they gave a lethal overdose and nobody came?
George, a UD reader, sends her the absurd, unsurprising disciplinary statistics on frats and sororities, for instance, at Indiana University. This headline captures it nicely:
Vast Majority Of IU Fraternities & Sororities Disciplined Since 2016
So, you know, having written about Greek dégueulasserie on this blog for years, I don’t need to revisit the abattoir here; I just need to update you on the faltering fortunes of these freshman fatality factories. As in, they’re faltering.
But here’s the thing. No one will ever actually kill them. They will stagger on, rotting brick Colonials inhabited by rancid remnants financed by hedgies who used to be members.
Well, if you ever listened to ol’ UD, you wouldn’t be astonished at all. How often has she tried to tell you that the best cover for major drug operations is a colonial home full of clean-cut studious fraternity brothers? Really, who would have thought that the earnest young strivers at San Diego State’s fraternities harbored major weaponry, tons of coke, and all the rest of the tools of the trade in their quaintly Greek-lettered domiciles? But no – even after SDSU, you’re still shocked, shocked, to find that a massive drug conspiracy rages in three North Carolina universities. Silly boy!
School song, Bois d’Aulne Secondary School:
Joy to the world, the teacher’s dead
We barbecued his head
What happened to his body?
We flushed it down the potty
And round and round it goes
Until it overflows
And rou-ound and rou-ou-ound and round it goes
Guns of course are ubiquitous at frats, but they’re an adjunct to the frat’s extensive drug dealing operation (see pages and pages of guns and frats here), or they’re AK-47s that the lads like to photograph themselves holding, or they’re be-well-son-and-take-care-of-yourself goodbye gifts from Maw and Paw as the little guy heads off to school. And of course they’re notoriously handy when suicide is in the air. All routine American gun use.
Real powpowpow, however, has been thin on the ground. Stuff that draws pledge-blood has been… anemic.
Yes, this Oklahoma State guy (an inter-fraternity council secretary)
used a loaded gun to scare two new fraternity recruits. The victims say (Owen) Hossack pointed the gun at their heads and asked if they would take a bullet for their brothers. Then, police say, he fired the gun …
But I mean big deal nobody got hurt and loyalty is an important value…
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See, if you ask UD the omnipresence of guns, alcohol, drugs, teenagers, secret guys-only events, and loyalty tests should mean that America’s budding Stephen Paddocks begin routinely manifesting themselves at our fraternities. By national standards, shooting a gun at two guys’ heads but not killing them is, uh, kid stuff.
On the other hand, there’s evidence that things are escalating to the serious mass shootings UD keeps expecting. New Mexico State University (feast your eyes) is exactly the sort of walking abortion of a school you’d expect to be a first-adopter here, and sure enough they did manage to draw blood at a recent hazing event.
Dozens of students, including Jonathan Sillas, attended the Kappa Sigma fraternity’s initiation event.
As Sillas was leaving, another student, Miguel Altamirano, pulled him to the side and told him to turn around, according to a criminal complaint.
Altamirano pulled out a .40 caliber handgun, held the firearm against Sillas’ leg and pulled the trigger, the complaint states. The bullet went through Sillas’ leg.
Gun-friendly states always use the passive voice. The bullet went through. The shooter did not put the bullet in Sillas’s leg; the bullet decided to go through Sillas’s leg. And note the other thing going on at hazing events: Sadistic tyranny. Pulled him to the side and told him to turn around. Right out of The Story of O. Frat hazing (and sorority hazing) reeks, my dears, of S&M.
Duh. We all know that. It’s about torturing people pathetic enough to be willing to be tortured in order to join your club.
I mean, datz why I keep wondering why no mass killing at Sigma Alpha Epsilon yet! You know they’ve got guns galore, but no one’s gonna confiscate them because that would initiate a massacre of free Americans by the federal government. Little by little, a pledge shooting here and a pledge shooting there, we’re inching toward mass murder at an American university fraternity. Just be patient.
Legacy admit, got my eyes on you
Baby you don’t know shit
Legacy admit, got my eyes on you
The way you use your mom
You’re the sub she’s dom
Otherwise you’ll bomb
Watch her shake her poms
It’s the new rom-com
You’ll move to Panmunjom
Until the shitstorm calms
Legacy admit, got my eyes on you
Mama buy your credits now
Legacy admit, got my eyes on you
The way you boogie all night
To your heart’s delight
While Mama makes it right
With her online sleight
Lat year, our fraternity system killed a student; this year it only almost killed a student. WE ARE GETTING SO GOOD! This tape is ready for this year’s ad campaign. Watch our ranking soar!!
… with whom UD has been chatting on and off about East Timor as part of prepping her for scholarship interviews, just won a Marshall.
Not that I’ve been to East Timor. While Mr UD was part of the United Nations Transitional Administration there, UD and La Kid stayed on nearby Bali, living it up and entertaining Mr UD when he got time off. Chloe was there more recently, doing environmental work.
Because Mr UD told me a lot about it, I was able to ask Chloe very specific questions about the complex politics of that island. Naturally, she aced them all.
The place has been, for decades, a perfect shitstorm. You name what’s wrong with American universities, and it’s super-wrong with SDSU. Overpaid presidents? SDSU’s last non-interim president was so greedy an outraged state legislature and outraged citizens forced the SDSU trustees to make some changes. Bankrupting themselves through sports? An earlier president seems to have spent his entire term throwing all of the school’s money at a football team that played to empty stadiums. Homicidal fraternities?
Ah. Homicidal fraternities. Ever since an arsenal of big guns and a cache of big drugs were discovered at its frats (six were involved in a 2008 conspiracy so extensive and professional as to draw the involvement of the DEA) SDSU has held the distinction of being the site of one of our nation’s largest college drug busts. The conspiracy began to fall apart with the death of a student from a cocaine overdose…
… Which might explain why yesterday, in the wake of another frat-related death – he was a wee freshman who’d just gotten there – SDSU has done something less homicidal schools don’t do after each of their after all pretty routine frat drinking deaths: It has suspended fourteen fraternities.
I mean, fraternities being what they are, a bunch of them at SDSU were already being, er, scrutinized for the distant possibility that something untoward might be happening at them… But now! I mean, if you’re going to start killing nineteen year olds weeks after we’ve taken them from their parents and invited them to come here and study I mean, really!
*********
UPDATE: Suspension: It’s in the air! Washington State University – another ridiculous sports-obsessed school – has also decided that their frats are getting a little much.
The rich-shits-cheating-and-buying-their-kids’-way-into-good-colleges story is old news by now; but turns out it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
[Parents from high schools with large numbers of cheaters] were concerned that colleges would start banning all kids from the tainted high schools as a matter of principle.
It did not help matters when a boy [from one of the most notorious cheater schools] who had been rejected from Georgetown emailed [that school] to say he had been accepted to Harvard and wrote: ‘Fuck you. I’m going to Harvard.’
At a time when there is so much actual injustice around us — third-rate schools, mass incarceration, immigrants dehumanized — it’s bizarre to see student activists inflamed by sushi or valorizing a shoplifter. This is kneejerk liberalism that backfires and damages its own cause.
Sing it:
His son was failing on the SAT, woe-oh
Kid was never getting into USC, woe-oh
No one would have known that today was yet to show
A tragedy, woe-oh… surfin’ tragedy
He’d pay for his kid to keep his head held high, woe-oh
He’d pay a quarter mill… the assistant coach would lie, woe-oh
Little did he know that today was yet to show
A tragedy, woe-oh… surfin’ tragedy
Skilled at surfin’, he was the best
There wasn’t a wave he couldn’t finesse
Rick Singer told him he could do the same
With the bribe ’em into college game
The sun is setting on the Earth today, woe-oh
The tide as it sets seems to say, woe-oh
You should’ve stayed at home
But how could you have known
Your destiny was to be
Surfin’ tragedy, surfin’ tragedy
Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. could be talking about Oberlin College. But he’s talking about Harvard’s capitulation to students seemingly unable or unwilling to understand the rights of accused people to legal representation. Sullivan is representing the vile Harvey Weinstein; because of this, students demanded that he be thrown out as faculty dean of one of the school’s residential houses as he made students feel “unsafe.”
Sullivan writes that he is “willing to believe that some students felt unsafe,” but UD ain’t willing. It is beyond pitiable to fear that a vile person’s attorney is going to hurt you, and UD‘s going to go on record believing that any undergraduate woman impressive enough to get into Harvard (assuming she got in legitimately…) simply can’t be that pitiable. UD does these trembling babes the honor of assuming that their real motive is to keep national attention focused on the issue of sexual abuse, and they saw an opportunity here.
… UD thinks a little caution is in order.
But this is America, land of the bold, where mere undergrads majoring in biology can open ponzi schemes and use them to finance the Vegas strip club lifestyle one associates with people in their thirties at least.
The scheme – call it a kedge fund – couldn’t have worked without a supportive community of drunks/the mentally challenged/fellow criminals. It takes a village.