Members’ members? Or just members?
Well, that didn’t work. A judge just ruled that the mother of an eighteen-year-old pledge pummeled to death by a CUNY Baruch fraternity may indeed bring her suit.
In a myriad of sordid fraternity beating deaths, this one stands out for sheer brutality and moral depravity.
The world of sadomasochism to which UD has been introduced by her decision to cover fraternities on this blog has shocked and confused her. And she’s no shrinking violet. She’s read her de Sade and her Story of O. She’s thought about the subject. She’s been around.
But there’s no denying it: Many college fraternities house concentrations of just about the sickest people in American culture.
I think. Something like that. There’s too much stuff going on there to keep track of…
UD likes her way of putting it.
******************
San Diego State University also scored a great headline in England’s Independent newspaper:
WORLD’S WORST HUMANS
WAVE DILDOS AT
ANTI-RAPE PROTESTERS
Way to go, SDSU! This is generating even more publicity than your six-fraternity drug cartel.
The local paper goes there.
For a long time, UD went with stupidity as an explanation, because business-model party schools like San Diego State University have to admit a lot of stupid people. Then – for similar party school reasons – UD went with wasted, because being drunk certainly helps make it possible for men to hurl eggs and dildos at women …
(By the way: Remember what UD told you about a similar civil war at the University of Virginia, where frat boys are destroying anti-violence exhibits and, when asked to stop, loudly threatening the people asking them to stop? As with San Diego State, don’t expect the pro-rape forces to surrender without a fight. And those SDSU frats don’t fool around: The last DEA raid on them uncovered a number of guns, plus an impressive cash reserve. )
But it’s occurred to her that the editorial board of U-T San Diego is probably right: Group psychosis looks most plausible.
Let’s put it this way: Drug-running, gang-banging, eat-my-puke pledging fraternities are tailored to appeal to some of America’s most promising sociopaths-in-training. If you want to understand these people, read the chapter in The Story of O when O is brought to a become-a-slave sorority, and instantly goes from a psychopathic masochist to a psychopathic sadist.
UD wouldn’t think of denying that the personal traits honed in some of America’s highest-profile fraternities can be traded up to a career at Goldman Sachs. And, uh, Lehman Brothers…? She understands why predatory capitalism is called predatory capitalism. She sees perfectly well the through-line between secretive all-male sado-masochistic loyalty and this blessed bountiful land.
She just wonders why this form of social interaction dominates so many of our universities.
Universities don’t get much worse than San Diego State, an epicenter of the drug trade, a money-hemorraghing sports joke, and a school run (though considering what goes down there, is anyone actually running it?) by a president whose greed so outraged the local community that legislators moved toward imposing mandatory salary caps on executive pay there.
And now, with the eyes of America on the issue of rape on campus, SDSU’s fraternities, apparently looking for something to do since an unusually big drug raid two years ago shut down their main activity, have decided that their contribution to the crisis will be assaulting women and pitching dildos.
Where are you, President Hirshman? The local suckers pay you almost half a million dollars to do something. But what is that thing?
Drugs and violence. Violence and drugs. If you take away your students’ drugs, they turn to violence. (“[S]even students have reported being raped at SDSU this year, one about 24 hours after a protest last Friday night against sexism and sexual violence.”) For some of your students, those are apparently the only two behavioral options.
UD says, Maybe it would be safer to give them back the drugs.
From the mouths of babes. She’s quite right. As I said in an earlier post, about places like Penn State and Florida State, when sports and fraternities and drinking rule and have long ruled, it’s hard to know how any of that would change.
Fraternities in places like these tend to be the quintessence, the culmination, of all the alcohol and athletics in the larger campus culture. At UVa, “the fraternity system is king and heavy drinking is part of the culture.”
More frighteningly, fraternities are young, tightly-knit, all-male subcultures. In many settings, young, tightly-knit, and all-male is bad news. Young, tightly-knit, and all-male adds group aggression – extreme hazing, fighting, assaulting – to the mix. “Fraternities have become more like lab experiments for the distillation of male sexual aggression” than anything else.
Some have called for UVa to close its frats permanently.
Phi Kappa Psi, like all fraternities, exists to teach bad values to developing young men. Sent off to campus to educate themselves as individuals, fraternity members instead learn to subordinate their values and plans to a collective. After a torturous and dehumanizing selection process, fraternity members are able to write a check and purchase 30 new friends; it’s not surprising that they would see sex — pour a drink, girl is yours — as similarly transactional.
… By deciding to suspend its fraternities temporarily, the University of Virginia has acknowledged that those frats cannot be implicated in any new offenses while the eyes of America are watching. It is a tacit admission that the school cannot risk, not now, another sexual assault being committed. It has decided that the easiest and most palatable way for this to happen — for UVA’s fraternity brothers not to rape — is for its fraternities to cease to exist.
So why bring them back? Shut them down and move on.
Dahlia Lithwick doesn’t weigh in on shutting or maintaining them, but she does get to the nub of things:
Fraternities are nuts.
***********************
UD doubts closing them down is really a solution. Sick and sometimes criminal initiation rituals will persist somewhere on campus at any booze and sports soaked university that ignores them. The Florida A&M marching band didn’t need a fraternity to beat a fellow student to death in a long-tolerated form of hazing.
Perhaps what makes more sense is really serious policing and surveillance of fraternities – policing and surveillance for which the fraternities would pay.
Just as many schools spend a fortune on squads of extra police for their football and basketball games (students are prone to mischief and violence both in and outside sports arenas), so fraternities should be willing to bill their current and past members for the heightened security procedures they need. Hugely wealthy Michael Bloomberg happens to be a proud and loyal member of Phi Kappa Psi; with his passionate involvement in violence reduction, he should be willing to subsidize the hiring of guards and cameras for his brothers. A million dollars a year, say, would set Bloomberg back not at all.
Would university campuses begin to look like armed camps? Yes, but university football and basketball games (plus tailgates and party/riots) already tend to look like that. And as to cameras everywhere – well, most universities already have cameras everywhere.
In the longer term, UD proposes that frat-run universities like UVa choose as their yearly campus-wide book (UD is talking about the popular One Campus One Book, or Common Read, program) Lynn Chancer’s Sadomasochism in Everyday Life, so that fraternity members can begin to think seriously about their problem, and other members of the campus community can learn enough to at least see the brothers coming.
For a moment there, it looked as if a disgruntled ex-member was going to fuck with Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s kill ratio. But no worries.
An ABC news pundit just summed up the problem that’s kept the Republicans down in this election. And we can quote it here at University Diaries because it’s a university reference.
UD will cop to being extremely excited to hear, just now, that Elizabeth Warren won in Massachusetts. UD has been a big supporter of Warren from the start, and it’s been a close race throughout. Big sigh.
One student is dead; eleven other people are wounded. Apparently a fight broke out at a party.
**************************
Correction: Not a fraternity house. A private house on the edge of the YSU campus, at which members of a fraternity had gathered for a party.
… case. One of the more disgusting frat bro events this blog has covered over the years (the most disgusting of course was the Tucker Carlson/JD Vance beer fest), the pitiable death of Timothy Piazza at the hands of sadists at Penn St has inspired anti-hazing legislation, but it has also generated long years of appeals and delays in the hugely deserved sentences given to the degenerates who let the guy die.
State prosecutors said he was served 18 drinks in 82 minutes and then suffered life-ending head and abdominal injuries when he fell... Piazza was found unconscious in a fraternity house basement the day after the event, but emergency medical responders weren’t summoned for 40 minutes.
Details? How he was left unconscious all those hours? You don’t wanna know. Forty minutes? You can see their dilemma. No booze allowed and hey then how come this dude’s dead of alcohol poisoning? Let him lie there and maybe he’ll sprout in a few years.
Vomiting, bruised, in agony, his limbs literally stiffening in front of his fellow drunks’ eyes, Piazza attracted little attention beyond mocking laughter, Snapchatting, and rough, random efforts to change his position so he wouldn’t choke on his vomit.
******************************
More than 1,000 counts have been brought against 18 members in the largest criminal indictment against a fraternity and its members in US history...
Video played in court showed that Piazza collapsed just before 11.30pm but no-one came to his assistance.
He was then seen repeatedly collapsing as he attempted to crawl, rolled around the floor, vomited in his sleep and went in-and-out of consciousness over the course of the next eight hours.
As the hours passed he was body slammed into a couch by one frat member, had a beer or multiple beers dumped on him by another and later lay comatose while one young man threw his shoes at the visibly inebriated college student...
A fraternity brother who was present following that first fall revealed in an interview that he was thrown against a wall when he tried to help Piazza, a claim that is supported by footage shown in court.
Kordel Davis could be seen making animated gestures after seeing Piazza lying on the couch, at which point he is slammed into a wall by another member of the fraternity.
… But … if you read this blog with any care, are you really surprised that a university sorority is being used as a cover for drug dealing?
True, VCU’s dainty prescription drug ladies don’t get anywhere near the mafia-level drugs and guns activity of the frat gangs of San Diego State, busted in the now-legendary Operation Sudden Fall. But as UD has pointed out a lot on this blog, you’d have to be an idiot not to see that frats and sororities are PERFECT operation centers for drug conspiracies. Clean-cut college kids who wash cars to raise money for St Jude’s! Earnest, physically attractive seekers after knowledge! Oh, you kids! All those hyper-secret events and insider signals and slogans – so cute! You wouldn’t want to put the closed cult thing together with the clean-cut moral cover thing and arrive at any conclusions…
Where else? It’s long been one of America’s most twisted locations. Nothing surprising here.
Shooting pledges with air guns, making them eat butter with dirt on it and making them drink bong water led to a Coastal Carolina University fraternity’s five-year suspension … [A] first-year student pledging the fraternity was injured after being shot multiple times with an air gun as part of the group’s initiation process… [He] was shot twice in the head, twice in the stomach and multiple times in the back… [The] student sought medical attention in the following days for headaches and hearing difficulty… Shortly after, he received texts from some of the fraternity members, including one who allegedly told him to “keep the frat’s name out of your mouth,” according to the report. The pledge withdrew from the university on Jan. 9, 2023, for medical reasons.
First there was an update on frat life there:
[M]ultiple individuals reported they were drugged at an AEPi house event, and according to the Saturday notice, another individual reported they were drugged at an SAE house event… The University suspended [SAE] in April 2017 after a report that four women were drugged at the house that January. Despite the report, the chapter faced no disciplinary action from NU, and returned to campus on probation in 2018 after completing a one-year suspension.
That’s from a 2021 article about a large student demonstration in front of SAE, along with calls to shut down NU’s long-lurid Greek system.
Most recently, there are the school’s closely-associated sports teams:
A former Northwestern player said the alleged hazing acts that took place within the football program were “egregious and vile and inhumane behavior.” …
If a player was selected for “running,” … they would be restrained by a group of 8-10 upperclassmen dressed in various “Purge-like” masks, who would then begin “dry-humping” the victim in a dark locker room...
[A] Daily Northwestern article also mentioned other allegations of hazing rituals, including a practice where freshmen had to duplicate a snap from the center to the quarterback while both players were naked. It also cited a second player who noted the existence of the ritual.
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