If I may quote myself. It’s not just the notorious cases, like Cal Poly and San Diego State. More and more frats are discovering that their secrecy, their clean cut college guy front, and their ability to form themselves into tight loyal gangs, means that organized crime of all kinds can flourish in-house. The drug trade is simply the organized crime of choice.
Problem is, drugs bring another crime: the crime of violence. These frat boys pack guns. There’s their drug gang and your drug gang and… you know. Maybe you even live in Chicago.
Serious university drug markets almost always center in and around the frats. Unserious university drug markets, like those at preppie schools like Wesleyan, tend to be a bunch of unarmed deadhead friends making a bit of money selling stuff to their roomies. But serious university drug markets, like the one at the Delta Chi fraternity at Northern Arizona University, do not fool around.
Why hasn’t Northern Arizona University shut down Delta Chi, with its history of drug sales? Some of its members, according to reports, were involved in some way in the shooting (one person dead, three injured) that took place yesterday on NAU’s campus. It’s too soon to know if the shootings were drug-related, but let’s say that they were. Why was Delta Chi still in operation?
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Correction: In the original post, I mixed up the University of Arizona in Tucson and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. I’ve now corrected that, thanks to a reader who noticed the error.
… from America’s colleges. It’s a little complicated, because it involves a football team/fraternity synergy… But okay. Let’s go.
A fraternity at Cal Poly has been suspended because the frat is a cover for a drug dealing operation. Nothing new there. More than a few frats have figured out that they’re supremely – UD would even say unbeatably – well-situated as far as the drug trade goes. Recall the federal raid of a bunch of San Diego State fraternities/drug houses. The raid netted guns along with drugs. These boys don’t fool around.
This latest thing, the thing at Cal Poly, also involved guns as well as drugs. Here’s the rather complicated first paragraph of an article about it:
Cal Poly has suspended the fraternity targeted in an attempted armed robbery last summer for violating student conduct policies, after the university determined chapter members knew illegal drugs were sold at the house and failed to take action.
See, what blew the cover of this frat’s operation was the school’s football team. A group of players wanted drugs, and they knew where the campus drug market was, and, well, something went wrong.
The Delta Sigma Phi house at 244 California Blvd. was the target of an attempted robbery on Aug. 10 allegedly committed by a group of Cal Poly football players believed to be looking for drugs.
I guess the football players didn’t want to buy the drugs; they didn’t seem to understand that the frat is a drug market, not a free drug distribution center.
So. To recap: You’ve got university football players committing armed robbery for drugs against a university fraternity.
Cal Poly: Keepin’ it all in-house!
You wonder sometimes what it really comes down to, the sort of people and customs it creates. You wonder about the actual daily nitty gritty of university life at schools where nothing matters but sports.
I’m not talking about the big public stuff, the big five-part Sports Illustrated feature on T. Boone Pickens’ Oklahoma State University and its multidimensional pigswill. I mean the microculture – the way people talk to each other; the way they dress; the way they interact, one on one.
For that, you need two types of stories that routinely hit the news:
1. the sadistic coach; and
2. the sadistic hazer.
These two highly placed boosters carry the microculture in a way we can see, a way chronicled – since it maims people and generates trials and lawsuits – by the local and national press. Oklahoma State’s macroculture is the five-part series; OSU’s microculture is the secretary of the Interfraternity Council who pulled a loaded gun on pledges when they said they wouldn’t take a bullet for their brothers. He didn’t shoot them, but in his rage he shot out the window of the pick-up in which they were sitting. Because they obviously had no idea how serious the brotherhood of boosters was at OSU.
My post’s headline comes from a voice mail the women’s lacrosse coach at the University of Louisville sent to one of her players. The university’s system of spies had spotted a player wearing a shirt with the name of a competing university on it.
Darby, change your clothes, don’t bother coming to practice today. Do you know that I just got a phone call about you wearing a Michigan State shirt? You obviously have no idea how serious athletics is at the University of Louisville. I do not want to see your face today until after practice, but your butt better be up in my office with a Louisville shirt on your chest when practice ends.
Winston Smith would have no trouble recognizing this message. It is the functional equivalent of mandating burqas for university women.
The University of Louisville – read about its vile, all-enveloping sports culture here (scroll down) – is now enjoying national coverage of this coach and her alleged abuse of the students on her team.
Are you beginning to see how twisted these all-American settings are? Looked at from both macro and micro perspectives, the nation’s sports sluts get sicker by the day.
… you have to ask yourself: How does OSU top that?
Well, ask no more:
A 22-year-old Oklahoma State University student faces two felony charges for allegedly using a loaded gun during fraternity hazing.
Owen Hossack, a now former Alpha Gamma Rho member, faces two counts of pointing a firearm at an individual with the intent to harm, KFOR reports.
Hossack is accused of holding a loaded gun to a pledge’s head on Aug. 16 in an extended cab pickup truck and asking the student if he would take a bullet for his frat brothers. When the pledge said no, Hossack allegedly became angry and yelled before placing the gun up to another pledge and asking the same question, according to an affidavit. Shortly after the second pledge’s response, a flash of light was seen and the passenger window exploded.
No one was hit by the bullet.
OOOOOOOOOOklahoma!! Where the guns come sweepin’ down the plains!
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Here’s some real tasty details I bet even Aunt Eller couldna whipped up.
During an interview with OSU police Sept. 11, Hossack said he fired the weapon at the window, which he believed to be open, to frighten the pledges.
Hossack, who was secretary of the Interfraternity Council in 2013…
Number One: Nuthin wrong with firin a gun out a open window. Everybody on the street oughta be armed to defend themselves.
Number Two: They voted me fuckin secretary of the whole Interfraternity Council.
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UPDATE: Says here the shooter had passed anti-hazing training. Hm. Was the course explicit about not putting guns in people’s faces and threatening to shoot them? Sounds as though we need a little tweaking.
The chair of their trustees thinks big-time sports are “integral” to universities, and ASU, a perennial game loser, spends hugely on them (expenditures have gone up 44% since 2005). Campus culture is what you’d expect – scads of drunken fuckheads. You can watch them on their latest outing here. It’s bound to be a YouTube sensation — timely publicity for ASU as it competes with Chico State for the gun toting asshole applicant pool. This 2012 article describes an alarmed populace as ASU demolishes all frat and sorority houses (why?) and allows colonization of neighboring streets. With rhetoric suited to a war zone, ABC News headlines:
Frat Party Violence Escalating at Arizona State University
Dispatches from the war zone:
At [one] point, gunshots were fired. The ensuing panic sent hundreds of partygoers running for their lives.
We sing to you, dear ASU.