I entered college as Barack Obama began his second term. Within a year, two close friends at separate colleges, in separate fraternities, had been accused of sexual assault. They were promptly suspended and expelled. I wasn’t there those nights, and I don’t know the facts of the cases. More importantly, I question whether the colleges did either – I suspect they never cared to find out in the first place.
My experience has become all too common for American men under 35, especially those who have joined fraternities. The solution to the purported rape epidemic on college campuses is for men to act more like women: introspective, vulnerable, compassionate. The irony is that fraternities offer a distinctly male-coded way to foster those traits through rituals, shared hardship and peer accountability. Yet to join a fraternity today – or to “rush” it in the Greek life parlance – means accepting a permanent target on one’s back. America’s dominant cultural sensibility treats any all-male institution as presumptively toxic. This is why incidents such as those involving the so-called Cornell 7 function as a universal standard worthy of national hysteria, even though the morality of the Cornell situation seems far more nuanced.
It is an institution that mixes outsiders and insiders, rich and poor, nerds and jocks and offers them belonging
In fact, if you talk to actual fraternity brothers who rushed in the post-#MeToo era, the conversation rarely turns to parties or the perks of privilege. Instead, they talk about brotherly bonding, the shared sense of obligation to one another and the practical ways membership helps men from wildly different backgrounds navigate college life and beyond. Some bad behavior exists, as it does in any large group of young people, but the reality rarely matches the caricature of predation and exclusion. What emerges is a quintessentially American form of elite egalitarianism: an institution that mixes outsiders and insiders, rich and poor, nerds and jocks, and offers them a sense of belonging.
“I was bullied in high school,” said Sam, a University of Maryland alumnus. “I never thought I would join a fraternity.” He was an obvious outsider: Jewish, gay – although he didn’t know it then – and noticeably effeminate as a teenager. He never had male friends growing up, and didn’t know how to relate to men. Hoping to rectify that, his dad bribed him with a Cartier watch to rush, and he did so reluctantly. The brothers accepted him, regardless of what he acknowledged was probably a “shitty attitude” at the beginning. Eventually, he learned to enjoy and thrive in the male world. “Drink with the boys, and you become one of them,” Sam said, still with a hint of pride.
“Greek life offered the core pillars of social engagement, career engagement and professional career advancement on campus,” said Alex, a former Cornell student who graduated during Covid. He rushed an academic fraternity, focusing on how it would help his career prospects. Though Alex did develop those professional skills and connections, in hindsight he thinks the social connections mattered more. “There are not a lot of places to be vulnerable… and in fraternal life, that private single-sex space, you’re allowed to be a whole person,” he said. He and his brothers could discuss everything from messy break-ups to difficult family relationships. “We were able to help each other through it.”
Despite their success – Sam now works in finance, at a regional firm still very much reliant on successive generations of Good Old Boys, while Alex landed a white-collar job in a major East Coast city – they were both too wary to have either their real name or specific fraternity used in this story. Their fear was echoed by every brother, past or present, interviewed for this story.
“The first rule of being in any sort of fraternal organization is understanding that there’s a target on your back… anything you do can be blown out of proportion or misconstrued. So be careful,” Alex said.
It’s not hard to see why. American culture holds a cartoonish idea of fraternities as villainous. The trope has been around for decades: movies demonizing hunky jocks; the infamous 2014 Rolling Stone rape exposé at the University of Virginia (which was eventually retracted); Netflix hits such as Dear White People, which frames elite fraternities as bastions of privileged bigotry. Over the past 15 years, that narrative has become louder, with bogus stats such as “one in five college women is raped” being used to craft federal policy in the Obama era. Frat boys are usually wealthy, handsome, popular and athletic. How else do they get their position at the top of the social hierarchy, if not through the exploitation of others?
Fraternities don’t always help themselves. Take the parties. These are often innocuous enough, so long as everyone gets drunk and goes to bed. But partying is the one stereotype of fraternity life that is actually accurate, and no one I spoke to denied it, despite a noticeable twinge of guilt in their voices as they described some nights of blackouts, occasional drug use and lascivious hook-up culture. It’s easy to tut: our culture still views this as distasteful behavior for the future white-collar leaders of America. Yet this is the world we live in – liberated from tradition, shame and stigma – and fraternities are no more guilty of gratuitous party culture than any other group of young people in America today. The difference is that teenagers getting drunk in their hometown cornfield offer no social utility. Fraternities, at least, channel these universal antics into lifelong social bonds.
Rituals are the key to the distinction. Hazing gets a bad rap, with occasional horror stories of young men dying under severe conditions. Yet hazing takes the chaotic energy abundant in young men, that would otherwise be expressed randomly, and channels it toward socially valuable purposes: loyalty, discipline and the establishment of a collective identity. Fraternity brothers are typically happy to defend the practice, despite having been at the receiving end of it, arguing it’s both relatively harmless and necessary to receive the full benefits of fraternity life.
“Hazing sucks, but it’s overall a net positive,” said Dave, a current upperclassman at the University of Michigan. “It’s simply the best way for the pledge class to bond with each other,” he explained, comparing the experience to a military training camp, where recruits are broken down as individuals to be built back up as a team. He told a story of pledges being dropped off far from campus – no phone, no cash, no map – and having to work together to get back to the house.
“Our fraternity honestly wasn’t too bad hazing-wise,” said Harry, a graduate of Louisiana State University, a school known for having some of the most competitive Greek life in the country. It focused on “servitude type-stuff” – learning to sublimate one’s own interests to the needs of the house. There’s another useful life lesson in this for recruits: you might not understand it, but you sure as hell better do it.
For many, this is their first experience operating within an institutional structure that, unlike a school, which simply demands compliance, allows people to get as much out of the place as they’re willing to put in. That means paying your dues. Josh, a sophomore at the University of Kentucky, recently described feeling like “I’m fucked” when he forgot to answer a text from his chapter president demanding he serve as his personal Uber. The punishment was that he had to “eat something disgusting.”
Fraternities are no more guilty of gratuitous party culture than any other group of young people
“There’s value in that aspect of it,” said Harry, now several years out of college. He said it helped him navigate the corporate world after graduation.
Harry is the quintessential frat boy that America loves to hate. He grew up in Arkansas, played sports and participated in a mock-Greek life in high school where he served as a sorority sweetheart – a tradition where “fraternity” boys, chosen for their commitment, serve as honorary representatives at sorority events. This is simply the culture of the American South, he explained, where boys are expected to know which Southeastern Conference fraternity they plan to rush before they even land on campus. These schools place a premium on Greek life. Only here do high-priced rush consultants exist, offering advice to pledges on how to land a bid at their target fraternity. Once in, these students play an exorbitantly outsized social role on campus, throwing massive themed parties and sometimes raising millions of dollars for charity. Naturally, if you don’t rush, you’re a nobody.
This can be exclusionary, as Harry concedes, but once you’re in, you’re in for life. “You could have graduated 20 years ago and still have that shared identity with people you meet,” he said. Alumni typically maintain contact with their schools, and it’s not uncommon to keep a second house near campus to return for football games – the only bigger cultural touchstone of the Southeastern Conference schools than Greek life. That connection comes not through exclusion, but selective inclusion. I asked Harry why he joined. He didn’t mention parties or girls, but the “lifelong friendships” he found.
Of course, there is still bad behavior. When Harry recently met House Speaker Mike Johnson, an alumnus of his own LSU fraternity, his friend managed to embarrass the frat, hurling drunken expletives at Johnson for being insufficiently MAGA.
Still, it’s a far cry from today’s villainous tropes about fraternities. Those same tropes would have us believe that gay, Jewish Sam and Southern Jock Harry would be diametrically opposed – the former being as likely to “smear the queer” as rape an intoxicated woman. In the real world of the frat, Harry could have been a mentor and confidant to someone like Sam.
Brotherhood does not demand that men abandon their differences, but that they find common purpose through them. The same society that celebrates diversity elsewhere seems incapable of imagining it behind fraternity doors. Instead, it reduces young men to their presumed privileges, just as it reduces their accusers to presumed victims. My friends learned this the hard way: in an age supposedly committed to dismantling prejudice, belonging to the wrong brotherhood can be enough to forfeit the presumption of innocence.
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