Fraternity brothers of multiple generations will tell you that what their fraternity gave them was an institutionalized form of close and enduring male friendship, and that for many of them that was a revelation, something they hadn't experienced before. I get that, and I accept that this was emotionally meaningful for many of them.
On the other hand, I sometimes think some of them aren't telling the full truth about what that entailed. Here I'm not thinking of the familiar problem of the cultural values that a lot of fraternities uphold within their ranks, but instead the degree to which fraternities often represent a form of selectivity and exclusivity within institutions that are variably selective and that this selectivity offers tangible benefits that go well beyond a reliable pool of close male friends. A lot of frats, like secret societies or eating clubs in the places those survive, become ways to get a thumb on the scale or a furtive advantage in hiring, promotion or opportunity where there are brothers who can look out for you. What's more, I'm certain that most people joining fraternities are substantively aware that this is what they will receive (it's why a lot of them put up with hazing, etc.: it's not just peer pressure, it's a form of transactional payment for services to be provided later).
I happened to notice when we finally recently got rid of the last fraternity here that the lease on the house that they used for parties was held by a former brother. When I looked him up, I noticed that he was working in a very particular branch of insurance in a medium-sized independent firm that specialized in that kind of insurance that had only regional clients. When I looked up the firm, I noticed that a significant number of the guys working for it were also former brothers of the same fraternity from this college, across a span of years that meant that not all of them would have overlapped or known each other. So that pretty much means the firm preferentially hires the graduates of a single institution who belonged to a single frat. When you also notice that these guys were largely on the same sports team and were almost all majors in the same discipline, you realize that the frat was a kind of "coordinating institution" that directed its members to do the same things and seek the same outcomes.
No wonder that frustrates a lot of faculty: it's counter to most of what they think should be happening when students matriculate. It's essentially a survival of the pre-meritocratic order on colleges, when they were finishing schools for the already-elite. It's hard to see why contemporary administrations should tolerate the idea except for the fact that previous generations of fraternity members attempt to buy the continued survival of the system, in part because it is important for the maintenance of the benefits they have received from it in the past.
I agree that the quasi-transactional networking aspect of things is part of the attraction, but I don't think that's a solvable problem. That is, I think that's a nearly inevitable result of any affinity group that endures more than a few years. In 10-20 years if you do the same sort of analysis, I'd be surprised if you didn't find a similar clustering of, say, lacrosse players, or club water polo, or whatever.
I say that because when I was an undergrad at Williams, frats had been banned for something like 25 years, but a lot of the social functions-- including the "get hired by a former player who was hired by a former player" thing-- had been picked up by sports teams and clubs. That's arguably a small improvement over Greeks in that sports teams are somewhat less likely to be exclusive in problematic ways, but it was still a very real feature of the social scene. And some students would complain about it in language very similar to what people at Union use when talking about Greeks.
Yeah. But the thing is at least that the question of who gets to be on the lacrosse team, Varsity Blues notwithstanding, is answered by "who plays lacrosse well enough to contribute to the team", and whatever social affinities the players form in playing feels at least as if it is the product of that alignment rather than a secretive organization given privileged access to a space they control and criteria for admission that they don't have to disclose or defend. If there was a varsity team on a campus whose alumni were known for hiring each other and the team when it went out on the field just kind of dicked around and got clobbered, not only would that be publically visible (e.g., it would be rather obvious that the team was just a cover story for bros looking out for bros) but it would permit other members of the community to question why institutional resources were being spent on a coach, equipment, transportation, facilities, etc. But nobody can "look inside" a frat in the same sense--even the things that frats rather showily do that is supposed to prove how publically-minded and charitable they are get seen only because the frats go out of their way to broadcast that they were done, as a thin attempt to claim beneficience.
My two cents are that the "Intellectual Dark Web" is just the first group of people who made pushback against woke excesses A Thing. There's really nothing holding them together apart from that. Some are liberals (in the traditional sense), some centrists, some grifters, some anti-liberal conservatives, and whatever Eric and Bret Weinstein are (cranks?), and by way of their principles, they have nothing in common. That's the niche they fill.
To what extent does the college development office weigh in on the fraternity issue? A friend of mine who was at one time deeply involved as an alumni volunteer told me once that participation in an affinity organization was just about the best predictor of alumni giving, with the "Greek" organizations being about the strongest affinity organizations there are. Which seems like the sort of thing that every administrator knows but is also impolitic to say out loud.
The conventional wisdom is that anything that's perceived as a move against frats tends to blow a hole in the fundraising for a few years; I don't have access to hard numbers to say how true that is or how long the effect lasts. We've never had a discussion about eliminating the Greeks all that seriously; it's mostly just a "Back on their bullshit again..." topic for some of the faculty.
Fraternity brothers of multiple generations will tell you that what their fraternity gave them was an institutionalized form of close and enduring male friendship, and that for many of them that was a revelation, something they hadn't experienced before. I get that, and I accept that this was emotionally meaningful for many of them.
On the other hand, I sometimes think some of them aren't telling the full truth about what that entailed. Here I'm not thinking of the familiar problem of the cultural values that a lot of fraternities uphold within their ranks, but instead the degree to which fraternities often represent a form of selectivity and exclusivity within institutions that are variably selective and that this selectivity offers tangible benefits that go well beyond a reliable pool of close male friends. A lot of frats, like secret societies or eating clubs in the places those survive, become ways to get a thumb on the scale or a furtive advantage in hiring, promotion or opportunity where there are brothers who can look out for you. What's more, I'm certain that most people joining fraternities are substantively aware that this is what they will receive (it's why a lot of them put up with hazing, etc.: it's not just peer pressure, it's a form of transactional payment for services to be provided later).
I happened to notice when we finally recently got rid of the last fraternity here that the lease on the house that they used for parties was held by a former brother. When I looked him up, I noticed that he was working in a very particular branch of insurance in a medium-sized independent firm that specialized in that kind of insurance that had only regional clients. When I looked up the firm, I noticed that a significant number of the guys working for it were also former brothers of the same fraternity from this college, across a span of years that meant that not all of them would have overlapped or known each other. So that pretty much means the firm preferentially hires the graduates of a single institution who belonged to a single frat. When you also notice that these guys were largely on the same sports team and were almost all majors in the same discipline, you realize that the frat was a kind of "coordinating institution" that directed its members to do the same things and seek the same outcomes.
No wonder that frustrates a lot of faculty: it's counter to most of what they think should be happening when students matriculate. It's essentially a survival of the pre-meritocratic order on colleges, when they were finishing schools for the already-elite. It's hard to see why contemporary administrations should tolerate the idea except for the fact that previous generations of fraternity members attempt to buy the continued survival of the system, in part because it is important for the maintenance of the benefits they have received from it in the past.
Heh, you know, in a strange way you just made a great case for sororities.
I agree that the quasi-transactional networking aspect of things is part of the attraction, but I don't think that's a solvable problem. That is, I think that's a nearly inevitable result of any affinity group that endures more than a few years. In 10-20 years if you do the same sort of analysis, I'd be surprised if you didn't find a similar clustering of, say, lacrosse players, or club water polo, or whatever.
I say that because when I was an undergrad at Williams, frats had been banned for something like 25 years, but a lot of the social functions-- including the "get hired by a former player who was hired by a former player" thing-- had been picked up by sports teams and clubs. That's arguably a small improvement over Greeks in that sports teams are somewhat less likely to be exclusive in problematic ways, but it was still a very real feature of the social scene. And some students would complain about it in language very similar to what people at Union use when talking about Greeks.
Yeah. But the thing is at least that the question of who gets to be on the lacrosse team, Varsity Blues notwithstanding, is answered by "who plays lacrosse well enough to contribute to the team", and whatever social affinities the players form in playing feels at least as if it is the product of that alignment rather than a secretive organization given privileged access to a space they control and criteria for admission that they don't have to disclose or defend. If there was a varsity team on a campus whose alumni were known for hiring each other and the team when it went out on the field just kind of dicked around and got clobbered, not only would that be publically visible (e.g., it would be rather obvious that the team was just a cover story for bros looking out for bros) but it would permit other members of the community to question why institutional resources were being spent on a coach, equipment, transportation, facilities, etc. But nobody can "look inside" a frat in the same sense--even the things that frats rather showily do that is supposed to prove how publically-minded and charitable they are get seen only because the frats go out of their way to broadcast that they were done, as a thin attempt to claim beneficience.
My two cents are that the "Intellectual Dark Web" is just the first group of people who made pushback against woke excesses A Thing. There's really nothing holding them together apart from that. Some are liberals (in the traditional sense), some centrists, some grifters, some anti-liberal conservatives, and whatever Eric and Bret Weinstein are (cranks?), and by way of their principles, they have nothing in common. That's the niche they fill.
To what extent does the college development office weigh in on the fraternity issue? A friend of mine who was at one time deeply involved as an alumni volunteer told me once that participation in an affinity organization was just about the best predictor of alumni giving, with the "Greek" organizations being about the strongest affinity organizations there are. Which seems like the sort of thing that every administrator knows but is also impolitic to say out loud.
The conventional wisdom is that anything that's perceived as a move against frats tends to blow a hole in the fundraising for a few years; I don't have access to hard numbers to say how true that is or how long the effect lasts. We've never had a discussion about eliminating the Greeks all that seriously; it's mostly just a "Back on their bullshit again..." topic for some of the faculty.