One of my real “Here he goes, back on his bullshit…” recurring themes at work concerns Greek organizations (fraternities and sororities). These are very prominent at Union, where several national fraternities were founded back in the day, but also very controversial among the faculty.
My particular brand of bullshit on this subject is that I don’t think the faculty have been particularly good about understanding what makes these organizations work for the students, and what the students are getting out of it. Because God knows, it’s basically impossible to get college students to do something when they don’t see a clear benefit to themselves. Professional academics are mostly not from the subset of the college-age population who are enthusiastic participants in Greek life (I only know one colleague who speaks fondly of his own days in a fraternity), though, and thus mostly come to the discussion with a deeply entrenched prior belief that these organizations are bad. When the subject comes up, there’s a tendency to look into them only in a fairly superficial, prior-confirming way: concatenate a few more anecdotes about the badness of the system, and re-issue the annual-ish call for them to be banned from campus.
I think this is a mistake because while the system is indisputably problematic in many ways, it’s also incredibly successful at connecting with the students who take part. This even extends outside the obvious population— many years ago, I talked to a Union alumnus who was the chair of a department at an Ivy League university and he told me he had cut off a lot of his ties to the college in the 1990’s when they shut down the fraternity he had belonged to circa 1960. These organizations are providing something that students want very much, and I’m not convinced we have a great understanding of what that is.
That lack of understanding hampers attempts to move past the existing system in a way that isn’t hugely disruptive. The best way to take on the problems of the system we have is to better understand what needs these groups are providing that students want, and figure out an alternative that provides as much of that as possible without the problematic aspects. It’s not going to be possible to get everything— some aspects of current Greek life would be unwise or even illegal for the college to directly support— but I suspect there are ways to get enough of it for a replacement to be effective, and move the campus culture away from the problematic parts.
This isn’t a hugely original idea, of course, and it’s been tried, with limited success. I think that limit comes about because what faculty tend to design is an alternative that speaks to what they think students ought to want, not what the students who are invested in the existing system actually want. So we end up with Greek alternatives that play pretty well with the subset of students who are most like the faculty, but that don’t do anything to shift students away from the existing organizations, because they’re not attuned to the actual motivations of the students who join them. And those are the students you most need to connect with, to pull them toward being more like you would want them to be.
This was prompted not by anything related to actual fraternities, but by a random uptick in coverage of another phenomenon associated with a population that faculty tend to look down on, namely Joe Rogan. This started with a flurry of stories about him testing positive for Covid and treating it with folk remedies, and most recently included a day of Twitter trends about Howard Stern taking shots at him. Between those bookends was this piece by Freddie de Boer, “Joe Rogan, Parody of the Open Mind.”
That piece runs a bit longer than it needs to (but you knew that from the substack.com URL), but is a better analysis of Rogan’s approach and appeal than most. It’s also got a link to a NY Times piece from earlier this year that provides a bit more color. I think de Boer is maybe a little too hard on Rogan’s failure, in a relative sense— that is, I agree that he tends to be less thorough about interrogating his own beliefs than might be ideal, but that’s a nearly universal flaw, including among professional academics. (See above…) All manner of people are really bad at correcting their own misconceptions (this is a huge problem in intro physics teaching) and challenging the statements of people they perceive as being “on their side.”
I end up connecting Rogan and Greek organizations in my mind not just because of the facile analogy between his core audience and “frat boys,” but because I feel like they share the characteristic of connecting with people in ways that we ought to take more seriously. I absolutely agree that it’s a huge problem that he’s providing a platform for loons and bigots, but at the same time, I think he (and and also folks like Jordan Peterson and the self-described “Intellectual Dark Web”) is filling a need for that audience that’s otherwise going unaddressed. As imperfect and erratic as it is, there’s a core idea there of self-improvement through wide-ranging inquiry that seems like something that ought to be encouraged. It’s clumsily modeling the sort of thing we try to cultivate in academia, but delivered in a way that connects with an audience that isn’t being reached by more traditionally academic approaches.
At some level, this becomes a question of whether you think that the loons and bigots are central to the appeal of Rogan and others in that general space, or something more peripheral. Most of their critics would say that it’s central, but I’m less certain, because it feels a little too much like confirmation bias, in the same way that a lot of shallow discussions of Greek organizations do. Or, to put it differently, I suspect that there’s a version of the Roganesque approach— a kind of inquiring spirit without the elements that put people off traditional academia— that could connect with a significant part of this population without the same element of loony bigotry. I don’t think you could really get to a “woke Rogan,” but I feel like it would be possible to connect with many of the same people without the gratuitously dickish anti-”woke” elements, and we would be a lot better off if somebody could figure that out.
This might seem like a call for a cynical, marketing-type approach, but that’s not what I mean. That wouldn’t work, anyway, any more than explicitly branding something as a Greek alternative is going to bring frat boys and sorority girls in the door. What’s needed is something more genuine. Or at least someone more genuine, who can present themselves in that mode without feeling phony.
I’m not that guy, as you can tell from the overly mannered prose above (and the use of the phrase “overly mannered prose”…). I can see a bit of the outline of what’s needed, in that I’m put off by some of the same aspects that push that audience away— a kind of tediously reflexive reflection and relentless therapeuticization of everything— but at the end of the day, I’m very much a creature of elite academia. I think there’s an opening there, though, but just as with constructing a Greek alternative, filling it needs to start with a deeper and more honest engagement with what’s actually working about the current examples than most of what we usually get.
This is probably going to end up as another frustrating example of me writing about a potentially controversial topic in such a careful way that nobody will respond at all, but on the off chance that this appeals to you, here are some buttons:
And if you want to respond more directly, the comments will be open.
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.
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.