When the national chapter of the Sigma Chi fraternity suspended the organization’s University of Kansas chapter indefinitely last week it did just what every Greek letter organization should do with their rule-breaking chapters: Get rid of them.
And if the nationals won’t do it, then universities should kick these fractious social fraternities off their campus, period.
Sigma Chi is the third fraternity to be suspended in 2022 at KU. Phi Gamma Delta and Phi Delta Theta also were suspended for a hazing culture, which we all know is nothing more than excessive bullying and dehumanizing of other students.
In November 2020, KU terminated Pi Kappa Phi until spring of 2026, and in 2018 the national chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon closed its KU chapter for four years.
Sigma Chi attributed the closure to accountability issues among its members, The Star reported on Wednesday. The university’s campus paper reported that hazing and lying to the national organization were involved.
KU is far from alone when it comes to trouble with fraternities. Last year, an 18-year-old University of Missouri freshman nearly died and suffered severe brain damage after he was pressured to drink an entire bottle of vodka during a fraternity pledging event. MU revoked the fraternity’s charter.
Many of these exclusive student social groups have been the bane of college campuses all across the country for years. Often, fraternity houses are located just off campus property, so schools don’t have direct oversight over them. They do, however, control penalties for student behavior code violations.
While colleges are supposed to be places where young people get to interact with students from all walks of life, fraternities and sororities do the opposite. Many Greek letter organizations traditionally recruit from a narrow band of affluent white students, and in doing so, reinforce race, class and gender stereotypes and perpetuate discrimination.
Black fraternities and sororities, which started as a resistance to their exclusion from other Greek life organizations, are not immune to these same problems of hazing, and they should be held equally accountable.
Several private colleges have banned fraternities altogether, including Middlebury College in Vermont, Bowdoin College in Maine and Swarthmore College, an elite liberal arts school in Pennsylvania.
Fraternities remain a central part of the social culture on many campuses. But after a series of toxic events that have gained national attention, including student deaths, schools are beginning to seriously reassess support of these organizations.
And some students are objecting to their existence too, claiming they are outdated, exclusionary and discriminatory — resistant to reform and the opposite to an atmosphere of inclusion that today’s students want.
Last year, students started an “Abolish Greek Life” movement on social media. They’ve called for doing away with these institutions at a number of prominent colleges, including Duke University, Washington University and Vanderbilt University, where two years ago a student joined a fraternity to change it from inside. He concluded that diversity groups, educational initiatives and accountability structures set for the fraternity were, in the end, just “window dressing,” he wrote in the campus newspaper. “The rot goes much deeper, and nothing short of abolition can adequately excise it.”
Colleges and universities have long been reluctant to outright ban fraternity life.
Here’s how a typical Greek crisis looks: A student is hurt or dies at a fraternity house because of hazing, forced binge drinking or sexual assault. The school puts out a no tolerance statement saying student safety is a priority, and the chapter promises to change and establishes a list of reforms.
A few years later, there’s another incident either at the same house or a neighboring one on the same campus, and the cycle continues.
No. That’s not good enough. Zero tolerance has to mean just that, because kids are dying and they have been for years.
The message ought to be one and done. You break the rules, and your fraternity is suspended for at least five years — long enough for the bad lot to matriculate off campus. If after reinstatement the chapter has even one more incident, it should be banished for good, no exceptions. Break the cycle.
Sure, social fraternities offer students some benefits: lifelong friendships, career and professional networking, academic support and leadership development. But when they also offer up a dose of danger that outweighs the positives, they have to go.
Unless universities are willing to impose stiff, unyielding penalties on repeat-offender Greek chapters, they will continue to wreak havoc on college campuses and students will continue to be hurt. That can no longer be tolerated, and it never should have been.
Either fraternities abandon their unacceptably bad and sometimes even criminal behavior, or universities must shut them down.
