Behind The Greek Letters

When most people think of fraternities, the first thing that comes to mind is the common “frat boy” archetype, with their backward baseball caps, or the pompopus and exaggerated “Wolf of Wall Street finance bro” personality. Whether that type of life sounds like a dream or a nightmare is up to the individual, but the truth is that for almost 800,000 college students, paying a couple of extra thousand dollars a month to join a frat is a no-brainer. It’s a minimal cost for what they get in return. 

For many people, fraternities (also known as Greek life) prove to be a very valuable part of the college experience. They’re places where new students can find friendship, tradition, belonging, and even broad alumni and networking opportunities that can help them professionally after graduation. It’s easy to see why people rush to rush (pun intended). People I know tell me stories about the kids who got high-end jobs because of professionals they got the chance to meet through Greek life, whether that’s a “brother’s” dad or high-up executives who are fraternity alumni. Nearly 50 percent of fraternity members report that a fraternity brother directly helped them find an internship or job, or provided crucial career advice. Sounds amazing, right? Not exactly.

In recent weeks, we have seen that the same loyalty and traditions that make fraternities feel like families are also what make them breeding grounds for behavior like drug rings, sexual assault, and heinous hazing methods. I have been told stories of inhumane hazing practices at elite colleges like Dartmouth, where pledges (new fraternity members who are not yet officially initiated) were told to swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, eat omelets made of vomit, and chug cups of vinegar until some people threw up blood. To me, these were nothing more than stories. They were too outlandish to consider, and I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t have heard more about these incidents if they were true. But after the cases at Penn State and Cornell, I'm starting to understand why I hadn't. 

The source who exposed the Dartmouth hazing practices—a student named Andrew Lohse—was attacked by his own campus for speaking out. Classmates and alumni called him bitter and dishonest, his fraternity’s lawyer questioned his credibility, and he lost nearly all of his friends. The hazing he exposed was not new to many people. What was new was that someone was willing to break the silence around them, and the price he paid showed everyone why people don’t want to raise these issues. 

At Penn State, prosecutors said that the silence from the fraternity brothers that allowed for the cocaine trafficking ring to grow was part of the initiation and hazing. Thomas Robinson, a leader in the drug ring, tried to identify “trustworthy” pledges and had them sign non-disclosure forms before taking them to the fraternity’s boiler room, where they were told to cut and package cocaine. 

For pledges, expressing your disapproval or saying no to joining the ring, especially after an invitation from a fraternity head, would mean certain social death within the frat. The desire to be seen as important and masculine within a fraternity is immense, and that pressure discourages pledges from denying an opportunity they think could prove such traits. And the silence extended beyond the insecure and integrating pledges. Authorities said the code of silence that already existed in the fraternity extended to the drug trade, ensuring that pledges would not reveal the operation to law enforcement or school administration. When Robinson was arrested, authorities said the president of the Delta Upsilon fraternity held a virtual meeting to notify the brothers and told them to “not talk to police.” Their brotherhood became their reason to keep quiet, and their silence became proof of loyalty.

At Cornell, the details of the crime were different, but it rested on the same idea of brotherhood. Earlier this month, a former student—who goes by the alias Jane Doe—alleged in a lawsuit that seven current and former members of the Chi Phi fraternity drugged and raped her at their fraternity house in October 2024. According to photo evidence, a message in the fraternity’s supposedly 57-member group chat invited other members to join. According to her attorney, only two of the accused were expelled from Cornell, and no one was arrested at the time, with the suit alleging that some faced discipline as light as simply writing essays. That leaves 50 other people who likely saw those messages and said nothing. Only after the lawsuit was filed did the district attorney reopen the criminal case to seek a grand jury review.

So why do such outrageous crimes like the ones in Penn State and Cornell take lawsuits or a grand jury before any of us hear this? Simply put, it’s because fraternities are built to protect themselves. Members who speak up for what’s happening in their fraternities risk becoming like Andrew Lohse, who exposed Dartmouth’s hazing but lost the very friends, housing, and social standing that drew him to Greek life in the first place. According to the 2012 Rolling Stone article on Lohse, Dartmouth fraternities have ties to alumni with influence in finance and business, and students often described recruiters showing up in the very same spaces where the gruesome hazing happened. When the people who might hire you, network with you, or promote you are connected to the system you are in, it's easy to see why staying quiet is so much easier. Colleges also often contribute to the silence surrounding many of these cases. Cornell, for example, said that federal privacy laws limit what it can publicly say about individual disciplinary actions. Although that’s true, it also means a student can be hurt while the campus community and sometimes even the student themself—may never find out how the case was handled. 

To many, however, whether those on social media or frat members themselves, such crimes, especially those like Penn State’s drug ring, are just part of the “fraternity experience,” happen everywhere, and are nothing to be shocked by. Andrew Lohse remembers a conversation with one of his ex-frat brothers: “I ate the vomlet!” he yelled. “I made other pledges eat it! That’s brotherhood!” Boys will be boys, college is wild, and fraternities are hardcore. Nobody should be surprised. It’s an easy attitude to fall into, especially because the frat boy archetype has become a character that pop culture loves—from the backward-cap party animal to the swaggering finance bro. Social media feeds into this idea, with those characters being idealized as masculine and hip.

Fixing this issue takes more than new rules, because the way fraternities are built shows that self-policing isn’t enough. Dartmouth’s case in the 2010s should be seen as a lesson: the administration downplayed its own power over the fraternities, and an earlier reform attempt collapsed under alumni and student backlash. A good step forward was the Stop Campus Hazing Act, signed into law in December 2024, which requires colleges to include data on hazing incidents in their annual security reports and to publish a public Campus Hazing Transparency Report. However, institutions aren’t required to publish that report until they have a substantiated hazing violation, and on top of that, it only covers hazing, not things like drug rings or sexual assault. Regulations mean nothing when no one is actively enforcing them, and the people closest to the crimes are bound by silence. Real reform must rebuild the structure of fraternities themselves. There must be more open, supervised membership processes in place of secretive pledging, and regularly present trained staff in a campus Greek life office with real enforcement power. Reform also has to make it safer to report crimes through methods like anonymous channels run by someone with no stake in the fraternity and the handoff of suspected crimes to law enforcement instead of campus discipline, because people like Lohse show that speaking up can cost you everything. 

With lackluster current regulations from colleges on Greek life, the first and best line of protection starts with you. Fraternities, for their part, have changed very little. After the Cornell lawsuit, the presidents of all the campus’ fraternities voted to cancel social events for a single weekend, and Chi Phi’s national organization said it removed the accused members. But Cornell had already tried event monitors, live-in advisors, and a party suspension in 2022, and the assault allegations at Chi Phi still came two years after those efforts. Since many current Stuyvesant students may end up joining fraternities in college, it is important to know what type of social environment a fraternity cultivates, what its conduct record is like, and whether the chapter is officially recognized by your school (and is therefore included in its safety oversight). At Penn State, one of the two fraternities in the drug ring wasn’t recognized by the university at all, which is why the school could suspend Delta Upsilon but had no power over Sigma Chi. Remember that finding a community in a fraternity doesn’t mean succumbing to the pressure of staying silent in the face of crime.

Not all fraternities are running drug rings or inhumane hazing traditions. Plenty of members join and reminisce on exactly the reasons that make Greek life appealing: friendship, tradition, and community. But the dichotomy is that the same loyalty that makes fraternities feel like communities is also what leads 57 members to remain silent about assault. You shouldn’t be scared to join Greek life in college because of stories like those at Penn State or Cornell. Live up your college days and build lasting connections, memories, and networks, but remember the pledge Lohse’s fraternity brothers had to recite: “What happens in the house stays in the house. Trust the brotherhood. Always protect your pledge brothers.” Loyalty like that deserves a second glance.