PrintI.
I like to get sloshed, soused, squiff y, shitfaced, and three sheets to the wind as much as the next red-blooded, hairy-chested, college-age man, and one of the things this school has taught me is to take something when someone else gives it to me for free.
It then stands to reason that when I set foot on campus for orientation week, my first move was to the frat house. It’s an aphorism accredited to Trey Parker and Matt Stone that “weed makes it OK to be bored,” and an observation of mine that booze makes it OK to be boring. Both were most welcome sensations in the disassociated daze of the fi rst week here. Some acquaintances that would later grow into friends staggered into a house, got drunk and high, and had a one-night-stand that would grow into a year-long relationship. My diminished faculties, emotional dulling, and physical pleasure were fortunatly (and unfortunately) more short-lived. While it was weird to approach random people in John Jay, it was comfortable to do so at frats, and I could do it all over again the following evening.
The year went on, and as communities cohered in my dorm, I schlepped the 50 feet from Carman to 114th Street less frequently. At Columbia it is possible to go an entire year without visiting a frat, as I discovered during my sophomore year. The few times I did go were more as an observer than as a participant. It seemed as if people were most inclined to join frats around the time that they grew out of them. What was I missing out on?
II.
Our odyssey begins on a Thursday night, when four people are stuffing terrible fried foods into their faces and quaffing carafes of free wine to make room for more. A fraternity? No—Columbia Cottage, of course. An hour into dinner I spy Jon Hollander, a junior in Columbia College and president of Beta Theta Pi, escorting a few charges past the tapestry and into the back room. It is at this point that I ask the dumbest question anyone can possibly ask while under the influence.
“What are you up to?”
“Just having dinner. It’s all brothers and biddies right now.”
“Anything going on tonight?”
“Nope, just dinner.”
An Asian kid and a Jewish guy with glasses walk in, and Jon ushers them to a table in the back, where a gaggle of what looks like the future financiers of America is practicing for a career of martini lunches.
“Your crowd looks pretty homogeneous,” I say.
“Well, isn’t that what frats are for?”
III.
Psi Upsilon Fraternity is known throughout campus for screening classic movies (in the Batman Begins sense) every Tuesday, showing its charges a good time, and occupying a house with an owl overlooking the stoop. It is to this house, in search, that I walk after the Cottage. The “Underwater Party” is to start at 10 p.m. It‘s 10:03 p.m. when I walk in the front door, fashionably early, and find two guys laying wires and collecting cups.
“I was told there was a party this evening,” I say. “But it seems that I was mistaken.”
“No, no,” says one of them cordially. “Usually people don’t show up until later.”
“How much later?”
“About half an hour.”
Handshakes and palaver are exchanged. One of my feet nearly topples the hookah, but I grab it just in time.
“Nice catch.”
“Thanks.”
A couple of girls come down the stairs, and the guys engage them with boilerplate banter. Another one says into his phone, with vehemence and conviviality, “You can’t do homework now, you’re a brother!” The pursuit of pleasure seems a little tame. 20 minutes elapse, and I walk over to the larger common area, where I find a sausage fest of nine.
“Bad time for a party?”
“Not usually,” says one my new friends. Everyone is very friendly. “It’s the middle of rush. We should have a bunch of people coming over.” He summons me to the beer-pong table. One of the brothers says a kind word and surrenders his spot so I can play.
“What’s the gender ratio usually like?” I ask.
“We typically have a good 60/40 ratio of women to men.”
“Isn’t that what Columbia is in general?”
“About.”
“I guess average here is successful elsewhere.”
The game drags on, and the Backstreet Boys throb in the background.
“So why Psi U?” I ask a brother.
“I thought I could meet people I’d get along with here.”
I’m reminded of what Jon said.
“So, is being homogeneous the point of being in a frat?”
“You mean like being all white?”
20 minutes later, we lose the game. The playlist changes to something else I’ve heard before, and I engage a tweedy patrician whose outfit lacks only a top hat, a bow tie, and a corncob pipe protruding from the corner of his mouth.
“Goddamn Glass House Rocks,” he grumbles.
“Oh, is that what’s going on?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s the gender ratio usually?” I ask.
“It’s been really good this year, I’d say about two thirds girls.”
I ask someone else. “70 percent.”
And someone else.
“Better than this.”
“Is there anything else going on tonight?” I say.
“I think there might be something at AEPi (Alpha Epsilon Pi Fraternity).”
“Which way is AEPi?” asks a girl.
“Over that way,” says the sybarite in tweed. He waits for her to get out of earshot and then deadpans to me: “I’m insulted.”
“I’ll be back,” I say. I walk to AEPi. The door is barred—the event is evidently for “brothers and their biddies only.” “Are you really in a position to reject people?” I think, and it seems the answer is yes.
IV.
“I hate AEPi,” says a friend, and tetrarch of the campus Jewry, over lunch on East Campus a few days later.
“Isn’t it more Jewish than Beta?”
“Not really. It’s a weird mixture of JTS (Jewish Technological Seminary) kids and wannabe WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) ... There’s an element of self-hatred to it.”
All frats are based to a certain extent on exclusivity, on defining themselves by including some and excluding others. Is this not similar to being Jewish at Columbia? Aren’t frats driving at the same thing as temple youth groups?
“A cohesive community and the frats are actually kind of at odds with one another,” he replies. I devote the rest of the day to unpacking these familiar paradoxes: how can something have an identity unless it necessarily excludes something else? Why don’t people get along? Do they not drink enough?
V.
I first entered the house of Beta Theta Pi in the middle of last semester. The exterior is flamboyant red and blue on a block of brownstones. Everyone told me that the self-owned title deed was the only thing keeping Columbia from demolishing the entire block and doing to the Greeks what the Persians, Romans, and Macedonians couldn’t. I step inside. A well kept wood-floored vestibule leads to a common area with plush couches and a wallhigh emblem painted behind a pool table. Everything sparkles with the luster of real estate porn. The penthouse is the “Persian palace,” a popular hangout spot sporting a canopy of upholstery and a 90-inch projector.
I ask Hollander, economics major and skilled schmoozer, what makes Beta different from the rest. “A lot of the guys who came to Beta kind of came to college not wanting to be in a fraternity. ... There’s a strong emphasis on academics and leadership, we have the highest GPA of all frats, and we’re the only frat that owns its own house,” he says. The rushing process seems tame, and the terminology Hollander uses is wistful, patrician, and first person plural, “We keep our rushing process dry. We rented out the back of the West End and had an alumni party.”
“What’s the gender ratio typically like?”
“Well, we don’t usually invite over other frats, but we do things with the sororities pretty frequently. It’s good to be a Beta.”
With Beta’s emphasis on “leadership,” one might expect it to call the shots at the Inter-Greek Council, Columbia’s equivalent of the Athenian assembly. But another source tells me that it’s “dominated by Delta Sig (Delta Sigma Phi) and Sig Ep (Sigma Phi Epsilon).” He describes an atmosphere of hearsay, conspiracy, mistrust, and internecine conflict, “I heard Delta Sig used their position on the judicial board to evict Zeta Psi from their house.” Was there any other reason Zeta Psi might have gotten the boot? “Well, they kicked a couple of walls in and wrote shit all over the walls.”
VI.
Once upon a time, Zeta Psi was one of Columbia’s most hallowed frats. It was the first brotherhood of its kind to go nationwide, and the Columbia chapter had been on campus since 1879. But when I visited on April 20, 2007, to use the kitchen, it was a South Bronx tenement to Beta’s 740 Park—dirt everywhere, rooms derelict and hollowed out, a kitchen that barely possessed the rudimentary vessels needed to make a batch of brownies. What had happened? My contact spoke to me on the condition of anonymity.
“We were pretty neglectful of the house in previous years, it wasn’t well-maintained...”
“So is that why you lost it?”
“That was part of that... plus we did other stuff, like throwing parties while on suspension. The beginning of the end was when they didn’t let us live in the house over the summer, which pointed to a peaceful move-out process ... half of the other fraternities didn’t have a house. Before we got our house taken away, Alec, the president, wrote to Stephen Colbert, saying that liberal pinkos wanted to take over the fraternity house from one that’s been on campus since 1879 ... I guess he saw that something was wrong before everyone else.
“Were there any frats in particular that felt enmity towards you?”
“I don’t know of any great rivalries.”
“Everyone else just used the pretenses as an excuse to fuck you over?”
“Oh, oh, definitely. Before the eviction we had some momentum ... people were joining, we had, I think, eight brothers in the recruiting class, which is solid. But why be in a fraternity when you don’t have a house? After this it basically turned into a drinking and video game club. Why pay dues when you can drink for free? Zeta Psi is dying.”
VII.
Columbia fraternities occupy a niche market—albeit a broad niche, ranging from nerds whacking it, toking up, and playing Super Smash Bros. on one end, to glamorous clubs with muscle-bound men and loose women, Studio 54’s “celebrities and ‘beautiful nobodies,’” on the other.
At other colleges, though, they’re the only game in town. This is especially true if that town is Hamilton, New York, population 5,733. I decide to speak to a good friend at Colgate about the frat scene up there.
“How many people join?” I ask. “At Columbia it’s something like 10 percent.”
“Roughly 55 to 60 percent of kids that are eligible,” he says.
“And why did you choose the football frat?” He’d joined Delta Upsilon as a sophomore.
“I don’t like the culture of molesting really drunk chicks and exclusion and rejection. There’s definitely an undertone of racism and classicism that exists in every fraternity but DU—they’re on the football team, most of them are on full scholarship, and come from real families.”
“So for other frats, it’s all about, um, being homogeneous?”
“For most people.”
“What’s the culture like?”
“I’ve heard of an instance where one kid from one fraternity went into another one and took a shit on the couch.”
“So why’d you join?”
“The reason I joined a fraternity was that it was impossible for me to drink as much as I wanted to if I didn’t,” he says. “It’s such a mixed bag. If you could wave the magic wand and just get rid of all the frats at Colgate, I think I’d do it ... I think it serves to foster segregation ... good people get turned into douche bags, girls get treated like shit.”
I ask him how it differs from the University of Washington—we had gone to high school together in Seattle.
“Well, at UW it’s different ... you’re in a city, the frat population is huge, but it’s also in the context of an enormous campus. A lot of people feel pressured to join frats to carve out a sense of community, but they don’t dominate the social scene the way they do at Colgate.”
“What’s the gender ratio at a typical Colgate frat party?”
“The gender ratio? Oh, I’d say about 60/40, women to men.”
VIII.
So that is Colgate—a more rural college, a place where the individuals serve the frats, not vice versa. The pressure to join is immense, and people are turned into stereotypes or limited to appearances.
Sororities everywhere are infamous for judging and defining themselves by appearances— what about those at Columbia? Here, brothers are more numerous and much more conspicuous than sisters, but seeing as the gender ratio figure was more or less universal, there had to be someone attending their parties. I didn’t really seem to be welcome at these gatherings, but I felt it would be remiss not to talk to at least one biddie emerita. A friend of mine, who asked not to be named, was a member of the sorority Sigma Delta Tau for more than a year.
“Why did you join?” I ask.
“I thought it would be a good way to make friends and always have something to do on the weekends.”
“Why SDT?”
“I felt the most comfortable with them.”
“Um, is the point of being in a fraternity to be homogeneous?”
“I think the point of a fraternity is to have a group of guys that enjoy each other’s company and get along well.” She pauses. “You know, in less homosexual terms than that.”
The recruitment process for fraternities is piecemeal and individualized, for sororities it’s collective and formal. She describes it to me—a pool of prospective sisters, a gradual winnowing, eventual selection of the remaining girls by two sororities, and one sorority by the girls.
“Is it catty?”
“If you’re on the inside, yes.”
“So it’s basically a glorified popularity contest.”
“Yes, but if you’re going through it, you don’t know it.”
“Is that not what girls do anyway?”
“It is, but it’s concentrated a little bit more. Remember, the whole purpose of this is to judge everyone.”
“So what do you think about the culture here?”
“Well, it’s so small here, it’s not an organization that gets a lot of publicity. Joining is more of a conscious choice. It sets you apart.”
“Do all the frats and sororities hate each other?”
“Everyone at this school hates each other,” she says. “I think people just want to find people with whom they can commiserate.”
After being turned out of AEPi, I walk the block back to Lerner for the tail-end of Glass House Rocks. Groups wander about, not really talking to each other, the music pulsates with kinesis, but the people—arranged in homogeneous groups of one—are mostly static.
IX.
It’s impossible for an outsider—someone not part of this community—to know what a frat is to its brothers or a sorority to its sisters, but it seems that what they offer to their members is largely the same: a sense of community, “comfort,” “people with whom they can commiserate,” friendship, camaraderie. At Columbia none of it is compulsory. It’s entirely a choice, often beneficial to the people who make it and largely off the radar of those who don’t. Nobody with whom I spoke regretted rushing, and it seemed that the “homogeneity”—“the point,” perhaps—served not to efface but to enhance individual identity, which is what every good community should do.
The frats, as everywhere, seemed more cohesive with themselves than with the rest of the Greek community—the pleasant, chill, boozy, and open atmosphere of a party contrasted with the scandalous, fractious, closed vibe outside. The most backbiting comments were off-therecord, nearly everyone requested anonymity. It was academia’s version of classical city states, a setting defined by “everyone hating each other” and “people commiserating,” “popularity contests” and “homogeneity,” mistrustful hearsay and drunken banter, enmities and alliances, differences that render everyone the same and similarities that make people different. In the end—like getting trashed on your first night on campus, and having a random one-nightfriendship with someone you won’t have to feel awkward about seeing on campus later—it was innocuous and worth it.
In my conversations with members of the brotherhood, I wasn’t regaled with tales of liquid brinksmanship or ritual degradation. If a real dark side of the Greek world does exist, my fleeting moment on frat row wasn’t going to uncover it. What I did uncover was a pervasive sameness, belying the putative distinctions of antiquated acronyms and vacant credos.
I did, too, uncover one more thing. It’s all about the ratio.