#frats

BY ANI WILCENSKI

At Cornell, the school uses an anonymous reporting system in which anyone can submit a complaint against a frat, even people who don’t attend the university—which can then become near-immediate grounds for a formal investigation during which the fraternity may very likely be suspended. This happened as recently as February, when Cornell’s Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards (OSCCS) received “an anonymous incident report” making unspecified allegations against at least 10 fraternities. By 9 p.m. the same day, OSCCS emailed every new member of those fraternities encouraging them to come forward with their own reports; three days later the school began suspending the accused chapters. The frats were prohibited from all social activity during the investigation, which included banning new members from eating at the house, even though they were paying for the fraternity meal plan, and limiting events at campus apartments occupied by graduating seniors, some of whom even had to cancel their birthday parties. I talked to one senior who wrote to the university, explaining that their guidelines were making it impossible to hold even small gatherings among friends and asking for additional clarity so seniors could find approved ways to enjoy their final days as students—especially since the anti-Israel protests were making campus life notably unenjoyable.

“It was frustrating because most people in our frat are Jewish, and the frat really was essential for us while there were swastikas being drawn on school sidewalks and people were yelling ‘From the river to the sea’ every day,” he said. “I said in my email to the school that campus is divided, isolating, and even threatening for Jews sometimes, so having the fraternity social network is actually a critical part of our lives. They didn’t even respond to my message.” The school lifted his frat’s suspension nearly a month later after the university found insufficient evidence for the allegations.

I will preface this by saying that I know very little about American fraternities/ sororities as it is an institution that does not exist in Greece and most of Europe. I first found out about it through Tumblr actually, while stumbling upon the phrase “do you like Greek life?” or something and being VERY confused. The concept is in fact so foreign to me and my school / college experience that I am still not at all sure whether I have grasped it fully.

I do not see an issue with the history of Greek fraternities. They seemed to have originally been student communities formed over similar interests, concerns, political ideas, with the desire to explore these topics in the freedom of their professors’ absence. According to the source I read, the first Greek letter society was ΦΒΚ (Phi Beta Kappa) standing for Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτις (Philosophy, Life’s Leader) which reflects the noble intent of the early fraternities / sororities.

However, now fraternities and sororities can be just about anything, including topics that bear no relevance at all to anything remotely Greek or not even a field where at least Greeks contributed to too, to excuse the association. I still don’t think the use of Greek letters is bad for the naming, quite the contrary I like it, provided that it represents a nice Greek phrase like in the case above.

What I take an issue with is calling it “Greek life”. Or “come to the Greek party”. Or “Find the Greek community that is best for you”. I mean, what? Furthermore, it seems that this institution has been disgraced a little in the last decades, with many fraternities being essentially just drink groups or spreading ideals of macho traditional toxic masculinity and so on. Surely, there are sororities which are superficial or plain problematic too. In this light, I do not like the use of the already controversial “Greek life” term by potentially problematic youth in order to find like-minded shitheads to do whatever crap they want. But even if they were all “saints” or “philosophers” in search of “higher meaning”, it is still uncomfortable, if not invalidating, to know there are millions of youngsters who claim to live the “Greek life”, while you know very well that they don’t have the merest idea or interest to know what Greek life, or the life of a Greek, or life in Greece, which are the actual and only legitimate modes of Greek life, is like.