Death at Penn State

The Atlantic ^ | November 2017 issue | Caitlin Flanagan

[yldstrk]

At about 3 p.m. on Friday, February 3, Tim Piazza, a sophomore at Penn State University, arrived at Hershey Medical Center by helicopter. Eighteen hours earlier, he had been in the kind of raging good health that only teenagers enjoy. He was a handsome, redheaded kid with a shy smile, a hometown girlfriend, and a family who loved him very much. Now he had a lacerated spleen, an abdomen full of blood, and multiple traumatic brain injuries. He had fallen down a flight of stairs during a hazing event at his fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, but the members had waited nearly 12 hours before calling 911, relenting only when their pledge “looked f****** dead.” Tim underwent surgery shortly after arriving at Hershey, but it was too late. He died early the next morning.

[DoodleBob]

The institutional power of national fraternitie

...is diminishing.

To be sure, this fall is self-inflicted to a large degree. Sigma Alpha Epsilon banned pledging - a good thing if pledging=hazing. Many national fraternities have seen local chapters shut down for drinking etc. Horrific behavior should not be tolerated.

At the same time, there have always been forces arrayed against fraternities. And I don't mean just feminists and liberals - indeed, several people on this thread are clearly anti-fraternity and I'd doubt they're liberal. I think some of it is class warfare: Many people think frat boys are all rich kids who used daddy's money to drive their Beemer to buy coke. Some of the dislike is based on an error in assuming that any "frat boy" is milquetoast and can't think for himself. A good chunk of the dislike hinges on the question of why would anyone want to join an organization that treats its pledges badly - a not unfair question. Throw all of these into the hopper and you get a new life form that, seeing a wounded Greek system, attacks repeatedly.

Fraternities are transformed into lawsuits in waiting, parents pull their sons from fraternities, and the death spiral begins. As you note, the death spiral is at play in many other group efforts - sports, Scouts, and the like. In conjunction, there are fewer outlets for boys to develop masculine elements.

Of course there will always be fathers to teach boys how to act like men...assuming the family remains in tact, mothers know who IS the father, and the fathers don't take their cues from MSNBC.

In the end, my support for fraternities is comparable to my support for the Church...man is a fallible creature but the church triumphant cannot be tarnished. Similarly, fraternity brothers may generally have weaker morals today than yesterday, but against the backdrop of shrinking venues for men to learn how to act like men, I am not willing to face colleges where the chief means for men to learn how to act like men is at an Antifa rally.

[Tax-chick]

Very interesting points. I can’t say I disagree with your conclusion.

If the university system as a whole takes a major hit ... perhaps when all the Other People’s Money ends up going to the elderly (SS, Medicare) and the dysfunctional (Medicaid, disability) ... it will all be, pardon the term, academic.